Three Views of "The Exterminating Angel"

First View: A Night at the Opera, November 3, 2017

My wife and I wanted to attend a performance of Adès’s latest opera at the Met, since we enjoyed a performance of his Tempest a few years ago.  It took some doing.  We left from Baltimore very early on the 3^rd, and traveled by bus to the city.  We walked all day, visited the other Met, the museum, and were a bit tired by the time of the performance.

Worse, I couldn’t read the program due to the dim light in the opera house before the performance began.  Worse again: Once the music started, I couldn’t obtain the subtitles, which in the Met are electronically transferred to the railing in front of one’s seat at the touch of a button.  Eventually, I located the German subtitles, then the Spanish, and finally, the English.  Maybe I need stronger glasses; I couldn’t read the subtitles quickly enough, especially those in German or Spanish.

I hadn’t read much about the opera, so there was no choice but to sit back and concentrate on the music.

I confess that before the first intermission, I was sometimes at the point of dozing off, not as a reaction to the music, which is anything but boring, but due to my exhaustion.

By the end of the opera, I was wide awake.  The music was wonderful!  Adès is a major composer, no doubt about that.

The only reservation I had was regarding the symbolism; a bit too heavy, I thought, and the staging a bit too static.  Did we really need to see all those sheep and listen to all those church bells at the befgnning, or the appearance of a bear who made a brief appearance later on?    

Second View:  The Film 11/6/2018

We wanted to see Biñuel’s movie before we saw the opera, but, due to all our activities, this was not possible.  Just as well, since this would have interfered with a performance that exercised our eyes and ears only, without reference to memory.

We hadn’t seen the film before; that it is considered a classic we knew, and were delighted to discover why this is so.  It is a surreal film, heavy on symbolism; the director, correctly I think, didn’t provide an explanation of the many ambiguities. Biñuel stated that he would leave the interpretation up to the spectator.  I accepted the fifty-five year old invitation.

This stunningly photographed black-and-white film portrays a dinner party at a mansion of an upper-class family in a Spanish-speaking country, possibly Franco’s Spain.  (If that were so, I thought, why are they all speaking with Latin American accents?  I later discovered that the everything was filmed in Mexico.  Franco was still very much in power in Spain at the time). 

The servants unexpectedly leave before the party begins.  After the sumptuous meal, the guests for some reason are unable to leave.  After a few days, all aristocratic niceties are left behind; the group degenerates into a bunch of selfish, increasingly desperate individuals, each fighting ruthlessly for his or her own survival.  Need has removed the masks from the upper-class faces, revealing monsters behind them. At one point, a bear, perhaps representing the uncivilized id, the beast within, runs loose among them.

Eventually, a woman reenacts where she was and what she said before all the trouble began.  The others follow her example, which somehow enables them to leave.  They subsequently attend a Te Deum mass to give thanks to God for their mysterious escape.  The three officiating priests, perhaps representing the Trinity, discover that they, like everyone else in the church, are unable to leave its confines.

We then catch a glimpse of military police shooting at demonstrators outside. In the final scene, a large herd of sheep, shepherdless, scurries into the church and disappears.

How did I try to make sense of this brilliant film?  I thought of the Buddhist parable of the burning house—Buddha exhorts the ignorant inhabitants who dwell safely within the walls of  delusion to exit the deceptively comfortable house before it’s too late.  (In Biñuel's; film, the house isn’t burning; it is, however, coming apart and is no longer able to provide a safe environment. In my interpretation, the aristocrats were technically able to leave at any time; their comfortable delusions are what prevents them).

The elites are unable to get by without the working-class that serves them.  On their own, they deteriorate into helpless degenerates.  They live in a bubble in which they will asphyxiate without the constant supply of oxygen which workers provide.

The Church is a larger bubble into which the smaller aristocratic one is subsumed. Common folk in the form of sheep, exposed to the chaos outside, still rush into the church for salvation and refuge, relief which the Church cannot ultimately provide.

Biñuel is asking us to come out of our bubbles and to confront the world as it is.  The political situation of the world in the film has degenerated into fascism and violence, since the people of all classes have abdicated their responsibilities for building a just society.

