Sea-changes - Melville - Forster - Britten

Front matter

Hanna Rochlitz

The story of Billy Budd and its operatic adaptation

QA Universitätsverlag Göttingen

Contents

AckniowledSements ssvcicssicsssecsisasisssisssisaslessossdessseseseaciudesescasiedesnedednsescsedesviedededsinoedtvedsbvdese xiii Copyright statement isinisisi ssiri ri Eear EEEE EEEE EE Eii i XV Tist Of abBPeVIAtONS isiti ei a aea e aa a aar AEREA ERASI ASS xvi Tnrodu coN eea e cose cass E E RE A i 19 I.1. Transforming prose works into opera: some key COncerns .ss...ssesssssssrssesssereesssse 31 I.2. Melville’s Billy Budd: the text and its readers wesc eesesseessseeseneseeseeesenseeeeeneneeneeenens 39 1.2.1. Textual history and textual problems oe esecesesesseetsseetsseenssestsseenens 39 1.2.2. Early critical reception and post-1950 criticism ...ss.ssssessssessseessrressrreesreesrees 41

1.2.3. E. M. Forster and Benjamin Britten in the tradition of British. Melville reception inre ariii a E 46

1.2.4. The editions used by Britten and his librettists ....s..seseseeseseesereseerersrersreen 48 viii Contents

Introduction

It was late in 1948 that Benjamin Britten and Edward Morgan Forster conceived the idea for an opera based on Herman Melville’s novella Bzy Budd. Together with Eric Crozier, who had collaborated with Britten on various earlier projects, Forster subsequently began the task of turning Melville’s narrative into a libretto which was to become the basis for a full-length opera of four acts. The opera Br//y Budd had its first performance at the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden on 1 December 1951. In 1960, the composer and his librettists revised the four-act version to produce the slightly shorter two-act version, which may be regarded as their final decision on this work, and which is commonly performed in opera houses today.

In choosing to adapt Melville’s novella for the operatic stage, Britten, Forster and Crozier were, as Forster put it in 1951, “by no means the only Billies on the beach” (Griffin 4). A play by Louis O. Coxe and Richard Chapman was staged in New York in 1949. An unpublished dramatisation was made at the same time by Donald Windham, a correspondent and friend of Forster’s.! Finally, the Italian composer Georgio Ghedini, whom Britten met around 1949, was at that time working on a one-act Billy Budd, adapted by Salvatore Quasimodo from Eugenio Montale’s 1942 Italian translation of Melville’s novella. This work was first per-

1 See Windham, ed. 11.

formed in Venice on 8 September 1949 but did not prove successful enough to become established in the repertoire.2 The ethical, philosophical and religious questions and problems addressed by Melville’s text appear to have appealed to a number of creative artists in post-World War II America and Europe, whose interests in adapting this particular text can be assumed to have ranged from the political to the personal. In the case of E. M. Forster and Benjamin Britten, it is possible to link their interpretation, transformation and re-creation of the story of Billy Budd with the wider networks of their respective life-long artistic concerns.

The main focus of this study centres on E. M. Forster’s involvement with Melville’s story, and on the role played by the ‘grand old man of English letters’ in the collaborative adaptation of this work for the operatic stage. As Linda Hutcheon has noted in her appraisal of adaptation theory, to consider adaptation as a creative process is to accord considerable attention to the adaptors themselves. It is they who first interpret the adapted text “as readers”, and then take possession of it “as creators” by “ma|king] it their own”; and, inevitably, “the traces of the adapting interpreter-creator cling to the adaptation”. Accordingly, Hutcheon has invited scholars and critics to reconsider [their] sense of literary critical embarrassment about intention and the more personal and aesthetic dimensions of the creative process. In theoretical-historical terms, our resistance is perfectly understandable, but it has inhibited us from understanding why such a critically denigrated form as adaptation has proved as much of an attraction for artists as for audiences. (111)

