A New ‘Billy Budd’ Opera Premieres at the Aix Festival

Billy Budd is a beautiful mystery. He is young, with a smooth and feminine face, but he doesn’t know his background; all he can say is that, as a baby, he was found in a silk-lined basket, hanging from the knocker of a door.

One thing is certain in Herman Melville’s novella “Billy Budd”: This handsome sailor is good, gentle by nature and loyal to his shipmates, who call him Baby and find peace just by being in his presence.

To Billy’s “good” Melville adds allegorically pure evil in the ship’s master-at-arms, John Claggart, and unbending virtue in Captain Vere. Like the legs of a stool, those characteristics hold up the drama of “Billy Budd,” which was left unfinished at Melville’s death in 1891 and wasn’t published until the 1920s.

The story of Billy Budd, stammering and precious, then sacrificed to a strict idea of justice after he accidentally but fatally strikes Claggart, has intrigued readers ever since with its opacity and open-endedness. E.M. Forster called the novella “an easy book, as long as we read it as a yarn.” But tug at the thread, and it unravels into a pile of unanswerable questions: about desire, about morality, about the microcosmic world of a ship at sea.

Perhaps that is why adaptations of “Billy Budd,” onstage and onscreen, have been so different. Each is as much an act of interpretation as translation, adopting a specific perspective, examining Billy’s tragedy through a particular character or idea.

The latest version, a sexy and ingenious one-act called “The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor,” ran at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France earlier this month. It’s an adaptation of an adaptation: a chamber treatment, by the director Ted Huffman and the composer Oliver Leith, of Benjamin Britten’s 1951 opera “Billy Budd.”