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(Interview and synopsis below: courtesy of Salzburg Festival. I shall be reviewing the final performance in the run on 8 August. Following the 28 July premiere, there will also be performances on 1 and 5 August.)
Thomas Adès, when did you first encounter Buñuel’s
film El
ángel exterminador, and how long have you been playing with the idea of
using it as the basis for an opera?
Thomas
Adès: The
idea goes back at least fifteen years, to a time before I began to compose The
Tempest. I saw the film when I was thirteen or fourteen, when I think there
was a Buñuel season on the BBC. My mother is a historian of art, especially
Surrealist art, with Dalì and Buñuel particularly being part of her work, and
so I encountered these things early on. I was strongly attracted to Buñuel’s
films. Possibly at that age I didn’t like El ángel exterminador – shot
in black and white and rather dry – as much as the more colourful, more
‘Pythonesque’ ones, like Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie or Le
Fantôme de la liberté (still probably my favourite), but the film stayed
with me to the point of obsession. When these ideas to write an opera come to
me, it’s not so much a conscious thing – the process is more like a seed that
gets dispersed in the wind and either lands where it can grow or doesn’t; a
sort of germination process.
But
at some point you must have said to yourself: this film could make a good
opera. Where does its potential for this lie? What makes it so suited to being
translated into the medium of music or musical theatre?
Thomas
Adès: In
a way, El ángel exterminador is an operatic story in a very pure form,
because every opera is about getting out of a particular situation. But in
Buñuel’s film, whatever the mechanism is that gets us from A to B, it’s
switched off: the guests know that they should go home – they have children who
are waiting for them, things to do, etc. – but they don’t go. Even when they
are starving and in despair, they’re incapable of doing so, although the doors
are open. When you’re writing an opera, the composer’s job is to write music
that gets you from moment A to moment B to moment C – as it were from one room
into another room into another, eventually arriving at a destination. Every
piece of music is looking for an exit, and the fun thing in this opera
is that the characters are looking for an exit the whole time but keep coming
back into the same room, though right at the end they do find it, at least
temporarily.
The
film is very musical in another way, too, because there’s an underground river
of meaning which is not exactly what the people are saying. This river links
the spoken lines and runs through the entire situation, but only occasionally
surfaces. So the film has an unspoken subtext all the way through.
Tom Cairns: As is the case with all
Buñuel’s later films, El ángel exterminador does not have a film score.
The silences between the spoken lines, scenes and situations lend themselves
perfectly for music. Silence is a wonderful thing, obviously, but music can
perhaps convey this underground river even better.
Did
your work on The
Exterminating Angel begin with musical ideas – also as far as the overall
structure of the work is concerned – or did you initially devote yourself
solely to the libretto?
Thomas
Adès: The
first steps are always very mysterious. At first one is dealing with individual
notes, or two notes. It’s rather like watching an embryo develop, the
difference being that you might understand the DNA of this tiny cell later on
and see how it relates to everything else. Rather the larger structure
eventually develops from trying to link these cells together. My image of music
as a natural process, as a living, growing organism, is a fairly precise
analogy of an opera and the way in which it is created. It wouldn’t be truthful
to start at the beginning by sketching this enormous shape, especially for a
piece like this where the movements of this underground river are so
complicated from line to line. Tom Cairns and I worked for years on the
libretto, and it went through at least six different drafts before a note of
music was written. You need to have a strong sense of the overall architecture
in order to find the specific character of the music.
Tom
Cairns:
We’ve been working on the libretto since 2009. It was about deciding at the
outset what the opera could be as an entity in itself. We agreed fairly quickly
on what we could do to reshape the film and turn it into this particular art
form. The libretto went back and forth several times, and in fact it ended up
becoming much closer to the film than I’d imagined. In order to get the piece
into a shape that was feasible on stage, we had to amalgamate a few characters
– the seventeen guests of the Nobiles in the film become twelve in the opera.
Since sung words take more time than spoken words, some of the text had to be
reduced. Other original scenes were added.