Given the richness of the available material which promises information about the “personal and aesthetic dimensions” of Forster’s engagement with Biy Budd — an engagement which is documented for a time-span of almost forty years — I am happy to follow Hutcheon’s invitation. My project aims to situate the story of Billy Budd, the Handsome Sailor, in the wider context of Forster’s literary oeuvre, his life, and his life writings. Through this, I hope to be able to shed some light on Forster’s relationship, as author, reader, interpreter and adaptor, to Melville’s text, but also on the relationship of the Bi/y Budd libretto to Forsterian thought and literary imagination. This relationship emerges in the form of a wealth of intertextual “traces” that extend far beyond the primary connection between the novella (itself heavily and self-consciously intertextual) and the opera libretto. These “traces” can be seen to tap into a multi-voiced and multi-layered background of other texts and cultural discourses. My investigations into the genesis of the opera

2 See Reed 1993a:57f.

3 Coxe and Chapman state their view of Billy Budd as “a morality play”, and explain that when they came to engage with the material in January 1947, “Melville’s story of good, evil, and the way the world takes such absolutes was material enough for two veterans of a war, a depression, and the moving cold front” (Coxe/Chapman ix).

Billy Budd will thus serve to illustrate in exemplary form that no adaptation can be understood as a one-to-one transposition of a single text, but, rather, that the interpretive process which results in the re-creation will always involve further intertextual and extra-textual elements. While a full reconstruction of the adaptive process is clearly impossible, the examination of this process promises some fascinating insights into the complexities and vicissitudes of creative adaptation.

Hutcheon has observed that the “inevitable [...] change[s]” undergone by an adapted text in the process of adaptation will necessarily be accompanied by “modifications in the political valence and even the meaning of stories” (xvi). In the case of a collaborative adaptation, which most operas are, and in the special case where three collaborators are involved, as in the creation of the opera Biy Budd, the finished work as an integral text will furthermore be seen to have been shaped by (among other things) several individually differing interpretations of the source text, and to have reached its final form through a series of negotiations over the overall intended meaning of both the source text and the operatic adaptation. Some traces of the conflicting interests articulated in those negotiations may still be detected as tensions and conflicts in the finished work, questioning and subverting its seemingly closed and integrated form, and thus contributing to the range of interpretive possibilities offered by the opera as text and intertext.

When talking about the adaptation of Melville’s Br//y Budd, the three opera-makers were wont to point out that they had tried to stay, in Eric Crozier’s words, “as faithful to Melville as possible” (BBC1960:203). Their collaboration “was governed from first to last by respect for Melville and the desire to interpret him faithfully — not an easy task with an author whose rhetorical language sometimes appears to conceal more than it expresses” (Crozier 1979:31). This “faithful” approach, most insistently proclaimed by Crozier and Forster, was coupled with a belief that “we imagined ourselves anyhow to be following [Melville’s] symbolism” (Forster in BBC1960:205). Yet an opera-goer who is familiar with Forster’s writings, both fictional and non-fictional, can hardly avoid the impression that the libretto contains a considerable number of typically Forsterian themes and narrative patterns, to such a degree that the libretto might easily be mistaken for one of Forster’s own independent literary creations. Moreover, for all their insistence on their faithfulness to their textual model, the librettists at the same time admitted to making certain radical changes to the character of Captain Vere, whom they felt Melville had been “disgracing” and who needed to be, as Crozier put it in 1960, “humanised” (BBC1960:206). Forster had at an earlier time gone so far as to refer to this process in his private correspondence as “the rescuing of Vere from his creator”, describing it as “no small problem” (EMFL II:237). In public, however, he declared that he and his co-librettist had merely “ventured to tidy up” a character whose behaviour had struck him as “odious[...]”, explaining that “adaptors have to tidy. Creators needn’t and sometimes shouldn’t” (Griffin 5f.).

