Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel
Opening Night U.S. Premiere
Metropolitan Opera
October 26, 2017
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| The shock of the shipwrecked souls Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
Opening night of The Exterminating Angel attracted a
younger, more stylish audience than your average evening at the Metropolitan
Opera. It was out of the ordinary for other reasons as well. Rather than the
usual gentle five-minute warning chimes one is accustomed to hear, as early as
seven to ten minutes before start time the loud clanging of more forceful
church bells rang not only in the front of the house, but they were still
ringing once you took your seat right up to curtain.
They were Luis Buñuel’s signature bells, the ones that punctuate
the movie of the same name on which the opera is based. Like good little
conformist lambs on our way to church, they herded us in and I noticed that
nearly everybody heeded the call more responsively than usual. There was much
less dilly-dallying at the bar on the Grand Tier than one would normally see.
With as long as five minutes to curtain, very few of us lingered in disbelief
in the front of the house wondering what had come over the nearly sold-out
crowd. It was just one of the surreal signs that this was not going to be your
typical night at the Met.
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| Like Buñuel's sheep, the public heeds the call of the bells Photo credit: Criterion Collection film still |
The last few years has seen a slew of operas adapted from movies: Breaking
the Waves, Brokeback Mountain (which was based on a short story), Cold
Mountain (which was adapted from a novel that was in turn inspired by
Homer’s Odyssey) just to name a few of the more prominent examples. Now
the great Thomas Adès has brought us The Exterminating Angel and
to great fanfare at that.
On the whole I found it an extremely stimulating experience. Because
it is a movie that I have held dear over all the many years that I have
pondered its complexity of meaning and its understated absurdist style, I
couldn’t help but think long and hard about the decisions the composer and his
collaborator Tom Cairns made in order to bring the film to the operatic
stage. On the surface of things it would seem that this adaptation is all too
slavish to the original script, but that is not true throughout.
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| Sputnik chandeliers rise and fall as the guests enter twice Photo credit: Ken Howard |
In the movie the entourage enters twice, as though the record skipped
or an additional take was added to the final cut of the film by accident. Then
the host gives the same toast twice once they sit down to dinner. The first
toast is warmly received and the guests are attentive. The second toast is
completely ignored by the guests who are immersed in their own inane
conversations and the host feels slighted. That’s when things start to go
downhill. The waiter drops a tray of hors d’oeuvres. One of the guests sits
down at the piano and plays a sonata by a fictitious composer named Paradisi
and they begin to realize that none of them have the desire to leave anymore.
Only once they repeat the scene at the piano will they, days later, be able to
break this horrid spell. So the movie is structured around a series of repetitions,
and another repetition is the only way out.
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| The charms of civility, while they last Photo credit: Criterion Collection film still |
Adès’s opera repeats the first and last of these ominous
repetitions. The house lights remain on and the Met’s signature Sputnik
chandeliers remain lowered during the initial scene, in which the awkward mass
exodus of most of the wait staff occurs and the entourage
of elite guests enter twice. The house lights dim and the
chandeliers above the audience also raise a second time. This was so disorienting that the
elderly women sitting behind and beside me all erupted into discombobulated
whispers of disarray: “Did they make a mistake?” “What happened?” “Was that in
the score or was there a technical error?” I’ve never heard so much live
commentary from the crowd that usually shushes anyone who makes a peep, opens a
candy or coughs during a performance.
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| Spin off conversations create a chaotic mess in the score Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
Adès’s orchestration is largely atmospheric. It only lends
something to the characterization of the various personalities stuck in the
house at intervals, and hardly at all in the first act. When it comes to the
whacked out sound effects that heighten the sense of chaos, Adès has definitely
got it down. However, I can’t help but think that his skill in this regard
would be even more effectively deployed if he did so more sparingly, particularly
in the initial movements of the opera. If he turned to a whacked out and
chaotic soundscape in a more directed way it could be put more expressive ends
as opposed to using it as the baseline from which everything else departs.
The mystery of the film lies in part in the gradual (then sudden)
deterioration of this group of society’s elite and their genteel haute
bourgeois ways. They need to be depicted as refined before they get totally
kooky. If they are a bunch of crazies from the get-go then they really don’t
have very far to fall.
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| Leonora fawns over her adored doctor Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
Mezzo-soprano Alice Coote brought a nutty co-dependency to
her portrayal of Leonora Palma, who is lustfully absorbed in the salvific
presence of her doctor, Carlos Conde, sung by bass Sir John Tomlinson.
