In Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, the ‘exterminating angel’ of the title is a mystery illness. A debilitating virus — much worse even than man flu — that attacks the social immune system and shuts down your ability to act, to think, to be. It prevents you from remembering how to behave at middle-class dinner parties. You arrive at a friend’s house twice. You forget to leave. Open doors become terrifying, impassable geometric objects. Your handbag contains not keys but feathers and chicken legs. Occasionally it kills.
The bug is Buñuel’s metaphor for a society gripped by cowardice. Composers can catch it. Not Thomas Adès, though. There is bravery (insanity?) in him even attempting to adapt Buñuel’s pitch-perfect confection of social satire and surrealism. Not just because lightning rarely strikes twice (name me another adaptation of a masterpiece that is also a masterpiece) but also because the central theme is inertia. And composing an opera about inertia is a bit like dedicating a restaurant to the inedible, or a zoo to the stuffed.
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