Porster’s self-identification as a “faithful” adaptor, rather than a creator, may be understood to reflect a cultural convention which privileges the composer of an opera as its principal ‘author’, and which judges a work according to its perceived fidelity to the ‘original’ adapted text. By contrast, Britten, as the official commissioner of what was to him the verbal basis for a musico-dramatic work which would be received as very much %żs creation,+ was more ready to emphasise explicitly his conviction that their adaptation had produced “a new work” of Melville’s novella, and that “adapting into a different medium, with all that means”, could legitimately result in something of which the parent text’s author “would not have approved at all” (BBC1960:207).

His claims to the status of adaptor rather than that of creator notwithstanding, Forster, too, can be seen to have regarded his version of BiA Budd as one of his own literary productions, and one which he valued very highly at that. Shortly after the opera had opened at Covent Garden on 1 December 1951, he wrote to Britten: “This opera is my Nunc Dimittis, in that it dismisses me peacefully and convinces me I have achieved” (9 December 1951, EMFL I1:246). More than ten years later, in a diary entry of 29 February 1964 — having attended the premiere of the revised opera at Covent Garden on 9 January — he lists By Budd as one of three “good reasons for pleasure” with which he begins the 86th year of his life (LD154).

There is every reason to believe that, as a number of critics have suggested, his collaboration with Britten enabled Forster to give a cautious public expression to some of his central personal and artistic preoccupations, namely, personal relationships, homoerotic desire, and salutary love between men. Given Forster’s lifelong habit of trying to protect his public persona from associations with homosexuality, his insistence that the opera-makers saw themselves not as “creators” but as “adaptors” (Griffin 6) might partly be explained as an attempt to safeguard against the possibility of being himself held responsible for any homoerotic content which audiences might discover in the finished work. It seems not irrelevant in this context that at the time of his first recorded engagement with Bi/y Budd in 1926, Forster was already firmly convinced of Melville’s “suppressed homosex[uality]” (CPB17). This conviction may, in the late 1940s, have gone a considerable way towards making him feel that, in cautiously strengthening the homoerotic elements he was able to detect and decode in Melville’s narrative, he was acting in perfect accordance with the author’s most private intentions — for

4 I am here arguing on the simplistic basis that most opera-goers may safely be assumed to think of going to see “Britten’s opera Bily Budd”, rather than “Melville’s Biy Budd, adapted by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier, and set to music by Benjamin Britten”, just as music-lovers will go to see “the Verdi Requiem” rather than “Verdi’s setting of the Missa pro defuncti?’ , or “Mozart’s Don Giovann?” rather than “one of the numerous eighteenth-century operas based on Tirso de Molina’s play Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, adapted by Lorenzo Da Ponte and set to music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart”.

Forster himself had, after all, been working covert discourses about homoeroticism into virtually all of his published fiction.

At the same time, Forster’s repeated declarations may also reflect a genuine conviction of actually having produced a “faithful” rendering of Melville’s model. Asked, for instance, whether “the symbolism or the second meaning behind the action in the work” had been “a part of [his] intention”, Forster stated: “I had the general feeling of salvation of course, but I don’t think we put in anything in that region which Melville did not give us” (BBC1960:205). The fact that Forster had already identified salvation as one of the themes of Melville’s novella in Aspects of the Novel certainly suggests that his adaptation to some degree retains the meaning he had originally found in Melville’s text.

This inevitably leads up to the question of how Forster might have been reading Melville, and in what ways, if any, the critic’s readings in the 1920s and in 1947, when Forster revisited the text in a BBC Book Talk, can be seen to differ from the adaptor’s interpretation in 1948-51 and in 1960. While I am well aware that textual analysis can provide no conclusive answer to these questions, I nevertheless believe that it will prove worthwhile to investigate the available material under this aspect. There is also the question of how and why it was possible for Melville’s novella to be turned into a libretto which is so trecognisably Forsterian in theme and content, and yet at the same time retains an appreciable amount of Melville’s original material. In other words, I am interested in the ways in which Forster was able to take possession of Melville’s story and characters — to appropriate them in a positive sense of re-creating them and thus making them his own? — and turn them into vehicles for his own artistic concerns.

