Did the Proms’ Billy Budd turn a mystery into a mess?

The many opera performances at the Proms this year have all been so successful, especially the Wagner series, that I hope it doesn’t require a centenary to include them in future seasons. One of the things that has made them so vivid to the audiences in the Albert Hall has been the immediacy of the contact between singers and public, despite the hall’s vast spaces. It would be nice, but vain, to think that the present breed of directors, with their concepts and conceits, might learn that the simpler the productions they mount, the more their audiences are likely to respond to the works; but the tendency in opera houses is to regard the opera as written by the librettist and composer as mere raw material to be twisted into any shape that might make it relevant and shocking. All the more reason why concert or semi-staged performances should become more frequent.

Glyndebourne’s production of Britten’s Billy Budd was so powerful that there was an even longer silence at the end than there was at Götterdämmerung, though that might be partly accounted for by the way the piece just drifts into silence, the libretto ending with three dots rather than a full stop, as we assume that Captain Vere’s musings on how Billy has saved him and he’s content will continue for some time after the curtain falls.

Andrew Davis, the superb conductor, said in the interval on the radio that of course we don’t believe for a moment that Vere is content, any more than we believe the same thing when Billy sings it. That view does make an opera that is already fraught with ambiguities tilt over into incoherence. Maybe Britten would have been happy for it to be indecipherable, since he revelled in concealment and velleity.