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| The Exterminating Angel by Thomas Adès: the Dinner Party Begins |
A week or so ago, I went to the Economy Opera: The
Metropolitan Opera Live in HD at my local movies. The sound is great, the views unobstructed,
and I can sit back in a nice big recliner and eat popcorn too. The opera was a relatively new one by the
British composer Thomas Adès, entitled The
Exterminating Angel, replete with innovative instruments, including tiny
violins, and a really weird old electronic sliding keyboard called an ondes
martinot. One of the female leads, the
opera singer Letitia (Audrey Luna), sings the highest notes ever written in an
opera. I am no music critic, and so can't critically dissect the wonderfully
dissonant score, but I loved it.
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| Buñuel's El Angel Exterminador: The Dinner Party Begins |
The plot
was adapted from a 1962 film by Luís Buñuel, El Angel Exterminador, so I had another look at that as well, in my
own living room (no popcorn this time, though) courtesy of Amazon Prime.. The
opera plotline follows the body of the movie: a group of wealthy people go to a
swanky dinner party, and afterwards discover that they are unable to leave. They are stuck in their evening finery in an
elegant salon, for some reason trapped there for days, or weeks maybe. Over time, their behavior becomes less and
less civilized: they cut into a water pipe to get drinking water, then
slaughter three sheep who apparently usually live in the garden, and roast them
over chopped up furniture. One partygoer
dies of a stroke, and a pair of young lovers decide that since they love each
other so much, things can't be better on the outside, and so they commit suicide. All three are deposited in the bathroom.
In the
pre-cellphone era in which the story is set, nobody on the outside knows what's
happened, and they can no more enter the mansion than the dinner guests can
leave. Finally, one of the guests, that singer
named Letitia, figures out a way to break the spell, and they can all finally
go home--at least the ones still alive.
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| Luís Buñuel |
Buñuel's film,
with its black humor, is very characteristic of his very idiosyncratic style
and also reflects the issues of his time.
Though made in Mexico, the movie is very much a satire on Franco's Spain
at the period and Buñuel's favorite whipping boys there: Spain's Fascist
government,
the reactionary high bourgeois ruling class of the time, and the
Catholic church, the latter most clearly seen in the film's epilogue: all the
former partygoers go to church for a mass of thanks after their liberation,
only to find that they are trapped there a second time, along with the
officiating clergy and other churchgoers. Not only can no one leave again, but they are soon joined by a flock of sheep who manage to enter---welcome to the Hotel California!
In the
course of the interminable dinner party itself, Buñuel takes potshots at other
belief systems besides Catholicism: neither the two guests who are freemasons
or the ailing and eccentric Leonora who pulls chicken feet from her purse and tries uttering
Kabbalistic phrases in Hebrew are able to break the spell either. Leticia's solution of having the guests
repeat some moments at the beginning of the party and having everyone present
assume the exact positions they were in at the time breaks the cycle of
enchantment before everyone can completely degenerate into murderous insanity.
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| Leonora, Kabbala and Chicken Feet |
Living in
Spain in the mid 1960's, just a few years after Buñuel made his film, I can see
exactly where he was coming from. Born
in the Aragonese town of Calanda, in Spain, he had been one of the iconoclastic
bad boys of Surrealism in Paris during the 1920's (remember Chien Andalou and that eyeball)? He subsequently returned to Spain during the
years of the Republic between 1931 and 1936, but left in 1937, and was to spend
most of his life abroad with periods in the U.S., France and Mexico. His one
foray back to the Motherland was to make the weirdly wonderful Viridiana in 1961, but that didn't go
well for him there; after all, this movie is slyly anticlerical.
You can
take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the
boy. Buñuel always kept a finger in
Surrealism and against the reactionary forces of the country of his birth,
though he long survived Franco. In El
Angel Exterminador, sheep and a bear cub wander around the mansion, some
scenes seem inexplicably repeated (though this repetition becomes crucial for
the exit strategy), and the occasional hallucinatory vision flits through.
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| Thomas Adès |
In adapting
the film scenario to an opera, Thomas Adès and his librettist Tom Cairns have
basically remained true to Buñuel's film, but have not only made it more
modern, but also more timeless. The
seventeen characters trapped in Buñuel's salon are here reduced in number, and
the opera is an hour longer than the movie, which allows for more character
definition--you really get to know these people and begin to understand how
each of them reacts to their strange situation.
The use of those little fiddles and the ondes martinot also add to the
weird mood at strategic moments. Since it's an opera,
the three musician characters (Letitia, the singer, the conductor and Bianca the
pianist) are more fleshed out, but others are too. The doctor becomes the voice
of reason far more than in the film, and the Colonel is a vain, exaggerated
military man. The religious satire is muted, and the references to Freemasonry
and Kabbalistic mutterings disappear, but the chicken feet remain as a symbol
of civilized logic breaking down. By the end, the guests appear far more
disheveled too.
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| The Opera: Sheep's head |
But what
really makes the Opera both more contemporary and timeless is that Adès and
Cairns chose to eliminate the church epilogue.
The liberated guests stagger out to reunite with friends and family, but
we the viewers and listeners understand how close they became to degenerating
into anarchic savagery, and how thin the veneer of "civilization"
really is.
I am
neither a knowledgeable music critic nor a film critic with technological
knowhow to really dissect the opera and the film in a profound way. For that I have added some links from real
critical experts. I do think though that
I'm a good audience-goer with enough cultural savvy to enjoy both the film and
the opera as end products.
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A disclaimer: my pictures are filched from the Internet (as usual--most of the time). Some of the stills from the opera are from the British production. The opera itself premiered in Salzburg in 2016.
Buñuel's film can be rented for a modest fee from Amazon prime. It is also available on Youtube, as are clips from the opera. The Met should be encoring Adès's opera via their LIVE in HD series in local movie theaters somewhat later in the season.
The Wikipedia article on Luís Buñuel is thorough and well researched: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Buñuel
Roger Ebert wrote a wonderful review of the movie which can be read at: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-exterminating-angel-1962
Two Articles on the Opera that appeared in the New York Times are accessible at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/01/arts/music/exterminating-angel-metropolitan-opera-thomas-ades-bunuel.html?_r=0
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/arts/music/thomas-ades-exterminating-angel-metropolitan-opera.html
A trailer for the opera can be seen at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEyy1wsl1eY
Maybe one day the whole thing will be available on youtube. I hope so.
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