For my analyses I will naturally be turning to the direct comments which Forster made about Melville’s novella and its characters in his critical writings and in his private communications. At least as pertinent, however, are certain characteristic and pervading elements within Forster’s own work which bear a surprising resemblance to some of the central elements of Melville’s novella. These textual similarities suggest that Melville’s story may have lent itself to assimilation into Forster’s own creative patterns with remarkable readiness, so that the changes made during the adaptation may indeed have seemed, to Forster, little more than “tidy[ing] up” (Griffin 6) in some respects. With these investigations, I hope to

5 I am aware that the term “appropriation” carries negative connotations in some branches of cultural studies, adaptation theory and fan studies, where it is variously associated with discourses about exploitation, cultural mainstreaming, notions of ownership, and theft. Yet I would claim that Forster’s statements about “rescuing” Vere point to notions of ownership as an essential and positive element of his creative experience, as does his assertion that Claggart’s central monologue is “my most important piece of writing” in the libretto (letter to Britten of early December 1950, EMFL II:242). For this reason, I shall continue to use the term ‘appropriation’ in a positive sense throughout this study. The alternative of ‘salvaging’ (see Hutcheon 8) is unacceptable to me in this context because its linguistic associations with wreckage imply some defective quality in the adapted text.

contribute some new perspectives to our current ways of thinking about Forster’s collaboration with Britten and Crozier on the opera Bil Budd. As part of this project, I offer readings of a number of Forster’s texts through the lens of the opera Billy Budd, as well as readings of the novella’s characters and their operatic counterparts through the lens of Forsterian writing.

It is of fundamental importance to remember that a great part of Forster’s own fictional work had already been completed before the publication of Melville’s novella in 1924. For all of Forster’s novels — leaving aside the special case of Maurice which Forster continued to revise for over four decades — as well as for many of the short stories discussed in this study, there can therefore be no question of their having been influenced by Melville’s By Budd. I will also show that all of the parallels to Bi//y Budd which can be discovered in Forster’s writings, such as the typically Forsterian constellation of a ‘dark’ character in need of salvation and a ‘light’ saviour figure, or the association of attractive young men with figures of Greek mythology, had already clearly established themselves as essential presences in the Forsterian creative imagination in these early fictional works, so that their continuing reappearance in the short fiction written after 1924 could not be attributed to the influence of Melville’s novella, either. Yet one of Forster’s short stories, “Arthur Snatchfold” (1928), shows an engagement with a problem of responsibility which exhibits some striking parallels to the problems surrounding the figure of Melville’s Vere. I shall discuss some ways in which Forster’s story could be read as a creative response to Melville’s text. Finally, two of the short stories I examine, “The Other Boat” (1957/58) and “Little Imber” (1961), were composed after the essential completion of the opera Bi//y Budd, and I will explore some of the effects which Forster’s librettistic engagement with Melville’s novella may have had upon his subsequent work.

Part One of this study is devoted to a close textual comparison of Melville’s novella and the Britten/Forster/Crozier opera Bé/ly Budd, and thus provides the basis for all my subsequent enquiries. I preface my investigations with a brief overview of key concerns in the theory of operatic adaptation of literary prose works (section 1.1). I then introduce Melville’s novella in section 1.2., where I discuss its status as an unfinished text, its complex publication history, and its critical reception, yet always with a view to the relevance or itrelevance of these issues to Britten’s, Forster’s and Crozier’s engagement with the text. A short chapter of this section traces Forster’s and Britten’s connections to the multi-generational network of early British Melville enthusiasts.

In section 1.3, I analyse Melville’s text as the raw material which the collaborators had to interpret and transform in the process of creating their operatic adaptation. This investigation will concentrate on the three main characters, Billy, Claggart, and Vere; yet the voice of the narrator will inevitably form an integral part of my analyses.

Section I.4. contains a similar analysis of the opera’s main characters as they appear in the libretto. It is opened by a brief overview of the transformative choices and structural changes made by the adaptors, and of the original Melville material retained in the libretto. In the course of my enquiries, I pay special attention to the ways in which the libretto’s characters differ from those in the novella, and to the impact these differences have on the interpretive possibilities offered by the libretto, particularly with regard to the theme of salvation.

