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E. M. FORSTER'S BILLY BUDD AND THE COLLABORATIVE WORK OF OPERA
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 October 2010
Extract
On 9 January 1964, the 86-year-old E. M. Forster took a curtain call at the Covent Garden revival of Billy Budd alongside his colibrettist, Eric Crozier. The Times review of the event neglected to mention either of the librettists, prompting Forster to write:
Dear Sir,
I have read with interest and approval your article on An Opera of Good and Evil in this morning's Times, but wish you could have managed to squeeze in a reference to Eric Crozier and myself. We did the Libretto. We worked on it in Britten's house for several weeks. We might reasonably be credited with having helped to interpret his intentions and his conception of Melville's intentions.
Yours faithfully,
E. M. Forster
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- Articles
- Information
- Theatre Survey , Volume 51 , Special Issue 2: Operatic Intersections , November 2010 , pp. 225 - 245
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2010
References
Endnotes
1. On 12 January 1964, Forster also sent a copy of this letter to Eric Crozier, who reprinted it in Crozier, Eric, “The Writing of Billy Budd,” Opera Quarterly 4.3 (1986): 11–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 26.
2. Forster to Britten, 9 December 1951, written directly after the world premiere of Billy Budd, in Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, vol. 2: 1921–1970, ed. Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (London: Collins, 1985), 246. Nunc Dimittis refers to a canticle based on the Gospel of Saint Luke. Simeon, a devout Jew, received a revelation that he would not die before seeing the Savior. The canticle is taken from Simeon's words upon seeing the infant Jesus. In the King James Bible, they read: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”
3. To be clear: musicologists do write about the libretti of opera quite frequently. But like the Times reviewer, they often attribute the intentions behind the libretto to the composer.
4. Whitesell, Lloyd, “Britten's Dubious Trysts,” Journal of American Musicological Society 56.3 (Fall 2003): 637–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 641.
5. Essay reprinted in Brett, Philip, Music and Sexuality in Britten: Selected Essays, ed. Haggerty, George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 34–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6. Benjamin Britten to Crozier, Eric, 15 May 1950, in Letters from a Life: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten, vol. 3: 1946–51, ed. Mitchell, Donald, Reed, Philip, and Cooke, Mervyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar, 594; Britten's italics.
7. “Britten and Pears in Canada,” in Britten on Music, ed. Paul Kildea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 210–13, at 211.
8. Britten to Mayer, Elizabeth, 29 July 1941, in Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, vol. 2: 1946–1951, ed. Mitchell, Donald (London: Faber & Faber, 2004)Google Scholar, 962.
9. In the following discussion “Billy Budd” will refer to Melville's novella and Billy Budd to the opera.
10. Eric Crozier to Nancy Evans, 4 March 1949, quoted in Crozier, 17.
11. Crozier recounts: “We would begin our morning's work by carefully reading the relevant passage in Melville's text. Then we talked about it: we considered the characters and their motives; we checked any points of nautical procedure and life aboard ship that we did not understand (there were many of these, and our reference works proved invaluable). When we were satisfied, we drafted our own version of the episode. Sometimes one of us did this, sometimes both. I was mostly responsible for the technical scenes and the dialogues; Forster undertook ‘the big slabs of narrative.’ Afterward we would read our drafts aloud, comparing and criticizing them.” Crozier, 16.
12. Benjamin Britten, “Discussion on Billy Budd,” in Britten on Music, 194–207, at 200.
13. Forster to Crozier, 10 February 1949, quoted in Crozier, 13–14.
14. Crozier to Nancy Evans, n.d. [ca. March 1949], quoted in Crozier, 18. Forster's full name was Edward Morgan Forster, and he was sometimes called Morgan.
15. Crozier to Nancy Evans, n.d. [ca. end of August 1949], quoted in Crozier, 13–14.
16. Crozier, 23.
17. Forster to Britten, undated letter [ca. early December 1950], in Letters from a Life, 3:618; Forster's italics.
18. In this revision they changed the opera's structure from four acts to two, cutting a scene in which Vere assembles all the men on deck at the end of the original first act. In the analysis that follows, I use the revised text because it was preferred by all of the authors. Britten wrote to Crozier: “I have never been happy (and I find now that Morgan feels the same) with the present end of Act I. Vere's haranguing of the crew does not seem to ring true—none of us I think really had our hearts in this section.” Quoted in Philip Reed, “The 1960 Revisions: A Two-Act Billy Budd,” in Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, ed. Mervyn Cooke and Philip Reed, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 74–84, at 75.
