Review: ‘Billy Budd’ an evocative but suspect fable of good and evil at S.F. Opera

John Chest (center) plays the title role in Britten’s “Billy Budd” at the San Francisco Opera. Photo: Cory Weaver / SF Opera

One of the great achievements of Britten’s opera “Billy Budd” is the way the composer used his astounding musical gifts to create the illusion of moral and expressive complexity. To listen to this intricate and evocative score is to believe, against all other evidence, that one is learning something profound about good and evil, guilt and innocence, heroism and cowardice.

It isn’t so. Even in a production as musically probing and vigorous as the one that opened at the San Francisco Opera on Saturday, Sept. 7, the essential flimsiness of the work’s moral vision — one that goes back to the Herman Melville novella on which it’s based — can’t help shining through.

“Budd” is set aboard a British man-o’-war in 1797, a system whose thoroughly hierarchical structure — crisply established in the opera’s opening scenes — is threatened by the French Revolution and two recent instances of mutiny in the Royal Navy. Discipline is maniacally enforced, and political paranoia lurks in every officer’s cabin.

Against this backdrop, Britten establishes a tense, triangular battle of wills. At one point sits Capt. Vere, the insightful but weak-willed commander of the H.M.S. Indomitable, and at the other is the ship’s master-at-arms, John Claggart, a figure of unrelievedly cartoonish villainy. The title character — a seraphically beautiful foundling who’s been pressed into service from a ship none-too-subtly named the Rights-of-Man — is the battleground on which these two do battle.

John Chest (center) plays the man at the center of a moral battle in “Billy Budd,” set on a ship at the San Francisco Opera. Photo: Cory Weaver / SF Opera

Saturday’s opening performance at the War Memorial Opera House — dedicated to the memory of San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle dance and music critic Allan Ulrich, who died in July — conjured up a mighty and tempestuous fervor in telling this tale. Like the unpredictable sea weather that pervades the score, this was a performance that rose to imposing climaxes and subsided into beguiling calms, with a profusion of musical and theatrical detail running throughout.

The Opera Orchestra, led with conviction if a bit loosely by conductor Lawrence Renes, did full justice to the inventiveness of Britten’s instrumental writing. Michael Grandage’s production, brought from the Glyndebourne Festival and staged here by director Ian Rutherford, sets the action within a single, almost overpowering stage set by designer Christopher Oram, one that makes the insides of the ship look like a cross between a warehouse, a gladiatorial arena and an Elizabethan theater.

Christian Van Horn (left), as the ship’s master at arms, and William Burden, as the weak-willed commander, engage in a battle of wills in “Billy Budd” at the San Francisco Opera. Photo: Cory Weaver / SF Opera

The cast could scarcely be improved on. As Vere, the opera’s flawed voice of conscience, William Burden deployed his crystalline, fluid tenor with a combination of graceful ease and pained, halting expressivity. Bass-baritone Christian Van Horn was an aptly terrifying Claggart, bringing cavernous power to the role’s ominous low notes and quick fluidity — like a predator poised to pounce — to the higher-lying vocal lines.

And in the title role, baritone John Chest made an impressive company debut with a performance of freshness and vitality. Billy doesn’t have much personality  — he’s a blank, beautiful screen onto whom the other men on board can all project their desires and fears — but Chest’s singing, especially in the lovely late ballad “Billy in the Darbies,” created a telling simulacrum.

There were standouts, too, amid the large all-male cast (no women to be found on a man-‘o-war). Tenor Brenton Ryan sang with bright-toned intensity as the Novice — a young man who quickly discovers the hard truths of naval life — Philip Skinner gave a gruffly alluring performance as the grizzled old sailor Dansker, and Matthew O’Neill brought a few moments of comic relief as the duplicitous Squeak. The men of the Opera Chorus, led by Ian Robertson, raised a lusty and well-modulated sound as the ship’s crew.

Yet to what end, all of it? “Budd” is just one of Britten’s many operas about the fragility of innocence, and it casts this moral paradigm in largely unsubtle terms. Claggart’s pasteboard malignity is outsize and unmotivated, in spite of an extended soliloquy — which Van Horn delivered magnificently — intended to give him a third dimension.

The men’s constant harping on Billy’s youthful physical allure — he’s nicknamed “Baby” or “Beauty” by everyone on board — creates a homoerotic undercurrent that would be fascinating on its own, but doesn’t square with the work’s intended moral calculus. And the notion that Billy’s ultimate fate redeems Vere turns him into some kind of porno Jesus.

In the end, of course, “Budd” is about none of this. It’s about Vere (who frames the opera in flashback as an old man) and his great failure of moral courage, a theme that is almost enough to sustain the drama. Burden’s wondrous performance — robust but uncertain, full of both authority and doubt — helped keep the spotlight where it belongs.

“Billy Budd”: San Francisco Opera. Through Sept. 22. $26-$398. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-3330. www.sfopera.com

  • Joshua Kosman
    Joshua Kosman Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. Email: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman