Billy Budd Herman Melville

Theater and opera

• In 1951, Louis O. Coxe and Robert Chapman's 1949 stage adaptation, Billy Budd, opened on Broadway, winning both the Donaldson Awards and Outer Critics Circle Awards for best play.[28]
• The best-known adaptation is the opera Billy Budd, with a score by Benjamin Britten and a libretto by E. M. Forster and Eric Crozier. The opera follows the earlier text of 1924, and was premiered in December 1951 in a 4-act version. Britten, Forster and Crozier subsequently revised the opera into a 2-act version, which was first performed in January 1964. Scholar Hanna Rochlitz has studied the adaptation of the novella into this opera in detail.[29]
• Giorgio Ghedini also composed an Italian-language opera, premiered in 1949, adapted from the novella with a libretto by Salvatore Quasimodo based on the 1942 Italian translation by Eugenio Montale. The Ghedini opera has not been as widely performed as Britten's work.[29]

Film

• Peter Ustinov produced and directed the 1962 film Billy Budd, adapting its script from Coxe and Chapman's 1951 Broadway production (above).[30] The black-and-white film costars a young Terence Stamp as the title character, Ustinov as Captain Vere, Robert Ryan as Master d'Arms Claggart, and Melvyn Douglas as "The Dankster". Actors David McCallum, Paul Rogers, and John Neville are also featured in the film as officers aboard HMS Avenger.[30]
• Claire Denis' Beau Travail (1999), set in Djibouti, is loosely based on the novel.[31] In the 2022 Sight and Sound decennial poll of film critics and directors to determine current thinking on which films are the best of all time, Beau Travail was one of the new entries into the top ten, placing seventh.

Music

• "Billy Budd" is a song on the 1994 album Vauxhall and I by English indie artist Morrissey.

Television

• General Motors Theatre presented a live telecast of Billy Budd in 1955, starring a young William Shatner as Billy Budd, with Douglas Campbell as Claggart and Basil Rathbone as Captain Vere. Britten's "Four Sea Interludes" was included as background music.
• Two different productions based on the Britten opera were broadcast in 1988 and 1998.

Radio

• In 2002, Focus on the Family adapted "Billy Budd, Sailor" as an audio drama for their Radio Theater program.[32]

Audiobook

• In 2018 the actor and audiobook narrator Liam Gerrard narrated the audiobook version of Billy Budd, Sailor for Enriched Classics.