A SURREALIST SATIRE BY LUIS BUÑUEL BECOMES A GRIM OPERA

The Metropolitan Opera’s lone contemporary production this season is an adaptation of Buñuel’s 1962 film about the Spanish aristocracy, The Exterminating Angel.

John Sherer

A scene from Act I of Adès’s The Exterminating Angel (photo by Jonathan Tichler/Metropolitan Opera)

The Metropolitan Opera’s production of The Exterminating Angel, an adaptation of Luis Buñuel’s 1962 Surrealist film El ángel exterminador by British composer Thomas Adès, has been much anticipated, particularly as it is the only contemporary opera produced by the Met this season. There is talk that when the Met’s Music Director Designate Yannick Nézet-Séguin fully assumes his post in 2020, he will commit to programming more world premieres, not just the occasional North American or US premier, as has long been the Met’s practice. Those of us who value contemporary classical music hope this will prove to be more than a voice crying out in the wilderness. For now, we must content ourselves with the occasional new work while we hope for the wind to change.

In their libretto, Adès and his collaborator Tom Cairns follow the plot of Buñuel’s film closely: a group of aristocrats return from a night at the opera to a lavish mansion from which the servants have mostly fled, apparently without cause. The butler makes do serving dinner, and afterward the guests find themselves unable to leave the drawing room, again for reasons that are not explained. For several days thereafter, no one is able to leave or enter; as discomfort soon becomes danger (the drawing room isn’t stocked with food or water), the respectable façade of this polite society quickly dissolves, despite appeals to reason by Doctor Carlos Conde and the ever-gracious host, Edmundo de Nobile. Some guests do not survive. Eventually, those remaining are suddenly able to leave, but the reason is just as mysterious as the one that previously kept them confined. Ultimately, the entire community, including the citizens gathered outside, gets caught again in the same kind of inscrutable trap…………

Sally Matthews as Silvia de Ávila and Iestyn Davies as Francisco de Ávila in Adès’s The Exterminating Angel (photo by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)

The Exterminating Angel continues at the Metropolitan Opera (30 Lincoln Center Plaza, West 63rd Street and Columbus Avenue, Upper West Side, Manhattan) through November 21.

https://hyperallergic.com/409856/bunuel-exterminating-angel-metropolitan-opera/