19. Forster to Britten, 9 December 1951, in Letters from a Life, 2:246.
20. Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962)Google Scholar, 135.
21. In a radio broadcast of 12 November 1960, Britten reflected on his choice of Melville's “Billy Budd”: “I have often asked myself whether it was the passage in Aspects of the Novel, Morgan, whether that it was that reminded me of this extraordinary short story of Melville.” Crozier added: “It seems to me the kind of pregnant description of a subject that would attract a composer by the fact that it describes a quality of extension from the story—that you start with real characters, with human characters, which are then extended on to other planes of significance—something that is obviously stimulating when it comes to thinking of writing music.” Editor's transcript of recording of discussion by Britten, E. M. Forster, and Eric Crozier (NSA 1CDR0011307), broadcast 12 November 1960 on BBC Third Programme, quoted in Britten, “Discussion on Billy Budd,” 195.
22. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 125–6.
23. Ibid., 142.
24. Britten, Benjamin, Billy Budd, an Opera in Two Acts, op. 50, libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier, adapted from the story by Herman Melville (New York: Boosey & Hawkes, 1961)Google Scholar.
25. Shannon McKellar uses the example of these parallel speeches to argue against any simple connection between key and themes in Billy Budd, pointing out the proximity of F major (typically interpreted as characterizing “innocence” in the opera) to the respective F and F-sharp minors of Vere's and Claggert's credos. See McKellar, , “Re-Visioning the ‘Missing’ Scene: Critical and Tonal Trajectories in Britten's Billy Budd,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 122.2 (1997): 258–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 276.
26. “Post-Munich” (1939), in Forster, E. M., Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951), 21–4Google Scholar at 23.
27. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of “froggy” as a derogatory term for the French to 1872. It is an odd use of the anachronism (and one that is not present in the novella), given that otherwise Forster and Crozier went to great lengths to make sure that all of the naval terms were used properly.
28. Billy Budd, op. 50 by Benjamin Britten, words by Eric Crozier and Edward Morgan Forster. © Copyright 1951 by Hawkes & Son (London) Ltd. Reprinted by permission. All quotes from the libretto are from this source.
29. In Letters from a Life, 3:618; Forster's italics.
30. Forster to Lionel Trilling, 16 April 1949, in Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, 2:237.
31. See, for example, Elliott, Graham, Benjamin Britten: The Spiritual Dimension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Hindley, Clifford, “Love and Salvation in Britten's Billy Budd,” Music and Letters 70.3 (August 1989): 363–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fuller, Michael, “The Far-Shining Sail: A Glimpse of Salvation in Britten's Billy Budd,” Musical Times 147.1895 (Summer 2006): 17–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Emslie, Barry, “Billy Budd and the Fear of Words,” Cambridge Opera Journal 4.1 (March 1992): 43–59Google Scholar. Though Emslie writes of a triangular tension among the spiritual, the social, and the sexual in Billy Budd, his reading focuses on the gaps between and failure to reconcile these three elements, thus neglecting the political significance of the opera that lies precisely in the way that sexuality, spirituality, and the social are connected.
32. Whitesell connects the death of Billy and Vere's spiritual redemption to Christian salvation and “a long-standing tradition of homoerotic grief literature, stretching from David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, and Apollo's mortal loves” without giving a satisfactory account of how the Christian and the homoerotic narratives are connected, or why Forster as an atheist would be interested in preserving and heightening Melville's Christian symbolism. See Whitesell, 646. Philip Brett connects Vere's redemption to the “redemption-through-love” of characters in Forster's novels but not with Wagner. See Brett, “Pacifism, Political Action, and Artistic Endeavor,” in Brett, Music and Sexuality in Britten, 172–85, at 180.
33. Quoted in Crozier, 20.
34. Forster, “Post-Munich,” 22.
35. Forster, “What I Believe,” in Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 67–76, at 71.
36. Simon Williams emphasizes that Brünnhilde's willed decision is crucial to her heroic stature at the end of Götterdämmerung: “Only after humans have willed their deaths can they claim to be free. Brünnhilde is the only character in the Ring with that capacity. In willingly dying, she displays a strength that eluded Siegmund, Siegfried, and Wotan. She dies their deaths for them and in so doing shows them how they should have lived.” Williams, Simon, Wagner and the Romantic Hero (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 101. For an alternative take on Brünnhilde's choice, see Žižek, Slavoj and Dolar, Mladen, Opera's Second Death (New York: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar.
