After the sweepingly successful Peter Grimes of 1945, Benjamin Britten moved into the realm of chamber opera for several years, producing such well-loved works as The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring and concocting a new version of John Gay's perennial favorite, The Beggar's Opera. Only with a 1951 adaptation of Herman Melville's Billy Budd did the composer move back into the realm of massive, symphonically conceived opera. Billy Budd, written to a libretto by E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier, is a formidable, even menacing work in which nearly every bar testifies to the distance—in terms of musical sophistication and narrative/musical structure—traveled by Britten between 1945 and 1951. His decision in 1961 to condense the four-act work into a new two-act mold was, likewise, the sign of an ever-maturing pen, and had the very palpable effect of raising the opera from the relative obscurity surrounding its initial premiere to the more general appreciation among musicians and opera lovers it has enjoyed since the 1960 premiere of the revised version. It may never equal Peter Grimes in the public eye, but it is in almost every conceivable way that work's superior.

Billy Budd is a truly through-composed opera: here, Britten has gotten beyond the need for constant sectionalization that marks his first theatrical entries. Here also, even more than in Peter Grimes (in which there are intermittent episodes of distinctly light character), Britten uses weighty musical forces to hammer in an even weightier psychological substance; a very particular color (certainly one of isolation and constriction, and perhaps also of nearly panic-stricken obsession) is achieved and maintained throughout Billy Budd by both the restricted physical area (the action takes place entirely on board ship) and the use of male voices exclusively throughout. The narrative affords no room for gentleness beyond the singing of a few chanteys in the third scene of Act I, and Britten is wise enough to avoid inserting extramusical delicacies merely to increase the opera's popularity among casual operagoers.

Billy Budd takes place at sea on board the H.M.S. Indomitable during the 1797 French wars. Budd is himself a new recruit to the ship, and falls prey to the treachery of Claggart, the Master-at-Arms. From the moment Billy sets foot on deck his fate is sealed, and yet, as Captain Vere himself tells us in the Epilogue (which takes place, as does the Prologue, many years after the actual action of the drama), Billy's death is not entirely without cause or devoid of positive repercussions. Britten takes it upon himself, however, to challenge through music the effort to justify the hanging of an innocent lad on the basis of nothing better then martial laws, and the large composite structures with which he works are built up of insinuating gestures that refuse to allow even a moment's peace; if justification is to be had, it will not be easily won. Even tonality itself, normally so comforting to twentieth century audiences, is used to such intentionally conflicted ends that it becomes a looming (if fractured) darkness that only the final B flat of the Captain's Epilogue can pierce. Throughout, the work paradoxically evokes the expanse of the wide-open ocean and the claustrophobia of dozens of men forced to live and work on the confines of a wooden sailing ship.

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