Is “Billy Budd” the ultimate modern gay antihero who almost didn’t speak his name?

This year marks the centennial of the random discovery of Herman Melville’s novella by a scholar who was researching a biography of the author, and for a century “Billy Budd” has been analyzed and theorized as the ultimate battle of innocence, envy, voyeurism and latent homosexuality. Or is it just a tragic tale of a ship full of lonely and smelly men who secretly lust after the doomed and unobtainable pretty boy?

However it’s interpreted, a hundred years after its rebirth, Melville’s seafaring story is almost refreshing in its simplicity and shattering tragedy. In an era when the “Will & Grace” reboot constitutes a re-analysis of gay consciousness, the in-the-shadows subtleties of Melville’s tale are thrilling to ponder.

And Benjamin Britten’s opera of “Billy Budd,” written more than 25 years after the novel was unearthed, returns to the Royal Opera in London this month in a new production that has mesmerized audiences in Madrid and Rome over the last few years. It’s a well-timed and well-oiled “Billy Budd,” directed by Deborah Warner with a keen sense of how delicate the story and its characters are. It shines — or, rather, softly refocuses — a light on the power of one man over the multitudes.

It’s also sort of a homecoming since “Billy Budd” had its world premiere at the Royal in 1951 and remains one of the jewels in the crown of modern British opera, and also because it is quintessentially British. Melville wrote mostly of Americans on the high seas, most famously in “Moby-Dick,” but “Billy Budd” is about the English fighting the French during the Napoleonic wars, and Britten composed his work at a time when British modern opera was gaining global respect.