Doctor Conde’s lines were composed to be delivered almost always in an overly belabored
fashion, all… drawn… out… slow.... In the movie the doctor is the grounding
voice of reason, who more often than not serves to console and calm the group
when they get worked up.
Here Doctor Carlos Conde has been reduced to a slightly loony bon
vivant who is given to repeating the same joke, very slowly, as if that would
put us off the scent. His recurring joke is one that conflates death and
baldness in some kind of metonymy. It must be because when the body decays all
that is left is a bald skeleton, no skin, no hair. But that’s not what happens
immediately. It was made twice by the doctor, both times musically emphasized,
neither of them particularly funny. Nor was this nonsense even present in the
original.
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| The doctor is reduced to a man possessed Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
Then the joke about the first man to take off his tuxedo jacket
being from the United States was completely buried in the music and the
delivery was burdened in a different way. The libretto awkwardly adds the
remark that “they have different customs there,” which renders wordy what would otherwise be the punch line, especially played to an
audience in America. But instead the score muddles it into near
incomprehension. Another missed opportunity.
Which makes me think (time and again) that we are dealing with yet
another composer who struggles not only with comic timing but with a sense of
humor in music at all. And that is saying a lot. Remember this is the man whose
youthful Powder Her Face featured an “aria” for soprano and chamber
orchestra that simulated the singer performing fellatio. So that simply cannot be the case.
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| Lucía de Nobile holds forth on her practical jokes Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
Soprano Amanda Echalaz as Lucía de Nobile, the hostess with
the mostest for the evening, cast one of the first spells over the dinner
party. In the “Ragoût Aria” she sings during her first course prank, the musical
accompaniment is that of an unsettling deconstructed waltz, in the manner of
Ravel’s La Valse. A variety of waltz rhythms pop up over the course of
the opera, which the composer calls the quintessential “invitation to stay”
music. A waltz entices the listener not to leave the party, but to stay, to
dance another tune, to take another turn on the dance floor. And so what better
music to include in a piece that is literally about the impossibility of
leaving.
One of the staging decisions that I found disappointing was the
flash of lightning that strikes the rear of the stage upon one of their early
attempts to leave the salon, as though some external force is compelling them
to stay. It’s more effective and mysterious if the conceit is subtle and
remains on the psychological level. Heightening the mystery simply with the
eerie sound of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument, would have
been more than enough to create the effect and get the idea across.
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| The guests freshen up after their first night together Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
Another detail that confused all of the older women in my section
was the addition of a bathroom. The closet seemed to contain not only a mirror
but a sink and maybe even a toilet. It was unclear why this kind of realism was
necessary when the guests go off to “freshen up” after their first night
together. My section erupted in whispers when Julio and Raúl work to burst a
water main in the floor in the beginning of Act III. “Wasn’t there a bathroom
behind that one door before,” the women around me snickered.
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| The men manage to burst a water main Photo credit: Clive Barda |
Having revisited the movie before attending the opera, I was
expecting the opera to take advantage of the wonderful conversational style of
the film. The group is constantly broken up into little groups making small
talk and saying crazy, symbolic, non-sequitur and important things. It seems
like all this would be amazing fodder for a feast of duets and trios and
quartets that explore a variety of emotions and ideas and social commentary and
symbolism and subtlety (which is not necessarily what opera is known for unless
it is emotional – those broad broad strokes of emotion that the greatest operas
give us).
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| Mise en abyme: the self-involved lovers lock themselves in a closet Photo credit: Clive Barda |
Some of the strongest moments in the opera fall into this
category, but only in the last third of the show, namely the hallucinations and
the love scene in the closet. “Bouquets of lust, I’ll make from your veins,”
sang soprano Sophie Bevan and tenor David Portillo as the two
star-crossed lovers Beatriz and Eduardo, who in the movie are to be married in
a matter of days. Their big time-stopping love duet in the closet featured a
brilliant musical conceit. It is driven by a fugue structure. Her voice chases
his until they consume each other. Their two lines become one, musically, vocally,
sensuously. It is one of the most transcendent moments in the opera.
At first she is like the nymph Echo repeating the words of her
beloved Narcissus; only this Echo gets what she wants, along with the
dissolution and death she earns in the myth. Narcissus is also a fitting
reference for Eduardo (if not most of the rest of the shipwrecked souls in the
mansion). So taken is he with himself and his lover that they want to sink
farther from the world into their own solipsistic solitude rather than escape
back out into the public sphere that most of the party seems to be all too eager
to avoid.
