The Exterminating Angel

by Thomas Adès

seen at Covent Garden on 27 April 2017

Thomas Adès, conductor and co-librettist as well as composer, and Tom Cairns (librettist and director) created this opera, first seen at Salzburg last year, based on the film screenplay by Luis Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza for Buñuel's film El Ángel Exterminador. As this is a co-production with the Salzburg Festival (and The Met and the Royal Danish Opera) many of the original cast are reprising their roles. These include John Tomlinson, Iestyn Davies, Sophie Bevan, Anne Sofie von Otter, Christine Rice, Sally Matthews and Thomas Allen.

A thin gauze screen separates the audience from the stage before the opera starts, so that we can see the outlines of the set (designed by Hildegard Bechtler) looming - a curious wall of regular metallic protrusions on the left, and a massive plain proscenium which slowly moves closer and retreats and changes it angle slightly, all lit by roving greenish lights. Wandering in this rather desolate space are three sheep managed by two servants, and while the orchestra tunes there is a constantly tolling bell. Only when the opera itself is due to start does a senior servant arrive to order the shepherds to remove their charges, who would otherwise no doubt be a real distraction.

The Marqués and Marquesa de Nobile are hosting a dinner party after an opera performance by Leticia Maynar, their guest of honour; other guests include a conductor and his pianist wife, a doctor, a young widow and her brother, an affianced couple and four others. Perplexingly, the house servants apart from the butler are all keen to leave the house as soon as possible, and soon he is the only servant left, to the embarrassment of the hosts. However, this is by no means the worst of what happens - it soon becomes clear that no-one can leave the room in which they have convened, though it is never clear what is actually stopping them.

Social awkwardness turns to desperation and panic as the days pass, food and water run short, and tempers fray as the guests become more dishevelled and confused. One of them dies, feeling glad that he will not witness 'the extermination', and the affianced couple also contrive a suicide pact. There is temporary relief when the butler manages to break into a water pipe, and the sheep are slaughtered to provide a barbecue. Others attempt arcane rituals and there is a move to sacrifice the host as part of an incantation. Meanwhile, crowds outside cannot get in, and even the son of the widow is unable to enter.

Finally the singer realises that if the survivors repeat the conversation which led to her initially declining to sing for them, and she actually does sing, the spell might be broken; for reasons as inexplicable as the initial creation of a barrier, this works - although the final tableau in which the guests emerge into the crowd waiting outside implies that they are not so very secure after all.

The atmosphere of puzzling menace is well conveyed by the music and the action of the story. Inconsequential comments such as 'I won't eave this house till I hear her sing' take on a sinister meaning even though they are easily missed as typical social chatter. The whole scene of the arrival of the guests is repeated almost action for action and note for note, with no-one noticing the oddity, but it adds a surreal touch to prepare s for the greater strangeness of the entrapment. The guests all reply 'Enchanted' innocuously enough when they are introduced to one another, but the old-fashioned social nicety here carries an unintended sinister meaning.

Thomas Adès and Tom Cairns have handled the technical difficulties of keeping fourteen characters occupied both dramatically and musically with no exits and entrances to help them out. The set revolves at times, allowing us to focus on the dining table or the sofas, and at one stage to be outside the mansion when the crowd gathers to watch the spectacle, but the necessary idea of claustrophobic confinement is maintained throughout, particularly when it becomes clear that the small closet being used as a toilet has become unbearably noisome (not surprisingly, as it turns out to contain two bodies).

The music reflects the situation with cunning references to waltzes and chaconnes, figures which could in principal be endless, but which become oppressive when repeated for too long. There is also an ironic reference to Bach's 'Where sheep may safely graze' at the point when the sheep are about to be slaughtered. Adès specialises in high soprano lines, and in this opera it is the opera singer herself whose voice is pitched at the highest end of the scale that the human voice can manage, giving an unearthly piercing quality to otherwise clear diction. 

All in all, it is a remarkable ensemble piece in which notions of civility and civilisation are shown to be only skin deep (so to speak - we are very close to sacrificial murder at several points), and in which our usual expectations of the temporal flow of experience are uncomfortably confronted by the mysterious inability of the cast to act upon their desires.