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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Those familiar with Herman Melville's last novella, published posthumously in 1924 and entitled Billy Budd, Foretopman, will know that one of the most memorable scenes is in fact barely there. In the so-called ‘missing’ scene, all that readers know with any certainty is that Edward Fairfax Vere, captain of the warship Indomitable (later editions rename the ship Bellipotent), communicates to Billy Budd, a sailor, the verdict of a drumhead court. Billy is to die in the early hours of the following morning for the crime of striking and killing the master-at-arms, the malevolent John Claggart. Precisely what passes between Vere and Billy in the crucial scene — one pivotal for the denouement of the story — has remained for ever a literary mystery. Although the narrator provides some conjecture as to what may have happened in the compartment where Billy is held, all he can say for sure, in a sentence endlessly cited by Melville's critics, is ‘Beyond the communication of the sentence, what took place at this interview was never known.’
1 The definitive title of Melville's novella has since been altered Because of the posthumous publication of what was an unfinished manuscript, the early stages of Billy Budd in print are particularly varied The pioneer transcription by Raymond Weaver (1924) is called Billy Budd, Foretopman F. Barron Freeman retains this title for his 1948 edition Most recently (1962), Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts Jr suggest the title that most Melville specialists accept as definitive Billy Budd. Sailor (An Inside Narrative).Google Scholar
2 Melville, Herman, Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories (London, 1967), 391Google Scholar
3 Britten, Benjamin, Billy Budd, vocal score (rev edn, London, 1961) All references to locations within the score of the opera cite the figure numbers printed in the vocal score, additional superscript numbers preceded by minus or plus signs indicate the number of bars before or after the figure number respectivelyGoogle Scholar
4 Melville, , Billy Budd, 400.Google Scholar
5 E. L Grant Watson, ‘Melville's Testament of Acceptance’, Melville's Billy Budd and the Critics, ed. William Stafford (Belmont, 1961), 74–8.Google Scholar
6 Witham, Phil, ‘Billy Budd. Testament of Resistance’, Melville's Billy Budd and the Critics, ed Stafford, 78–90 (p. 89)Google Scholar
7 Melville, , Billy Budd, 392Google Scholar
8 Brett, Philip, ‘Salvation at Sea: Billy Budd’, The Britten Companion, ed. Christopher Palmer (London, 1984), 133–43 (p 135).Google Scholar
9 Johnson, Barbara, The Critical Difference. Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore, 1980), 102.Google Scholar
10 Brett, , ‘Salvation at Sea’, 137.Google Scholar
11 Cone, Edward, ‘On the Road to Otello. Tonality and Structure in Simon Boccanegra’, Studi Verdiani, 1 (1982), 72–98 (pp 72–3); quoted in Analyzing Opera, ed Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 18.Google Scholar
12 Whittall, Arnold, ‘Twisted Relations’ Method and Meaning in Britten's Billy Budd’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 2 (1990), 145–71 (p. 168).Google Scholar
13 Evans, Peter, The Music of Benjamin Britten (rev. edn, Oxford, 1996), 207–8Google Scholar
14 Vocal score, Act 1, Figs 1–3–1−2, and Act 2, Figs. 144+8–144+9Google Scholar
15 Whittall, Arnold, The Music of Britten and Tippett (Cambridge, 1982), 130Google Scholar
16 Parker, Peter, ‘Evil Helpless like a Lover’, Production Notes for Billy Budd (Royal Opera House, 1995), 28–32 (p 32)Google Scholar
17 I use the terms ‘mimesis’ and ‘diegesis’, ‘mimetic’ and ‘diegetic’ much like Carolyn Abbate does to distinguish in musical works between the enaction of events (mimesis) and the recounting of events retrospectively (diegesis) See her Unsung Voices. Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991), xii, 23, 53–6Google Scholar
18 That is, a one-movement work divided into two parts – Prologue and Epilogue – linked by a re-enactionGoogle Scholar
19 Lawrence Kramer, ‘Dangerous Liaisons The Literary Text in Musical Criticism’, 19th-Century Music, 13 (1989), 159–67 (p. 165)Google Scholar