Third View: Live Broadcast at a Local Theater. November 18, 2017

One gets a very different opinion of an opera when one attends a live-streamed performance at a movie theater.  This opera,  an ambiguous tragedy, but a tragedy nevertheless, benefits from observation of the singers/actors up-close. (At the Met, which was the case on November 3rd, our seats are usually in the Family Circle; the acoustics are great, but it's too high up to make out the faces of the singers).  In addition, the fact that this is an ensemble piece, with a dozen or so major roles, in which the music underlies the action rather than carrying it via melody and lyrical stretches, make seeing the drama from an intimacy of a small theater even more important.  You can sit back and enjoy the music of Fidelio, for instance; this opera demands that the audience pay close attention to the characters.

This is in one sense an advantage, and in another, a disadvantage.  As the opera began, I felt the vocal writing to be rather dry and declarative, while the music remained in a supporting role.  But as the drama progressed, I forgot about this and was completely absorbed in the action.  The libretto is for the most part, excellent.

Both Sartre and Kafka are pertinent here.  In Sartre’s Huis Clos/No Exit, the characters are condemned to a hell of their own making.  In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a strange thing indeed happens, Gregor Samsa wakes up from uneasy sleep to find himself transformed into an insect.  In both play and short story, the supernatural is not emphasized.  Samsa becomes an insect because he always thought of himself as being sub-human; the characters in No Exit are there because of choices they had made in life.  In other words, character drives the action in both instances. Once Samsa's transformation is over, the story proceeds in a naturalistic fashion; in Sartre's play, hell is hell on earth.

The opera, in contrast, emphasizes the supernatural element. Adès utilizes the ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument used in horror films for years, to create a spooky atmosphere. (The screeching sounds of tiny violins added to the spookiness as well). Biñuel saw no need to emphasize the macabre. The elites are trapped in the hell of their own making, as in Sartre’s play; the exterminating angel, the way I see it, is inside themselves. I think the Twilight Zone atmosphere of the opera detracts from the power of the plot, which, surreal and symbolic as it is, is about real people in the real world nevertheless.

The politics of Biñuel are also missing in the opera; the film has a lot to do with people living in their own bubbles, which enables fascists to take over the outside world.  Biñuel’s film has a marked anti-elite bias.  I remember reading a book by the animal-loving French pianist Hélène Grimaud.  She stated that hours before the allied bombing of Freiburg, Germany, in World War ll, the animals knew something was up and began to panic.  In both film and opera, the servants share the same prescience; they inexplicably flee before the dinner party begins. Like Grimaud's animals, they seem to have had a sixth sense of impending disaster.

Both opera and film are peppered with a mockery of upper-class snobbery.  For instance, long after the situation has devolved into desperate circumstances, in which the inner beasts of the guests become manifest, one of the characters, Francisco, complains that the coffee is accompanied by teaspoons, not coffee spoons.  How can one expect an aristocrat to drink a cup of coffee without coffee spoons?  He would look like, horrors! a worker, a peasant.  Later on, after they slaughter and cook up sheep that have wandered in from the garden, one of the characters complains that the meat needed salt—He’s no cave man, he’s no worker; though he's starving, his tastes are still refined!

The film’s ending is very different. When the guests escape by reenacting their initial actions at the supper—which for me suggests that people can do things differently and turn their lives  around—they attend, as stated previously, a Te Deum at the local church.  Then the entire congregation discovers it can’s exit, while fascist police shoot into the crowds outside.

In the opera, Leticia, the opera singer, sings an aria of faith and thinking about others instead of oneself, which breaks the spell of The Exterminating Angel—at least for a while. Everyone is reunited outside the mansion, but Leticia alone looks anxious.  Perhaps she knows, as the program stated, that “Their freedom will not last long.”  But, as I interpret Biñuel, it will be the internal beatings of their hearts—their characters—and not the spooky external sounds of the ondes Martenot that will imprison them once again.

All the singers were first-rate.  The tessitura of the vocal writing is very high; for instance, Audrey Luna, who sang the role of Leticia, hit the highest notes in Met history.  The high range of the vocal writing gave the opera an occasional hysterical quality, an effect, no doubt, that was deliberate.  There were some quite lovely lyrical moments, but not many.  The drama was what was most important in the composer's mind, a strategy that was, for the most part, successful.  The orchestration was quite impressive.

I enjoyed the opera very much. Whether the opera is a masterwork or not, time will tell.  The fact that the majority, if the informal poll I took while listening to the audience members as they exited is valid, seemed to dislike it doesn’t mean much.  The premiere of La Traviata, was, after all, a fiasco. I recall reading what the Austrian Emperor said to Mozart after the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro, arguably the best opera of them all:  “So many notes, Herr Mozart!”  “Yes, Your Majesty, but not one too many.”