Billy Budd and Death in Venice between them cover many of Britten's fundamental concerns in life and art: the overriding commitment to artistic expression, the conflict between the individual and the constraints imposed by society, the awfulness of war, the role of homoerotic desire. While to a large extent the two operas are differentiated by their subject-matter – war and fate on the one hand, and art and the artist's vocation on the other – both are concerned with love between males, and on this point, two important differences between them should be noted at the outset. Billy Budd was written at a time when not only was society's rejection of homosexuality embodied in the criminal law, but when the British stage was still subject to censorship. It is one of several operas in which, I believe, Britten intended to make a statement about homosexual experience, but, because of the censorship, had to do so in coded form. Death in Venice, on the other hand, was composed after the abolition of censorship in 1968, when its theme of same-sex love could be openly stated. A further, and important, difference is that while Tadzio is a teenage boy, Billy Budd is a mature man – a good deal more mature than the Billy presented by Melville.

Herman Melville's Billy Buddy Sailor was the great American novelist's last work. It was found among his papers when he died in 1891 in a form which still awaited final revision. It was perhaps in part occasioned by a historical incident in the US Navy, in which three innocent seamen had been executed in the interests of averting mutiny. Melville's cousin had been implicated in condemning the men, and the novelist may well have intended to devise 'a series of circumstances which would make a brutal hanging of a seaman inevitable and justifiable'. There is, of course, much more to Melville's story than this.