Almost eight years after its 2016 premiere at the Salzburg Festival, Thomas Adès’ surreal opera The Exterminating Angel made its French debut on that most surreal of days: February 29. Also, funnily, partway through the Lenten season. Based on the 1962 Luis Buñuel film of the same name, the opera follows a similar trajectory: guests enter a party, then slowly find out they can’t leave.
Like the film, The Exterminating Angel is an ensemble piece, with a cast of fifteen. central characters, as well as bit parts of maids, waiters, and servants, who converge at a mansion after a performance of Lucia di Lammermoor. The most prominent players include the aristocrat hosts Edmundo and Lucia, played by the powerful tenor Nicky Spence and the commanding soprano Jacquelyn Stucker; the lovers Eduardo and Beatriz, sung with verismo intensity by the tenor Filipe Manu and the soprano Amina Edris; Doctor Conde, portrayed with spiraling madness by the bass Clive Bayley; Leonora, the doctor’s disintegrating patient, performed with a desolate vulnerability by the contralto Hilary Summers; and the most notorious part of all, Leticia, sung by the coloratura Gloria Tronel, who dispatches the opening high A and hovers within the role’s stratospheric tessitura with grace. Rounding out the cast is one last unnamed and off-stage character of even greater importance, but more on that later.
Organizing such an unwieldy cast is no easy task, especially considering its eventual dramatic disintegration into total chaos. The director, Calixto Bieito, with help from his set designer Anna-Sofia Kirsch, situates the action within a classical-style drawing room. Curtains open to a white-domed interior with a long candlelit table surrounded by chairs, séance-like. Servants wheel away an enormous crystal chandelier and harsh overhead lighting overpowers the quaint flames, the contemporary horror of fluorescents rearing its head. Stark light floods the red Louis XVI chairs, candelabra, pianos, decorative molding, and oversized double doors, creating an effect strikingly similar to that of President Macron’s 2020 Elysée Palace renovation, a not-quite-welcome modern intrusion.
Bieito, a Spaniard, has frequently professed his love for another son of Spain, the artist Francisco Goya. Goya, Carlos IV’s court painter, was a keen observer of mankind’s dissolution, driven mad by seeing too far and hearing too much. Bieito’s Angel owes much to the director’s Goya-imprinted mind. Increasingly brutal encounters between trapped guests evoke the artist’s Los disparates (1815–23) and Los caprichos (1799) etchings, in which small groupings enact the unspeakable: fornication, defecation, madness, violence, suicide, rape, et cetera. One moment sees a handful of men raise an entranced Leticia over their heads in an image borrowed directly from Los caprichos No. 61, “Volaverunt.” Any moment from the opera looks like Los disparates No. 14, “Disparate de carnaval.”Beito’s addition of intra-guest cannibalism recalls a Goya signature, famous from Saturn Devouring his Son (1819–23), but also the concern of his 1800–08 series Caníbales.
The connection between high society and apocalyptic absurdity is, as it often is in Goya’s oeuvre, at the center of The Exterminating Angel. Buñuel’s film is often read as social commentary about the death of the bourgeoisie, or the self-defeating nature of the bourgeoisie, or the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, or the violence of the bourgeoisie, or the fill-in-the-blank-political-critique of the bourgeoisie. The film might be religious, or not; guests might be supernaturally trapped, or not. It’s a series of questions that don’t need answers because they’re not quite questions in the first place, just propositions.
Adès’s Exterminating Angel is a more severe creation. The characters are no longer just upper-class arts patrons and are therefore even closer in spirit to the audience. Adès’s sadism is technically relegated to just the opera attendees onstage, but the brutality of his score spares no operatic aficionado. Again, think of Goya—specifically the title Los caprichos No. 43: “The dream of reason produces monsters.” The score, conducted on March 13 by Robert Houssart but led by Adès himself in the first four performances, is an unintelligible array of cacophonic blasts: a waltz, a Spanish melody, a bel canto line, a flamenco guitar, a military march, Wagner-caliber brass, the drums of war. The moment it starts sounding familiar, the music switches to something else, a constantly shapeshifting creature. And yet, despite the score’s aggression, its impenetrable sounds, there’s something else in the pit still more mystifying and remote: the aforementioned final character, an instrument: an ondes Martenot, the Exterminating Angel itself.
The cellist Maurice Martenot created this electric instrument in 1928 as an attempt to join the tonal quality of a cello to the soundwaves he experimented with as a military radio operator during World War I. The Martenot later became a favored instrument of the composer Olivier Messiaen, who frequently wrote one into his religious compositions, bestowing it a holy glow. In Exterminating Angel, the Martenot retains its halo, but it’s that of Apollyon, Azrael, Samael. Born of war and possessing an uncanny resemblance to the human voice, the Martenot is the titular angel itself. It is both separate from and the cause of the action, a cat toying with helpless prey. It duets with singers, mirrors their voices, mocks them. At one point it mimics birdsong (another Messiaen-istic touch), giving the desperate attendees false hope of returning to the world. Occasionally it hides within the orchestra, imitating a violin, brass, or its illegitimate father, the cello, before exploding into unnatural tones and revealing its inhuman origins. Sometimes it laughs.
“Life is funny and strange,” repeats the doomed Eduardo, a line lifted from the original film. Adès Angel remains very funny, but is less strange than cruel. The opera ends with the attendees finally breaking out of the room to find themselves trapped within the stage’s proscenium, out of limbo and into hell. As the party guests chant the “Libera me” and the stage bears in ever closer, you sense the next victim is you—because it is. As Isaiah 45:7 reminds us, “I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”