¹ All quotations from Melville's text come from the edition by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, first published Chicago, 1962, as reprinted in Melville, Herman, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories, ed. Beaver, Harold (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1970; rpt. 1985), 317–409.Google Scholar For a discussion of the merits of this edition and comparison with the later edition by Stern, Milton R. (Indianapolis, 1975)Google Scholar, see Scorza, Thomas J., In the Time before Steamships. Billy Budd, the Limits of Politics, and Modernity (DeKalb, 1979), 183–95.Google Scholar Both Beaver, in his Introduction, and Scorza in his ‘Note on the Text’ provide useful accounts of the genesis of Melville's story. The most obvious difference between these editions and the earlier ones available to the opera-makers is that Captain Vere's ship is called the Bellipotent, not the Indomitable.

The extracts from Billy Budd reproduced in this article are reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.

² Melville, 404.

³ Melville, loc. cit.

⁴ Melville, 405.

⁵ Berthoff, Werner, ‘The Example of Billy Budd’ (1962), rpt. in Vincent, Howard P., ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Billy Budd. A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971), 79–80.Google Scholar

⁶ Adler, Joyce Sparer, War in Melville's Imagination (New York and London, 1981), 165.Google Scholar

⁷ Adler, 177–8.

⁸ Adler, 161.

⁹ Adler, 176–7. See Melvill (n. 1), 406.

¹⁰ Stern, Milton R., ‘The Case for Captain Vere’ (1957), rpt. in Stafford, W. T., ed., Melville's Billy Budd and the Critics (San Francisco, 1961), 152.Google Scholar See Melville, 392.

¹¹ Melville, 391.

¹² Berthoff (see n. 5), 74. Melville, 391.

¹³ Johnson, Barbara, ‘Melville's Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd’ (1979), rpt. in Johnson, The Critical Difference. Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore and London, 1985), 79–109.Google Scholar Johnson's essay also appears in Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations. Herman Melville's Billy Budd … and Other Tales (New York, New Haven, Philadelphia, 1987), 47–81.Google Scholar For Scorza, see n. 1.

¹⁴ Johnson, 95 and 85.

¹⁵ Scorza, 192.

¹⁶ Johnson, 108 and 103.

¹⁷ Scorza, 173–4.

¹⁸ Melville, 376.

¹⁹ Scorza, 106 and 141–2.

²⁰ See n. 5 and n. 7.

²¹ Even W. H. Auden, who might have been expected to underline any homosexual elements in Melville's tale, makes a point of their suppression, with respect to Billy and Claggart: ‘The motive for Claggart's behaviour, half-stated only to be withdrawn because no motive will really do, is homosexual desire’. Auden, W. H., ‘Claggart – I’ (1950), rpt. in Stafford (see n. 10), 158.Google Scholar Auden's point is that since Claggart represents the Devil he needs no motive other than his actual existence to seek Billy's destruction. This view is supported by other critics, including Scorza: ‘The facts that Claggart's passion is not “vulgar” in form and that his depravity “partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual” would seem to suggest that those critics err who read frustrated homosexual desire as Claggart's motive’ (p. 87). See Melville, 353.

²² Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations. E. M. Forster's ‘A Passage to India’ (New York, New Haven and Philadelphia, 1987), 5.Google Scholar

²³ See Brodtkorb, Paul Jr, ‘The White Hue of Nothingness’ (1967), rpt. in Vincent (n. 5), 32Google Scholar, and (in the same volume) Howard P. Vincent, ‘Introduction’, 5.

²⁴ See Rosenberry's, Edward H. ‘The Problem of Billy Budd’ (1965)Google Scholar, quoting Vogel's, Richard Harter ‘Billy Budd: the Order of the Fall’ (1960), in Vincent (n. 5), 49.Google Scholar

²⁵ Perhaps the most forceful example of this shift of tone is found between the last two paragraphs of Ch. 25, in which Billy's execution is recounted, and the opening of Ch. 26 (Melville, 400–1):

The hull, deliberately recovering from the periodic role to leeward, was just regaining an even keel when the last signal, a preconcened dumb one, was given. At the same moment it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East was shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and. ascending, took the full rose of the dawn.

In the pinioned figure arrived at the yard-end, to the wonder of all no motion was apparent, none save that created by the slow roll of the hull in moderate weather, so majestic in a great ship ponderously cannoned.

26 When some days afterwards, in reference to the singularity just mentioned, the purser, a rather ruddy, rotund person more accurate as an accountant than profound as a philosopher, said at mess to the surgeon, ‘What testimony to the force lodged in will power,’ the latter, saturnine, spare, and tall, one in whom a discreet causticity went along with a manner less genial than polite, replied, ‘Your pardon, Mr Purser. In a hanging scientifically conducted – and under special orders I myself directed how Budd's was to be effected – any movement following the completed suspension and originating in the body suspended, such movement indicates mechanical spasm in the muscular system. Hence the absence of that is no more attributable to will power, as you call it, than to horsepower – begging your pardon.’

