Sorry, Mr. Britten

After seeing Il Turco in Italia the day before, I was feeling pretty great about Glyndebourne and predisposed to think Billy Budd was going to be good. Alas, I cannot give it a good review, and the fault lies with one Mr. Benjamin Britten.

This is my third Britten opera, after a very good Peter Grimes at the Met and an okay The Turn of the Screw in Santa Fe. Unfortunately, it’s been a downhill slide with each one, though through no fault of the singers or production directors. Billy Budd is an adaptation of a Herman Melville novella, and it suffers from a few problems.

First, despite being written earlier, the older opera pales in comparison to Jake Heggie’s 2010 adaptation of Moby-Dick (Melville’s most famous work) which I saw less than 18 months ago. Second, an opera composed entirely of male voices just doesn’t have enough range to be exciting. Heggie got around this problem by having a soprano play a pants role, but Britten committed to an all-male sound. The all-female Suor Angelica in Il trittico feels rich; the sound in Billy Budd felt flat (again, no fault of the singers). Indeed, the singing was as lovely as one would expect of a company of Glyndebourne’s quality. I’m looking forward to seeing baritone Thomas Mole, luminous in the title role, again in San Francisco and Santa Fe this upcoming season.

First performed in 1951, the opera is meant to evoke homosexual undertones and the consequences of repression. Regrettably, I felt the production tried to turn those undertones into a theme so loud that it ruined some of the subtlety of the original story. Baritone Sam Carl was so over-the-top evil as the villain Claggart that I got taken out of the moment. I can’t blame the individual actors, because it was a recurring thing throughout the cast, so it must have come from the director.

Coincidentally, my mother always confuses the composer Benjamin Britten with the film “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”. For the past few years, I’ve made a point of trying to differentiate the undeniably similar names. However, now that I’ve decided to take a break from Britten, I might as well let the confusion continue.

Opera: Billy Budd
Composer: Benjamin Britten
Venue: Glyndebourne Festival
Date: July 2, 2026
Link: https://www.glyndebourne.com/events/billy-budd/