A Study Of Benjamin Britten’s Opera Billy Budd

Benjamin Britten(1913-1976)is an outstanding British composer,conductor and pianist in the 20 th century.He has created numerous works in different genres,including opera,chorus music,symphony and chamber music,among which there are as many as 16 opera works.Created in 1951,the opera Billy Budd is adapted from the short story Billy Budd,sailor by the American writer Herman Melville(1819 ～ 1891).Not only is it the fifth opera created by Britten but also it’s the first large-scale opera created after Peter Grimes,having remarkable significance in Britten’s opera creation career.Many symbolic musical elements are applied to the opera Billy Budd,which on the one hand vividly portrays the personality and psychology of those characters in the opera,on the other hand carries the profound spiritual connotation the composer intends to convey through the opera.This paper selects the opera Billy Budd as the research object,trying to explore the deep thinking Britten wants to convey through this work,which is realized by means of script analysis and music technique analysis,combined with the historical background and Britten’s own life and creative experience.The body of this paper is mainly divided into three chapters.The first chapter introduces the creative background and process of the libretto,and conducts a comparative study of the original novel and opera script.The second chapter focuses on the noumenon analysis of music.First of all,it introduces the music form,layout and dramatic conflict of the whole opera from a macro perspective.Then,the author emphasizes the analysis of how the composer adopts musical techniques to create abundant and diverse characters as well as their subtle psychological activities.Finally,the author selects several of the most prominent symbolic musical elements in the opera so as to further explore the connotation of the opera and the application of musical techniques to Britten’s opera.The third chapter is the sublimation of the whole paper.Based on the creative background and musical analysis of the first and second chapters,it further explores the spiritual connotation of the opera and makes a humanistic interpretation of it,on the grounds of the composer’s own creative experience and the social background at that time.