Thomas
Adès:
Once I started writing the music, this in turn inevitably demanded numerous
changes.
While
you were working on the libretto, were you already considering where you would
make use of the specific possibilities that musical theatre offers –
particularly ensembles? For example, did you plan right from the beginning to
make an ‘Enchanted’ ensemble out of the scene where the guests are being
introduced to one another?
Thomas
Adès: No,
these decisions were taken as I was composing, for example, when I noticed that
a line spoken by one person is actually a communal utterance. In the case of
the guests being introduced to one another I suddenly saw an opportunity given
by the Spanish word ‘encantado’: for an English-speaking person it is of course
slightly odd to say ‘enchanted’, but thanks to its double meaning –
‘pleased to meet you’ and ‘spellbound’ – the word underlines that the figures
are under a sort of spell and that the story has something of a fairytale.
Tom
Cairns:
Later, towards the end of Act Two, we refer to it again, when the Doctor
passionately cries out: ‘We are not “enchanted”. This is not a magician’s house!’
He’s desperate to bring the mysterious situation under control and pull it back
into his medical-rational approach to life. He is desperate at that point and
in the most dreadful emotional state because he can’t control the situation.
Scientific analysis is useless.
Thomas
Adès, you have made various passages in the libretto into small solo scenes or
mini-arias that show the figures – their character or emotions – in a different
light from the film. During their captivity in the drawing room the guests are
transformed from elegant, cultured people into something close to barbarians.
While Buñuel depicts this process from a distanced, almost documentary
perspective, it’s especially in these solo passages that you take us up close
to the characters, sometimes in a very moving way. For example, we encounter
the rather decadent Silvia de Ávila in Act Three cradling a sheep’s cadaver in
her arms while she sings a ‘Berceuse macabre’, believing she is rocking her
little son Yoli to sleep.
Thomas
Adès: I
think music demands these moments in opera – moments where things don’t proceed
in ‘real time’, but where the action stops and the music comments on the
emotional meaning of what is happening. In order to give some of the characters
these static moments we’ve also made use of poems by Buñuel from the late
1920s, that is, from his very early, Surrealist phase.
Buñuel
puts the people into a situation where their personalities as they are when
they first encounter one another eventually break down or turn into something
else. Buñuel plays with this façade. In the opera, the music supports the
private personality behind the façade on the one hand (and lets us feel empathy
with the characters), but on the other it also supports the other force which
is pulling them into a kind of shared nothingness. Music can be powerfully
levelling, because it tends to want to resolve everyone into the same place.
The whole process is heightened in the opera. The music is a sort of destiny
the characters are subject to. Sometimes it feels as if the music is
responsible for keeping them in the room, and in the end it’s the music which
releases them.
Often
the music knows more than the people. When for example the guests arrive at the
mansion and then – a physical impossibility – arrive again through the same
door, we hear the same music but in altered form: it contains more sinister
undertones, conveying a slight sense of things not happening quite at the right
time or in the right order. When the guests have walked into the house the
music occurs again in the orchestra, and this time you can sense that they are
leaving reality behind, perhaps even that reality itself dissolves behind them.
Is the phenomenon of disintegration that
the guests experience outwardly and inwardly reflected in your score?
Thomas
Adès:
When you think of something becoming a ruin or disintegrating, it is important
that you can read its structure up to the last minute to a certain extent. The
‘double’ arrival of the guests and the dinner go by quite quickly, but in the
rest of the opera I go over small moments of the music from these scenes and
dig deeper and deeper into the musical material. Towards the end, when the
guests are handing round scraps of meat around the burning cello, the music
from the start reappears in a more complete form – Tom had the brilliant notion
of letting the guests become a little like they were before and let them say
things like ‘I prefer my meat à point.’
Tom
Cairns:
They’re suddenly at a dinner party, just like the old days – and ultimately
they are reassuring themselves with this interaction…
Thomas
Adès:
…something I find very moving.