20 Stein, Erwin, ‘Billy Budd’, Benjamin Britten. A Commentary on his Works from a Group of Specialists, ed Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller (London, 1952), 198–210 (pp 208–9), and Donald Mitchell, ‘More Off than On Billy Budd, Music Survey, 4 (1952), 386–408 (p. 386)Google Scholar
21 Arnold Whittall writes in ‘Twisted Relations’, 156: ‘for most commentators the question of the symbolic significance or dramatic meaning of the thirty-four chords cannot be separated from that of their tonal identity’Google Scholar
22 Culshaw, John, ‘The Deadly Space Between’, essay in booklet accompanying the Decca recording of Billy Budd (SET 379–81, London, 1968), 6–7 (p. 6).Google Scholar
23 Evans, , The Music of Benjamin Britten, 168, and Brett, ‘Salvation at Sea’, 142Google Scholar
24 Mitchell, Donald, ‘A Billy Budd Notebook (179–1991)’, Benjamin Britten: Billy Budd, ed. Mervyn Cooke and Philip Reed (Cambridge, 1993), 111–34 (p 122).Google Scholar
25 Fig. 117.Google Scholar
26 Fig 143.Google Scholar
27 Hindley, Clifford, ‘Love and Salvation in Britten's Billy Budd, Music and Letters, 70 (1989), 363–81.Google Scholar
28 Whittall, , ‘Twisted Relations’, 156Google Scholar
29 Whittall quotes Weber. ‘Cases must occur, in which the ear will find itself in doubt as to a combination of tones and will be able to interpret such a combination to itself as naturally in one way as in another, and consequently the meaning of such harmony must in fact remain undecided.’ See Weber, Gottfried, The Theory of Musical Compositum, trans. James Warner, ed John Bishop (London, 1851), 368, quoted in Whittall, ‘Twisted Relations’, 158.Google Scholar
30 Barry Emslie also suggests that the opera does not end wholly positively. In ‘Billy Budd and the Fear of Words’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4 (1992), 43–59, he argues that three themes in the opera – sexual, spiritual and social – are marked by fundamental contradictions that remain irreconciled and problematic to the opera's end. A series of evasions mislead the spectator into believing there is resolution, when, for Emslie, there is only a shift of imagery and resolution is never achieved.Google Scholar
31 Whittall, ‘Twisted Relations’, 168Google Scholar
32 That is, the ‘missing’ scene, Act 2, scene iii, starting at Fig 117, and Vere's Epilogue, starting at Fig 143Google Scholar
33 Whittall, ‘Twisted Relations’, 162Google Scholar
34 Ibid., 158.Google Scholar
35 Ibid., 166.Google Scholar
36 Ibid., 168.Google Scholar
37 Forster, E. M., on his Billy Budd libretto, quoted in Anthony Gishford, ‘Notes and News: Billy Budd, Tempo, 21 (1951), 5.Google Scholar
38 Louis Coxe and Robert Chapman, Billy Budd: A Play in Three Acts (Princeton, 1951), 52–3Google Scholar
39 Melville, , Billy Budd, 388Google Scholar
40 Chapman, Coxe and, Billy Budd, 47.Google Scholar
41 Chapman, Coxe and, Billy Budd (London, 1966), x.Google Scholar
42 Vocal score, Act 2, scene in, Fig. 113+5–114 These are Billy's words about Vere, as he lies in chains, shortly before executionGoogle Scholar
43 Emslie, ‘Billy Budd and the Fear of Words’, 53Google Scholar
44 The phrases were coined by Günther Müller, ‘Erzählzeit und erzahlte Zeit’, Morphologische Poetik, ed. Elena Müller (Tübingen, 1968), 269–86. For a summary see Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative II (Chicago, 1985), 61–99.Google Scholar
45 Vocal score, Act 2, Epilogue, Fig 144+8 to endGoogle Scholar
46 Carpenter, Humphrey, Benjamin Britten. A Biography (London, 1992), 295–6Google Scholar
47 Considering key relations in opera, Siegmund Levane writes: ‘We can think of a composition as a definitive entity isolated from the notion of time, or as an evolutionary entity experienced in time.’ I am suggesting that it would be useful to hear Billy Budd's ‘missing’ scene in the first of these categories (out of the temporal action of the work), rather than – as is more usual – the second (within the action). See Levarie, Siegmund, ‘Viewpoint. On Key Relations in Opera’, 19th-century Music, 3 (1979), 88–9 (p. 88).Google Scholar
48 Roland Jordan and Emma Kafalenos, ‘The Double Trajectory Ambiguity in Brahms and Henry James’, 19th-century Music, 13 (1989), 129–44 (p. 143)Google Scholar
