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May. 11th, 2012 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI saw Britten's Billy Budd last night at the Met. I'd had this plan in my head to read the novella ahead of time, but that went the way of most of my fiendishly clever plots. Britten's opera was written with a libretto by Auden. It is morose, brooding, difficult, and narratively taut and thoughtful.
Though I've not read Billy Budd, the opera strikes me as extraordinarily committed to respecting Melville's narrative instincts. The program notes kept commenting over and over how the kind of tone painting Britten used so brilliantly in Peter Grimes is nearly absent here, as if this were a shocking departure. And in a way it is. Like Grimes, Billy Budd is a dark meditation on the hazards of life at sea and the way those hazards are trumped by the even harsher dangers of human interaction. But that sort of imagistic composition would have sounded flabby and unnecessary tacked onto Melville.
I kind of liked the way the Met staging dealt with the Jesus stuff surrounding Billy's death. They acknowledged its existence, with a pure white light shining down on the crewmen after the hanging, but I sensed a self-consciousness and maybe even a little shame about it. It was a theme clearly present in Britten's music (and according to the program notes, in the original novel, where Melville describes Billy's death as a 'sacrament'), and thus a theme that a scrupulous company had to represent, but it seemed a theme the production designer was not fully comfortable with. The production note is very insistent that Billy be read as a human being. Billy is naive, unlearned, unambitious, overexuberant... he is charming and goodhearted, but he is not saintly. Which had me pondering a Billy Budd fic where Billy actually is guilty of scheming mutiny, but Claggart doesn't know it. How that would change the story's good/evil dynamic is fascinating to me.
I... didn't really connect with Nathan Gunn's Billy as much as I wanted. I saw Gunn last summer in a show tunes recital at the New York Philharmonic and felt similarly. Gunn's voice is incredibly impressive, but I find something emotionally elusive about it. Meanwhile, James Morris sang Claggart, a role he originated at the Met nearly 35 years ago. He's still got it. His Claggart is deliciously over the top but still heartbreakingly real, though never sympathetic.
All told, I enjoyed it a lot.
Though I've not read Billy Budd, the opera strikes me as extraordinarily committed to respecting Melville's narrative instincts. The program notes kept commenting over and over how the kind of tone painting Britten used so brilliantly in Peter Grimes is nearly absent here, as if this were a shocking departure. And in a way it is. Like Grimes, Billy Budd is a dark meditation on the hazards of life at sea and the way those hazards are trumped by the even harsher dangers of human interaction. But that sort of imagistic composition would have sounded flabby and unnecessary tacked onto Melville.
I kind of liked the way the Met staging dealt with the Jesus stuff surrounding Billy's death. They acknowledged its existence, with a pure white light shining down on the crewmen after the hanging, but I sensed a self-consciousness and maybe even a little shame about it. It was a theme clearly present in Britten's music (and according to the program notes, in the original novel, where Melville describes Billy's death as a 'sacrament'), and thus a theme that a scrupulous company had to represent, but it seemed a theme the production designer was not fully comfortable with. The production note is very insistent that Billy be read as a human being. Billy is naive, unlearned, unambitious, overexuberant... he is charming and goodhearted, but he is not saintly. Which had me pondering a Billy Budd fic where Billy actually is guilty of scheming mutiny, but Claggart doesn't know it. How that would change the story's good/evil dynamic is fascinating to me.
I... didn't really connect with Nathan Gunn's Billy as much as I wanted. I saw Gunn last summer in a show tunes recital at the New York Philharmonic and felt similarly. Gunn's voice is incredibly impressive, but I find something emotionally elusive about it. Meanwhile, James Morris sang Claggart, a role he originated at the Met nearly 35 years ago. He's still got it. His Claggart is deliciously over the top but still heartbreakingly real, though never sympathetic.
All told, I enjoyed it a lot.