37. Accounts such as Graham Elliott's that relate Billy's death in the opera to the Abrahamic connotations of the novella miss the central point that the opera Billy is not quite the lamb he is in Melville's work. See Elliott, 129–32.
38. For a discussion of the connection of female characters to staged somnambulism, see Clément, Catherine, Opera; or, The Undoing of Women, trans. Wing, Betsy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
39. In a personal memorandum of 1935, Forster writes: “I want to love a strong young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even hurt by him.” Quoted in Beauman, Nicola, E. M. Forster: A Biography (New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1994)Google Scholar, 302.
40. Transcript of recording of discussion by Britten, E. M. Forster, and Eric Crozier, in Britten, “Discussion on Billy Budd,” 206.
41. Forster, “What I Believe,” 68.
42. Forster, “The Raison d'être of Criticism in the Arts,” in Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 107–22, at 117.
43. Forster, “What I Believe,” 73.
44. Forster to Forster, Alice Clara, 16 September 1914, in Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, vol. 1: 1879–1920, ed. Lago, Mary and Furbank, Philip Nicholas (London: Collins, 1983)Google Scholar, 213.
45. Ibid., 1:306; my italics.
46. Forster, E. M., Howard's End (New York: Vintage Books, 1921)Google Scholar, 31.
47. Similarly, in Where Angels Fear to Tread it is precisely because of the bad manners of the audience that a community is forged. The novel chronicles the disastrous mission of Carolyn Abbot and Harriet and Philip Herriton to rescue a half-British baby from the presumed moral depravity of its father, Gino, and of Italy more generally. On their first evening in Monteriano, the visitors attend a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor. From the start of the performance it is clear that they are not in Covent Garden any more. The audience takes active part in the performance, shouting to the singers and responding to the music with ostentatious emotion. Intoxicated by the atmosphere of the performance, Philip's disgust with Gino turns suddenly to friendship and identification. Gino, Philip joins in his box: “Philip would have a spasm of horror at the muddle he had made. But the spasm would pass, and again he would be enchanted by the kind, cheerful voices, the laughter that was never vapid, and the light caress of the arm across his back.” Forster, E. M., Where Angels Fear to Tread (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1959)Google Scholar, 107.
48. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 138.
49. Ibid., 142.
50. Forster to Lionel Trilling, 16 April 1949, in Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, 2:237.
51. Whittall, Arnold summarizes many of these analyses in “Twisted Relations: Method and Meaning in Britten's Billy Budd,” Cambridge Opera Journal 2.2 (July 1990): 145–71Google Scholar. See also McKellar.
52. Abels, Norbert, Benjamin Britten (Hamburg: Rowalt, 2008), 99–100Google Scholar. My translations.
53. Carolyn Abbate criticizes a “a pseudo-Wagnerian habit” in opera scholarship “of seeing operatic music as contingent, as a factotum or massive leitmotif that routinely endorses the most obvious moral precepts within librettos.” Abbate, , In Search of Opera (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, 104.
54. Melville, Herman, “Billy Budd” and “The Piazza Tales” (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2006)Google Scholar, 76.
55. E. M. Forster, diary entry for 16 June 1911, Locked Journal, Papers of Edward Morgan Forster, Modern Archive Centre, King's College Library, Cambridge. Quoted in Matz, Jesse, “‘You Must Join My Dead’: E. M. Forster and the Death of the Novel,” Modernism/Modernity 9.2 (April 2002): 303–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 304.
56. The 1974 pamphlet With Downcast Gays puts this critique in particularly strong terms. The authors Andrew Hodges and David Hutter connect this inarticulacy to a selfish and cowardly desire on Forster's part to maintain a privileged status as “the Grand Old (heterosexual) Man of English Letters. … Throughout his life Forster betrayed other gay people by posing as a heterosexual and thus identifying with our oppressors. The novel which could have helped us find courage and self-esteem he only allowed to be published after his death, thereby confirming belief in the secret and disgraceful nature of homosexuality.” Hutter, Hodges and, With Downcast Gays: Aspects of Homosexual Self-Oppression, 2d ed. (Toronto: Pink Triangle, 1979), 24–5Google Scholar.
57. Mervyn Cooke, “Britten's Billy Budd: Melville as Opera Libretto,” in Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, 27–41, at 27.