49 Vocal score, Act 1, scene in, Fig 84 ('We're off to Savannah'), and Act 2, scene in, Fig 115 ('And farewell to ye, old Rights o’ Man!')Google Scholar
50 For instance, vocal score, Act 1, scene i, starting at Fig 66.Google Scholar
51 Vocal score, Act 2, scene i, Fig. 41Google Scholar
52 Another significant B♭ is barked out above an E major of the main deck by the Quarterdeck in Act 2, scene iii, Fig 136+3, in their orders to a potentially mutinous crew Who are the ‘innocent’ here?Google Scholar
53 F major covers much of the music of Billy's dream (vocal score, Act 1, scene iii, Fig 116) as well as the dawn in which Billy lies in chains (vocal score, Act 2, scene iii)Google Scholar
54 Vocal score, Act 1, scene iii, Figs 110+17–111Google Scholar
55 Vocal score, Act 2, scene ii, Figs. 99+21–100Google Scholar
56 See above, n. 43Google Scholar
57 Some of the idea's origins lie with Schoenberg. ‘In the double-tonic complex, the tonic admits the rivalry of other tonics alongside it.’ Quoted in Christopher Lewis, ‘Mirrors and Metaphors. Reflections on Schoenberg and Nineteenth-Century Tonality’, 19th-century Music, 11 (1987), 26–42 (p 29) Other theorists include Kevin Korsyn, Harald Krebs and Jim Samson. Also see Cheong Wai-Ling, ‘Conference Report: Alternatives to Monotonality’, Music Analysis, 8 (1989), 353–8.Google Scholar
58 Analysis of tonal structure at levels of greater detail often runs into methodological problems or involves a high degree of selectivity.Google Scholar
59 William Kinderman, ‘Directional Tonality in Chopin’, Chopin Studies, ed Jim Samson (Cambridge, 1988), 59–75 (p. 59).Google Scholar
60 Jordan and Kafalenos, ‘The Double Trajectory’, 139Google Scholar
61 If one wanted to put a Schenkerian slant on the argument for dual tonality, a broad Schenkerian metaphor that replaces an apparently through-composed piece with a binary design suggests another more ‘analytical’ model for Billy Budd; it is one that could be said to set up a dialectic tension between the well rehearsed view of the work as irreversible and goal-driven, finished and contained, and the disjunction and contradiction therein Between the Prologue, the ‘missing’ scene and the Epilogue, the bass line, of course, is related by the interval of the fifth in both ascending and descending directions Then, while at first glance it might seem that Schenker's idea of organic coherence – of a forward-moving trajectory – is indeed played out musically in Billy Budd, the ‘Urlinie’ – and particularly the note D that goes part of the way to continuing a B minor element through to the very end – could be said to deny the bass arpeggiation this classic function; in Billy Budd, the tendency of 
2/V to close onto Î/I is simply not realized Instead, the final D suggests a modified – and what would be in Schenker's eyes a simplified – ‘interrupted’ structure (
3 moves to 
2, but thereafter 
3 is reinstated) which supposedly forms a cadence half-way through the work; the 
2 (in the interruption) functions as a resolution of the primary note. This way, then, the ‘missing’ 
2/V scene in Billy Budd again becomes a kind of ‘resolution’ in itself.Google Scholar
62 Or even a (highly metaphorical) Schenkerian structure (see above, n 61).Google Scholar
63 Anthony Newcomb, ‘The Polonaise-Fantasy and Issues of Musical Narrative’, Chopin Studies 2, ed. Jim Samson and John Rink (Cambridge, 1994), 84–101 (p. 86).Google Scholar
64 Paul Ricoeur, trans. Robert Sweeney, ‘Narrated Time’, Philosophy Today, 29 (1985), 259–72, repr in A Ricoeur Reader. Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario Valdés (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), 338–54Google Scholar
65 Vocal score, Act 2, Figs 144+10–144+13.Google Scholar
66 Abbate, Unsung Voices, 33. See Maus, Fred, ‘Music as Drama’, Music Theory Spectrum, 10 (1988), 65–72 He draws an analogy between a string quartet and a stage play, thus according music both actions and agents. However, for Maus, differences between the two arise because actions in music have descriptions that are specifically musical (they cannot be described in words) and the agents themselves, unlike in stage plays, are indeterminate.Google Scholar
67 Whittall, , ‘Twisted Relations’, 168.Google Scholar