²⁶ Melville, 327.

²⁷ See Hindley, Clifford, ‘Love and Salvation in Britten's Billy Budd’, Music & Letters, 70 (1989), 373 n. 34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁸ Melville, 406.

²⁹ Hindley (see n. 27), 375 n. 41.

³⁰ Porter, Andrew, ‘Britten's Billy Budd’, Music & Letters, 33 (1952), 118.Google Scholar

³¹ Porter, 114.

³² Mitchell, Donald, ‘More Off than On Billy Budd’, Music Survey, 4 (1952)Google Scholar, rpt. in Mitchell, Donald and Keller, Hans, eds., Music Survey. New Services, 1949–1952 (London, 1981), 408.Google Scholar See Melville, 392. Britten's composition sketch reveals that at one stage there were thirty-nine, not thirty-four chords in Sequence A: a D minor chord for strings between Chords 23 and 24, a C major chord between 25 and 26, A major (brass) and F major chords between 28 and 29, and a D major chord (brass) between 29 and 30. I am grateful to Rosamund Strode, Keeper of Manuscripts and Archivist at the Britten-Pears Library, for this information.

³³ Stein, Erwin, ‘Billy Budd’, in Mitchell, Donald and Keller, Hans, eds., Benjamin Britten. A Commentary on his Works from a Group of Specialists (London, 1952), 208–9.Google Scholar

³⁴ Culshaw, John, ‘The Deadly Space Between’, essay in booklet issued with the Decca recording of Billy Budd (SET 379–81, London, 1968), 6.Google Scholar

³⁵ Evans, Peter, The Music of Benjamin Britten (London, 1979), 168.Google Scholar

³⁶ Evans, 173.

³⁷ Brett, Philip, ‘Salvation at Sea: Billy Budd’, in Palmer, Christopher, ed., The Britten Companion (London, 1984), 142.Google Scholar

³⁸ Hindley (see n. 27), 371.

³⁹ Mitchell (see n. 32), 407.

⁴⁰ Stein (see n. 33), 208.

⁴¹ Evans (see n. 35), 173.

⁴² Schoenberg, Arnold, Structural Functions of Harmony (London, 1969), 2.Google Scholar

⁴³ See Rothfarb, Lee A., Ernst Kurth as Theorist and Analyst (Philadelphia, 1988), 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar, referring to Kurth's, Romantische Harmonik and ihre Krise in Wagners ‘Tristan’ (1920; rpt. Hildesheim, 1975), 1–2, 11.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Rothfarb, 158, citing Kurth, 262–4.

⁴⁵ See Levenson, Irene Montefiore, ‘Smooth Moves: Schubert and Theories of Modulation in the Nineteenth Century’, In Theory Only, 7 (1984), nos. 5–6, 35–53.Google Scholar Rothfarb, 159.

⁴⁶ See Wason, Robert W., Viennese Harmonic Theory from Albrechtsberger to Schenker and Schoenberg (Ann Arbor, 1985), 104.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Wason, 105, citing Dahlhaus, Carl, Untersuchungen über die Entstehung der harmonischen Tonalität (Kassel, 1968), 12.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Lendvai, Ernö, Béla Bartók. An Analysis of His Music (London, 1971), 1–16.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Weber, Gottfried, The Theory of Musical Composition, trans. Warner, James F., ed. John Bishop (London, 1851), 368.Google Scholar The title of this chapter in the third edn of Weber's, Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonkunst (Mainz, Paris and Antwerp, 1830–1832), 135Google Scholar, is ‘Mehrdeutigkeit der Modulation’. For the Abbé Vogler's use of the term, see Grave, Floyd K. and Grave, Margaret G., In Praise of Harmony. The Teachings of Abbé Georg Joseph Vogler (Lincoln, Nebraska and London, 1987), 34.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Melville, 391 and 396.

⁵¹ Hindley (see n. 27), 365.

⁵² Melville, 397.

⁵³ Melville, 398.

⁵⁴ Melville, 330.

⁵⁵ The bass arpeggios suggest an appropriately child-like source, two movements from Britten's The Little Sweep (1949), nos. 10 and 14.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Adler (see n. 6), 176.

⁵⁷ Melville, 406.

⁵⁸ Adler, 177.

⁵⁹ Melville, 406.

⁶⁰ See n. 27.

⁶¹ Johnson (see n. 13), 83.

⁶² Hollinghurst, Alan, The Swimming Pool Library (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1988), 218.Google Scholar

⁶³ Brett (see n. 37), 142.

⁶⁴ Scorza (see n. 1), 164.

⁶⁵ See p. 145.

⁶⁶ Evans (see n. 35), 168.

⁶⁷ Seen. 29.

⁶⁸ Scorza, see n. 19.

⁶⁹ Scorza, see n. 17.