The
music that you associate with the world of elegant social ritual, here and at
the beginning of the opera, is the Viennese waltz, often coupled with lush
chromatic harmonies.
Thomas
Adès:
What interests me about the waltz is the seductiveness of this music. I often
feel that the waltzes by Johann Strauss are saying: ‘Why don’t you stay a
little longer? Don’t worry about what’s going on outside.’ So in the context of
our opera the waltz becomes very dangerous… When panic breaks out among the
guests in Act Two, I have layered motifs derived and distorted from various
Strauss waltzes over one another in a Fugue of Panic, transforming them into a
kind of whirlpool.
Against
that you have Leticia, whose music is mostly from another world. Her music
takes over at the end and releases the guests from their strange captivity.
This
takes us back to the irrational basic situation of the plot: the inability to
leave the drawing room although there are no visible obstacles. In a brief text
written by Buñuel to precede the film when El ángel exterminador was first shown in
Paris he stated that ‘perhaps the best explanation’ for the film was that
‘rationally there is none’, but conceded that the film was open to multiple
interpretations.
Tom
Cairns:
I’ve come to think very much like Buñuel, which I suppose is inevitable. I
don’t feel the need to rationalize the situation. It feels almost normal to me
that the guests can’t get out. I now don’t see it as irrational.
Thomas
Adès: For
me, the question is actually: Why can anyone ever leave a room?
Why
is it Leticia who realizes how or rather that she and the others can leave the
room?
Thomas Adès: The fact is that the
servants, by some kind of instinct, know before everyone else that they have to
leave the house. The host and some of the guests are aristocrats, but there are
many hints that Leticia originates from a world closer to that of the staff –
not least her higher sensitivity to what is happening to them.
Tom
Cairns:
Leticia is somehow aware of the situation long before the other guests. That’s
possibly why she hurls the ashtray through the window in Act One – a first
instinctive attempt to let air in from outside as she feels a strange
atmosphere encroach on the room.
Thomas
Adès:
There is the idea that the humbler their origin, the more understanding a
character will have of the power of the exterminating angel. This may be why
Eduardo and his fiancée Beatriz – who don’t appear to be particularly
privileged – choose to taken their own lives rather than become victims of the
exterminating angel.
But
who or what is the exterminating angel of the title? The film was originally going
to be called something else and wasn’t renamed until during or after the
shooting. Buñuel later said that he had sensed a ‘subterranean connection’
between the title El
ángel exterminador and the content of his film.
Thomas
Adès: In
a way, the exterminating angel is an absence – an absence of will, of purpose,
of action. Why do we ever do anything? The film poses this question in a very
pure form, and the answer is: because otherwise we would be at the end, with
death and extermination. You could say that extermination is what we’re fleeing
from when we leave a room, when we do anything at all. In a way, the opera
throws me back on how miraculous it is that we can and must act,
indeed that we are alive at all. (In fact I find conducting it is
surprisingly exhilarating – I’m starting to think of it as ‘The Exhilarating
Angel’.) In this story the force that makes us act has been turned off, like a
switch. The people no longer know why they should go home; they have forgotten
what they are. The Doctor with his scientific, rational conception of the world
tries in vain to control the phenomenon by giving it a pathological label – a
Buñuel joke, diagnosing it as ‘aboulia’. On the one hand Buñuel conveys the
impression that the force stopping the guests from leaving lies within
themselves, but on the other, with this title, he takes the step of saying:
let’s pretend that there is such a supernatural, destructive force, a mythical
figure which makes it impossible to act. For me, once the exterminating angel
has taken possession of the guests, the only possible outcome is the complete
breakdown of society and the imposition of martial law – and ultimately the end
of the world.
In
the interlude after Act One you convey this dimension of the events in the
drawing room in a very disturbing way. The music recalls the unsettling
concluding sequence of Buñuel’s film, where demonstrators or revolutionaries
are gunned down by the police.
