Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel vs. Ades Opera

[lennygoran]

Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel vs. Ades Opera


We finally got to see the movie and for us we preferred the Ades opera over Buñuel’s surrealist movie-we saw the opera from the Met both live and HD style and I recently watched it again from Met On Demand-for me a superb opera experience. I see there's a new production of it available on Medici-a Calixto Bieito production-I'm skeptical of what he does but probably will give it a try at some point. Regards, Len

A Review that compares the works:

An Explosive Opera of “The Exterminating Angel”
In Salzburg, Thomas Adès gives Luis Buñuel’s cool, eerie film from 1962 a new, tragic volatility.

By Alex Ross
August 15, 2016


The British composer Thomas Adès is as compelling as any contemporary practitioner of his art because he is, first and foremost, a virtuoso of extremes. He is a refined technician, with a skilled performer’s reverence for tradition, yet he has no fear of unleashing brutal sounds on the edge of chaos. Although he makes liberal use of tonal harmony—including opulent, late-Romantic gestures, for which mainstream audiences profess to be starved—he subjects that material to shattering pressure. He conjures both the vanished past and the ephemeral present: waltzes in a crumbling ballroom, pounding beats in a pop arena. Like Alban Berg, the twentieth-century master whom he most resembles, he pushes ambiguity to the point of explosive crisis.

Adès, who is now forty-five, has, not surprisingly, proved to be a potent composer of music theatre. His first opera, “Powder Her Face,” appeared in 1995 and has had more than forty productions around the world, including, most recently, a staging by West Edge Opera, the innovative Oakland company. What begins as a brittle, noirish satire—the central figure is the Duchess of Argyll, whose love life created a scandal in nineteen-sixties Britain—acquires weight and pathos as the heroine maintains hauteur in the face of degradation. Adès’s second opera, “The Tempest,” had its première at the Royal Opera House, in 2004, and later went to the Met. It follows an opposing trajectory, from an airy, luminous sphere to visceral evocations of Prospero’s “rough magic.”

Never have Adès’s extremes collided more spectacularly than in “The Exterminating Angel,” his new opera, which had its first performance on July 28th, at the Salzburg Festival. The libretto—by the director Tom Cairns, working with the composer—is based on the great 1962 film, by Luis Buñuel, about a group of high-bourgeois characters who find themselves mysteriously unable to leave a party at a mansion. Adès had been eying the subject for many years, not least because the Dadaist and Surrealist tradition with which Buñuel is associated is a family inheritance: Adès’s mother, Dawn, is a scholar of Dali and Duchamp.

This composer is, however, more of an Expressionist than a Surrealist, and in his hands Buñuel’s cool, eerie scenario takes on a tragic volatility. To some extent, he follows the filmmaker in dissecting the pretensions of the aristocratic hosts and their guests: the opera singer and her conductor, the rational doctor and his delirious patient, the young couple lost in self-indulgent love, and the rest. The servants, by contrast, sense that trouble is near and flee the scene. Yet the curse that falls on the house transcends class. A crucial moment comes in Act II, when Julio, the butler, who failed to leave with the others, enters the zone of confinement. A quadruple-forte C-sharp-minor upheaval in the orchestra ensues, with the brass crying doom in falling intervals. The music points to a more universal anguish: the feeling of watching oneself make an irreversible mistake.

“The Exterminating Angel” is a huge, hyper-complex creation, one that will not travel as easily as Adès’s previous operas. There are twenty-two singing roles, including eight that could be classified as principals. Some of the vocal writing borders on the outlandish; the part for Leticia, the opera singer, often goes up to high E and F. The orchestra calls for an array of bells, a vast battery of percussion, an ondes martenot (the early electronic instrument beloved of Messiaen), a solo guitar, and eight miniature violins (at one-thirty-second size). The layering of harmony, timbre, and rhythm is intimidatingly dense.



At the same time, the score has a purposeful, systematic energy. From the outset of his career, Adès has favored cycles of intervals that expand and contract with organic logic. For example, the motif for Julio’s crossing of the threshold contains a fifth, a tritone, a fourth, and a tritone—intervals that narrow and then widen again. (A similar pattern appears in the first minutes of the opera, as a servant sings, “I wish I didn’t have to leave.”) As in Berg’s twelve-tone music, such operations yield a phantom tonality that never stays fixed. The Adès orchestra, meanwhile, rivals the Buñuel camera in imagistic power. The ondes martenot plays a pivotal role, serving to signal the nameless force that ensnares the guests. When Julio takes his fatal step, the instrument swoops to the bottom of its range—“as if swallowing the orchestra,” the score says.

The past arises in kaleidoscopic flashes, as it does in so many Adès works. Early in the guests’ captivity, when their inability to leave seems more absurd than abject, waltz rhythms proliferate, variously recalling classic Johann Strauss, the boozy dances of “Der Rosenkavalier,” and the deconstructed waltzes of Ravel and Stravinsky. Eduardo and Beatriz—the young lovers, who commit suicide rather than stay at the party for eternity—are given courtly, limpid music of quasi-Baroque character. Drumming and dance-band music evoke the cityscape outside. In the heaviest, most doom-laden passages, the harmony gravitates toward Wagner, or, perhaps, toward some forgotten but inspired Wagner follower. Throughout, Adès pulls off the Stravinskyan feat of making prior styles sound like premonitions of his own.

Any sense of playfulness dissipates long before the end of the opera, which, even more than the film, tilts toward the apocalyptic. In Buñuel, the guests liberate themselves by repeating dialogue from the onset of the crisis, only for a new confinement to begin, this time in church. In Adès, liberation from the mansion is achieved not only by a ritual of repetition but also through a visionary aria for Leticia—a harshly radiant setting of a twelfth-century text by the Spanish Jewish philosopher and poet Yehuda Halevi, expressing a longing for a lost homeland. When the spell of immobility resumes, seraphic harmonies give way to a colossal, demonic setting of fragments of the Libera Me from the Requiem Mass, with bells ringing anarchic changes. On this note of mystical dread the opera closes, no exit in sight.

Cairns directed the début production, at the Haus für Mozart; Hildegard Bechtler designed the sets and costumes. The mansion and its denizens were vividly rendered, but even on one of Salzburg’s smaller stages the action was at times obscure. Not until halfway through the first act could one differentiate among the characters. The dénouement, involving a mobile proscenium arch, was uncertain in effect. Refinements will be welcome as the opera travels onward—to the Royal Opera House next season, and to the Met in the fall of 2017.

On opening night, the singers came as close to mastering their parts as could be expected of any group of mortals. Particularly notable were the ageless bass John Tomlinson, formidable as the doctor; Anne Sofie von Otter, hypnotically unstable as his stricken patient; and Charles Workman, silken and a touch sinister as the male host. The most heroic performance was delivered by the coloratura soprano Audrey Luna, as Leticia. Her gleaming, yearning tone in the climactic aria provided a short-lived epiphany before darkness closed in again. Cynthia Millar’s playing of the ondes was so acutely expressive that she might have taken a bow with the singers. The Vienna Radio Symphony, under the direction of the composer, achieved furious precision.

Buñuel resisted efforts to articulate the meaning of “The Exterminating Angel.” The demand for explanations, he once complained, was itself a symptom of a bourgeois mentality. Adès has been more forthcoming in his comments on the opera. He defines the destroying angel as “an absence of will, of purpose,” and says, “The feeling that the door is open but we don’t go through it is with us all the time.” An instant of inaction brings about the “complete breakdown of society . . . and ultimately the end of the world.” It’s a lesson worth pondering at an ominous historical moment. ♦