Melville, Herman

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

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    An adaptation of the Benjamin Britten opera, in turn based on Melville’s classic novella, joins a lineage of beautiful enigmas.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.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: A ‘Moby-Dick’ Opera at the Met Cuts the Blubber

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      Streamlining Melville’s sprawling novel, Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s moody, monochromatic 2010 adaptation has come to the Metropolitan Opera.The opening line of Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” is one of the most famous in literature. But Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, whose moody, monochromatic 2010 adaptation arrived at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, conspicuously avoid placing those classic three words at the start.It’s an early declaration of independence, the kind that artists have always had to make when turning a well-known novel — especially one as sprawling and shaggy as Melville’s — into singing. Heggie, who also composed the well-traveled opera “Dead Man Walking” (2000), and Scheer, an experienced librettist, have narrowed one of the canon’s most overflowing works to its core plot.For readers who enjoyed “Moby-Dick” but yawned through the rambling digressions about whaling, do I have an opera for you.The compressed adaptation is direct and clear, at least. Some contemporary operas, of which the Met has offered a burst over the last few seasons, lean heavily on confusing devices: complicated flashbacks; characters shadowed by doubles; singers playing metaphorical qualities like Destiny and Loneliness; split-screen-style scenes crossing place and time.“Moby-Dick” wants none of that. It stretches across a year or so, but in a linear way. It never leaves the ship Pequod and its salty surroundings. Its characters are flesh-and-blood people.Yet the opera only rarely takes on flesh-and-blood urgency. While the story is streamlined and straightforward — a ship’s crew struggles with the demanding whims of a vindictive captain — Heggie and Scheer also want to capture Melville’s brooding grandeur, philosophical profundity and portentous language.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jake Heggie’s Adaptation of ‘Moby Dick’ Comes to the Metropolitan Opera

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      Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s 2010 adaptation of Melville’s unruly novel opens this week at the Metropolitan Opera.When “Moby Dick” opens at the Metropolitan Opera this week, audiences will experience a deeply American story of unchecked ambition, fomented grievances and a self-destructive desire for revenge.Based on Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, the opera delivers an economical and resolute retelling of the fateful tale of the Pequod, a ship in pursuit of a vengeful white whale. The libretto, by Gene Scheer, hits the book’s main conflicts without losing track of the action. The score, by Jake Heggie, is graceful and propulsive. The opera’s ending is certain and clear.It’s probably fair to say that more people know the story of the white whale from parodies or synopses than from reading “Moby Dick.” But an adaptation is not just a summary of the book’s major events. A society obsessed with efficiencies can be overly focused on directness.Skillful though it is, the opera, which had its premiere in Houston in 2010, has a kind of scrubbed and airless storytelling that leaves the singularity of the novel behind. This is the sort of adaptation that audiences have long responded to — a simplification of the book’s billowy structure to emphasize its plot. But can a tidy adaptation truly represent this unruly book, with its dramas born of endless uncertainties? Or is the purpose of adaptation something different?The tenor Brandon Jovanovich, center, sings Captain Ahab at a dress rehearsal of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “Moby Dick,” which opens on Monday night.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA composer decides what aspects of the narrative can be told through music, while a librettist shapes the story through words that can be thrown out into the air by way of song. An aria reveals a character’s singularity and ambition. Characters sing them to announce what they want and what lengths they must pursue to get it. Each creative turn adds distance from the book.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More