The Exterminating Angel

Luis Buñuel’s homonymous film becomes a quasi-mythical origin for The Exterminating Angel, the opera by Thomas Adès, a brilliant composer who will also conduct the performances at the Liceu. Adès transforms that unsettling universe into a fascinating sonic architecture: music filled with effects, unusual textures and subtle tensions that opens the doors to a ritual that slowly disintegrates.

The acclaimed production by Calixto Bieito for the Opéra national de Paris places the audience in a bourgeois and seemingly civilized space: an aristocratic salon that, after a refined dinner, reveals the fragility of its rituals. Where there should be meaning there is only repetition; where there should be freedom, an asphyxiating inertia accumulates. It is in this gap that the exterminating angel emerges: an invisible force that fractures order and exposes the sacrilegious nature of a society that has forgotten the true meaning of the sacred.

The guests, unable to leave the room, witness the dissolution of language, hierarchies and bonds. Elegance turns into animality; the salon into a corrupted altar in which desire and fear displace all etiquette. Adès’s music, full of surprising sonic gestures, amplifies the drama to its limit: a failed ritual, a liturgy disturbed by human self-sufficiency.

In Bieito’s vision there is also an underlying idea of redemption: when the guests accept their vulnerability and repeat the gesture that condemned them, the space dissolves and, with it, the trap. Freedom does not arrive by force, but through surrender. Only when the group embraces its fragility does the door finally open.

The Exterminating Angel imposes no moral; it offers a wound. It reminds us that what is truly sacrilegious is not blasphemy, but empty routine and self-complacency. And that only art, in its capacity to unsettle, can reopen the door to the sacred.