A dozen-plus beautiful people attend a swank after-hours dinner party and find that they can’t leave. Such is the inexplicable premise of Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, released in 1962 and a fixture on lists of the greatest movies ever made. The opaque, curiously deadpan allegory got under the skin of the future wunderkind composer Thomas Adès, born in London in 1971, when he was still a little boy. It was only a matter of time before he turned the black-and-white celluloid fantasy into an opera, but not until he had wowed the world with the X-rated Powder Her Face (inspired by the escapades of Margaret Argyll, the tabloids’ “Dirty Duchess”) and again with The Tempest (after Shakespeare).
A dream deferred, Adès’s claustrophobic yet oceanic Exterminating Angel opened at the Salzburg Festival in 2016, transferred to the Royal Opera in London in April 2017, and thence, that autumn, to the Met, where it was filmed in live performance.
Some had fantasized that a rival treatment by Stephen Sondheim would be unveiled off Broadway at just about the same time, an irresistible proposition. But it was not to be. At his death in November 2021, Sondheim’s long-simmering Buñuel double bill—also incorporating his take on the filmmaker’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie—remained a work in progress. So, the finishing touches fell to the master’s colleagues David Ives, the playwright, and Joe Mantello, the director. Their performing edition of Sondheim’s swan song, entitled Here We Are, is now in previews at The Shed in Hudson Yards. With the chance to compare and contrast upon us at last, what better moment to bone up or brush up on the opera, as the case may be.
Orchestrally, Adès out-Wagners Wagner, expanding the symphonic palette with platoons of percussion, battalions of bells, a mosquitoes’ chorus of nano violins, and the woozy electronic contraption known as the ondes Martenot. His jagged, flamboyantly sculpted vocal lines demand the singers’ utmost, in wildly eclectic modes. Many struggle, but not Audrey Luna, a willowy coloratura soprano who tops out at a dog-whistle high A, said to be the highest note ever sung on the Met stage—we’re talking two full steps above the Queen of the Night’s high-wire high F’s above high C. The synthesis of words and music veers from the cataclysmic to the ethereal. Where Sondheim shakes perfect Martinis, Adès is brewing ayahuasca.
What to make of Buñuel’s motley crew? The mad doctor, the incestuous siblings, the needy dowager who drones on about a “quogmire” and her “praymonitions”? For that matter, what’s up with the three sheep and the grizzly bear seen roaming the premises? Buñuel never said. If Adès has found answers, he doesn’t tell, either, but the sound galaxy he has created lends them a mythic dimension that blows your mind.
The Exterminating Angel is one of dozens of video offerings available for streaming on the Metropolitan Opera Web-site
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL.He lives in Hawaii
