The opera novice: Billy Budd by Benjamin Britten There is a very funny scene in The Sopranos when the family get into an argument over whether Herman Melville's Billy Budd is a gay novel. Carmela, who has seen the 1962 movie version with Terence Stamp, claims it's "the story of an innocent sailor being picked on by a cruel boss." But her daughter Meadow is certain the boss is "picking on him out of self-loathing caused by homosexual feelings in a military context," and tells her to read the critic Leslie Fiedler. Meanwhile Tony Soprano, a self-loathing mob boss, cracks jokes about Billy Budd being the ship's florist. Carmela, in this case, is more on the button than her daughter. The young foretopman Billy Budd is indeed described as "beautiful" and "all but feminine in purity of natural complexion" by Melville. And yes, the man-at-arms Claggart does inexplicably take against him. But Melville was a metaphysician who believed in the clash between eternal good and evil. He explicitly states that Claggart's behaviour, like Iago's, was "not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short "a depravity according to nature"." Benjamin Britten's great opera Billy Budd (1951), with a libretto by EM Forster and Eric Crozier, was as responsible as Leslie Fiedler for turning the story into a sadomasochistic saga. In the ENO production by David Alden that ended last week, Claggart (played by Michael Rose) dresses in leather and whips his charges. The action here is transferred from the Napoleonic Wars to a Das Boot-era mechanical world. In a seething aria, Claggart admits the boy has stirred destructive desires within him: "O beauty, o handsomeness, goodness!/ Would that I had never seen you! Having seen you, what choice remains to me?/ None, none! I'm doomed to annihilate you. To drive home the point, in this production Claggart then grabs the Novice, and threatens to rape him if he does not help him destroy Billy. It would be wrong to think, though, that psychosexuality is the opera's only theme. Billy (played by Benedict Nelson) is press-ganged from his ship Rights-o-man to the Indomitable, which is fighting post-revolutionary France. He gets into trouble just for mentioning his old ship's name, for Claggart and Captain Vere are nervous about the possibility of mutiny - the word sends a shiver down the ship's timbers whenever it's mentioned. Claggart can persecute Billy because of the lack of freedom and accountability on board. Captain Vere describes himself as "king...of this floating monarchy" and the opera - more clearly than the novel, though the same ideas are there - stages a political argument between democracy and dictatorship. After Billy Budd strikes Claggart dead and is hanged (chillingly staged here), a burgeoning mutiny has to be forcefully put down. The novel's wild language and nautical terminology are cleaned up and turned by the librettists into quickfire dramatic exchanges. But what Britten's Budd lacks in Melvillian eccentricity, it gains in claustrophobic tension. At the start the all-male sailors/chorus hauntingly sing "O heave! O heave away, heave!" and throughout it is the ensemble pieces rather than individual arias that leave the deepest impression. To my untrained ears the music sounds modernist but it's by no means discordant. There is a fantastic moment when Billy, who stutters, tries to defend himself from Claggart and the music, it seems, stutters at the same time. The battle sequence when the British ship takes on the French was thrilling.