In section 1.5. I discuss some aspects of the opera’s musical structure. The musical discourse of Bi/ly Budd is characterised by the use of leitmotifs linking certain concepts and figures, and therefore plays an essential part in the construction of meaning within the work as a whole; it can even be read as the structural equivalent of a narrative voice. I present an exemplary discussion of the so-called Mutiny motif, which will later become relevant again in section II.6. I also give a brief overview of the three main characters’ musical presences. A final chapter is devoted to the ways in which the opera’s musical discourse endorses and supports, but also questions and destabilises the theme of salvation which is so prominent a force in the libretto. The section concludes with a brief summary.

Part Two of this study presents an exploration of the story of Billy Budd in relation to E. M. Forster and his work from a variety of different angles. In the course of my enquiries, I conduct extensive analyses of Forster’s fictional and non-fictional writings, in which I regularly turn to the novella and the opera Billy Budd to investigate their parallels and affinities with Forster’s lifelong personal and artistic preoccupations. Forster’s creative engagement with male/male erotic longing in contexts of socially institutionalised homophobia occupies a central position among those preoccupations.

Section I.1. investigates Forster’s earliest engagement with Melville’s text as documented in his Commonplace Book. The source evidence establishes that Forster was reading the novella as a text by a homosexual author, and I provide an extensive discussion of the intertextual associations with encoded discourses about homosexuality evoked by Forster as he strives to define the concept of evil, as rendered in literary and cultural discourses which can be read as coded references to homoerotic desire.

Section II.2. contains an extensive overview of pervading themes, narrative patterns, and recurring character types in Forster’s fictional and non-fictional writings, with a special focus on those features which can be regarded as significant for his adaptation of Melville’s Br//y Budd. Central among these is the Forsterian salvation narrative, a structure which can be seen to provide the basis for a large part of Forster’s short fiction, but which also features in all of his novels to a greater or lesser extent. The Forsterian salvation narrative typically involves what I have termed a ‘dark’ English middle class character and a ‘light’ saviour character who is often a social or cultural Other; and my discussion here provides the basis for my four case studies of Forster’s fiction in section II.4., as well as for my discussion of Vere, Claggart and Billy as representatives of these character types in section II.5.

In section II.3., I provide a selective inventory of pan-Forsterian textual leitmotifs which also figure in the Bi//y Budd libretto. Tracing the patterns of recurring key words, phrases and images through Forster’s fictional and non-fictional writings, I am able to present readings of various aspects of the opera B: Budd and its characters on a basis of Forsterian textual symbolism.

Section I.4. comprises four case studies in which I present detailed discussions of “Ralph and Tony” (1903), The Longest Journey (1907), “Arthur Snatchfold” (1928) and “The Other Boat” (1957/58). All of these works show similarities to both Melville’s novella and the opera Bi//y Budd on more than one structural level, exhibiting narrative patterns and character relationships through which Forster’s own texts as well as his reading(s) and his adaptation of Melville’s text can be fruitfully explored.

Section II.5. re-examines the three main characters of the novella and the opera Billy Budd from a Forsterian perspective as extrapolated from Forster’s fictional and non-fictional writings, including his comments on B: Budd and its characters. Finally, in section II.6, I explore the interpretive potential of the discursive slippage between mutiny and homosexuality, which can be detected in the opera as well as in the novella.

The investigations conducted in this second part of my study enable me to present readings of the novella and the opera Bé//y Budd which are modulated by the imaginative forces at work in Forster’s own texts. These readings reveal a complex background of Forsterian thought and recurring narrative patterns which can be assumed to have influenced the transformation of Biy Budd from novella to libretto in a decisive way, for this background will have provided the framework for Forster’s interpretation and creative appropriation of Melville’s three main characters.

Part Three of this study is devoted to the genesis of the opera as the product of a unique and fascinating collaboration between the composer and his two librettists. Section III.1 provides an overview of key issues in this collaboration, which include Britten’s and Forster’s differing approaches to music and opera, and Britten’s, Forster’s and Crozier’s diverging views of By Budd as a text about relationships between men. I also consider the historical research done by the librettists, and the impact it had on their view of Melville’s text and the opera they were going to produce. The section is concluded by a brief chronological account of the opera’s development.

The operatic adaptation of Biy Budd is documented by a wealth of source material, in which the complete series of libretto drafts preserved at the Britten-Pears Library at Aldeburgh occupies a central position. My reconstruction of the evolution of the libretto and its characters in section III.2. is the first in Bry Budd scholarship to give extensive consideration to all of the currently available material. Particular attention is paid to Forster’s copy of the August 1949 libretto draft, acquired shortly after Clifford Hindley had essentially completed his pioneering examination of the Aldeburgh material, and subsequently never consulted again. The evidence provided by this document can be seen to qualify a widely established view in Bé/y Budd scholarship, which credits Britten with a number of changes to the character of Vere that are responsible for the development of the libretto into a characteristically Forsterian narrative about salvation. My investigations, by contrast, indicate that Forster was equally deeply involved in the making of those changes. I am thus able to resolve the seeming paradox pervasive in recent scholarly narratives which have Britten supposedly producing a text that is more true to Forster’s personal and artistic creed than the text envisioned by Forster himself.

Section HI.3. turns to Claggart’s central Act I monologue, which famously caused a serious disturbance in the relationship between Britten and Forster because Forster criticised the composer’s setting of this text. I provide a detailed comparison between Britten’s early and late revised versions of the aria, in the course of which I engage with some popular misapprehensions about Forster’s criticism.

My analyses and readings throughout this study do not attempt to impose any single theoretical model onto the examined material. The theoretical approach they ate perhaps most perceptibly influenced by on occasion can be loosely defined as a queer constructivist one. When talking about relationships between men, I shall be using terms like “homosexual” and “homoerotic longing” where they apply to concrete same-sex sexual or (to use a term fallen into sad disregard) love relationships or desires; in other words, to a homosexual object-choice. By contrast, the term “queer” is used in a specifically Queer theoretical sense as formulated by David Halperin: “Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. [...] [It] demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-a-vis the normative” (62). Where E. M. Forster is involved, this positionality may be perceived to include aspects of homosexual experience and of dissenting sexual, social and racial politics, but also of an artistic sensibility often articulated in terms of deviant gender behaviour.

I shall also occasionally be making use of Eve Sedgwick’s model of power relations in patriarchal society as negotiated through a web of “homosocial” relationships between men, relationships that cover a continuum ranging from the social to the sexual, and are structured by an “affective or social force”, a “glue”, which Sedgwick identifies as “desire”. This “desire”, however, need not necessarily be either sexual or positive, but can equally take the form of “hostility or hatred or something less emotively charged” (1985:2).

The Britten/Forster/Crozier opera was written more than ten years before the publication of the Hayford/Sealts ‘definitive’ text of Bé/ly Budd in 1962. For a comparative study of Melville’s text and the opera, it therefore seems the logical solution to use the edition of Bi% Budd which the librettists themselves were using, namely, the 1946 edition by William Plomer. All of my textual analyses of Melville’s B: Budd will therefore be based upon that edition, for, though flawed in many ways, this was the text of Bry Budd as the collaborators encountered it when they first decided to turn it into an opera late in 1948.

My analyses of the opera’s libretto and score will for the greatest part be conducted on the textual basis of the revised 1960 two-act version. Given that the principal change effected by the opera-makers at this time consisted in the omission of a Captain’s Muster at the end of Act I, Sc. 1, a scene with which none of the three collaborators had ever been entirely at ease, the 1960 version ought reasonably to be regarded as representing not just Britten’s, but also Forster’s and Crozier’s final decision on their work.°

6 See also Reed 1993b:84.