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| Some of the women turn to black magic and sorcery Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
The hallucinations segment of the final act of the opera is full
of surprises and it is the moment when the score settles down musically. One of
the guests has a dream vision of an almost demonic insect looking dancer. She
writhes as though possessed to the sound of a frenetic Spanish guitar. The
projected image of an amputated hand makes its way hauntingly across the stage
and Señor Alberto Roc levitates in a very dreamlike way across the stage to
make some kind of sexual advance on a sleeping Leticia.
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| How low will they go? Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
In fact, the descent is deeper here. The party sinks even further
into disarray than they do in the movie. So much so that the dashing baritone Rod
Gilfry ends up in his skivvies relatively early on. And somehow everybody
gets visibly soiled in ways that aren’t apparent in the black and white film.
We actually see them eat the sacrificial lamb, whereas in the movie they only
set about prepping it for slaughter.
At this point, soprano Sally Matthews, in the role of
Silvia de Ávila, enters into her own headspace and sings an utterly moving ode
to her son. Whether she too is hallucinating or has just lost it all together
is unclear. But in any case she cradles the severed head of one of the lambs in
her arms as if it were her beloved son, whom we actually see in the crowd scene
at about this time. Outside on the street he is goaded to attempt to breach the
home in which his mother is held captive. The music on the outside crackles
with a different kind of chaos punctuated by the lively sound of castanets.
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| Silvia cradles a carcass while she pines for her son Photo credit: Ken Howard |
Two of the men in the movie are initiates in the Free Masons.
After having identified each other early in the film, they later attempt to use
one of the secret mantras to tame the dangerous bear that prowls just beyond
the threshold of their prison. The opera drops the Masonic material, and
instead adds a more enigmatic Jewish messianic subtext. I’m still trying to
wrap my mind around the nature of its Zionist references. In the early depths
of their collective despair, mezzo-soprano Christine Rice, in the role
of the chanteuse Blanca Delgado, wistfully croons a version of an old Ladino
Jewish folk tune, “Over the sea, show me the way home….” Hers is a melancholic
moment, a longing for a time now lost.
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| A ferocious bear lurks just across the threshold Photo credit: Ken Howard |
Soprano Audrey Luna played the role of Leticia Maynar, the
guest of honor of the evening since she is the one who sang Lucia di
Lammermoor that very night prior to their little post-opera reception.
Ironically the star singer of the characters is the one who has the most
trouble articulating. Her vocal lines are all written excruciatingly high in
awkwardly staccato rhythms so that she kind of hiccups them out, when she isn’t
shrill and screeching and sounding like a ditzy dunce.
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| Leticia goes into a mystic trance Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
Letiticia is the one who has the illumination to reenact the
earlier recital portion of their first evening together, before they realized
they were stuck. In the context of the opera, it seems to be suggested that
only by the power of music are they able to break the spell. And then once they
leave the premises, she is the one who sings a sort of apocalyptic hymn of
sorts, the setting of an early twelfth-century text by Yehudah Halevi. After
invoking Zion, she sings, “Save me from eternal death, shine eternal light” or
something to that effect.
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| The guests finally stagger out of captivity Photo credit: Ken Howard |
They are greeted by the crowds on the street dressed in stylish,
brightly colored 1960s street clothes, who have been waiting for the elite
coterie to re-emerge from the house. The respective crowds mingle and mix to
much rejoicing, but the celebration does not last long.
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| They are greeted by the crowds on the street Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
It is then Leticia again who cuts the zombie-like festivities
short and proceeds to herd them all back across the threshold of another
building, into the ark of safety and salvation of which she ominously sings,
while they attempt to avoid the military police on the street. “Save me from
eternal death, shine eternal light,” she drones on. In Buñuel’s vision, both
the elite parlor, in the beginning, and the nave of the church, in the end, are
havens of disengagement from the political world.
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| Leticia herds them back into the ark of salvation with her apocalyptic hymn Photo credit: Monika Rittershaus |
As in the movie, church bells – the same ones that beckoned us into
the theater in the beginning – resound again all around us, only this time the
elite and the proletariat retreat together from the public sphere with Leticia
as their rather spooked pastor. And then what? We are perhaps to understand
that a unique cocktail of fear and complacency has gotten the best of them all,
from the upper echelon to the lower. A slightly more inclusive group attempts
to save themselves by withdrawing from the ravages of public life, and in the
meantime the wild world outside goes to pot.
As expected, Adès gave us a lot to think about and a very tough
pill to swallow, if this is indeed what he is after. But I would see it again in a
heartbeat.
– Lui
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| Dinner is served Photo credit: Ken Howard |
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| Preparation for the slaughter Photo credit: Criterion Collection |