Thomas Adès: Yes, it’s the first hint
of that in the opera. Incidentally, Buñuel was obsessed by the drums of Calanda
– his home town, where during Holy Week they would drum for three days and
three nights – and I had thought for years about putting them in the opera,
until I suddenly realized that the very judgemental interlude after Act One has
the same rhythmic structure as the – unusually long – drumming rhythm in
Calanda. So the drums naturally went in, which immediately brought the military
quality I was looking for.
The
exterminating angel also makes its presence felt in the opera with a very
special sound…
Thomas
Adès:
It’s the first time I’ve ever used an electronic instrument in a piece: for me,
the Ondes Martenot has the same relationship with the acoustic instruments of
the orchestra as the exterminated world without life has with the world that does
have life, without the exterminating angel. The Ondes Martenot
becomes a symbol, the voice of this exterminating angel in the sense that the
instrument is heard whenever a figure says something that contributes to the
situation of immobility. Sometimes the Ondes Martenot almost forces things, for
example, when the people outside are trying to make the little boy Yoli go into
the house: the Ondes Martenot intervenes and it’s as though it frightens him
into running away.
The
Ondes Martenot has a beautiful, delicious sound. One has to bear in mind that
although the exterminating angel is a terrifying, destructive force – an
absence, a negative – it also possesses something very attractive and alluring.
So the Ondes Martenot is like the sirens of Greek mythology, saying: ‘Stay!’
The
bells with which the piece starts and which also sound at the end function as a
sort of herald for the exterminating angel. You could say that bells are a kind
of music which stays in the same moment all the time. Buñuel often used bells
in his films, and especially here in Salzburg I’m struck increasingly by their
extraordinary nature: they’ve been ringing for centuries, rang long before we
were here and will ring long after we’ve gone. Bells are a form of eternity
appearing in the river of time, an expression of the unchanging. They are
saying: here is this moment again, and again, and again, and it is still the
same, and so are you.
Let
us return to the person who frees the guests from their state of paralysis: in
the opera Leticia is given an even more central role than she has in the film.
You’ve made her the prima donna of the opera performance the guests have been
attending, whereas in Buñuel’s film the singer is a different figure, and after
the dinner, in the drawing room, the guests plead with Leticia in vain to sing
for them. Not until the end of the opera, when Leticia entreats the others to
repeat their utterances and actions of the first evening, does she actually
sing, and it’s as if her aria releases the guests from the room.
Thomas
Adès:
There is an idea that is present in the film but very easy to miss as it is not
underlined by Buñuel – the character of Leticia, the ‘Valkyrie’, who almost
never speaks, does not say ‘I want to go home’ at the crucial moment at the end
of the first evening, as though she has forgotten her line; and it is
almost as though this condemns them all to be trapped. I saw an opportunity to
link this to the operatic soprano character whom we fused with Leticia, and have
the missed line actually be a whole aria.
Where
did you take the words for this aria from?
Thomas
Adès: I
have amplified a Jewish aspect here that is referred to only glancingly in the
film – in an anti-Semitic line spoken by Raúl when the ashtray flies through
the window (and which we have removed): ‘Some Jew passing by.’ The text of
Leticia’s aria at the end of the opera is taken from an early twelfth-century
Zionide of Yehuda Halevi, who wrote of his longing for Jerusalem in Spain. In
the original it says ‘Zion, do you ask of my peace, who longs for yours?’, so I
changed this to ‘My home, do you ask of my peace…’. Perhaps Leticia may have
experienced this larger dimension of homesickness and exile. The return to
Jerusalem is the ultimate image of returning. Buñuel also was very much
an exile, which made him a figure of legendary power within Spain. There are
also elements in Halevi’s text that link to the Surrealist imagery in El
angel exterminador: the scattered sheep, the idea of eagles’ wings, the
idea of ‘the chosen’.
There’s
also a subtext of Jewish exile in the figure of Blanca, who is a musician as
well, and like Leticia does not belong to the aristocracy. Her aria is based on
the children’s poem ‘Over the Sea’ by Chaim Bialik, the father of modern Hebrew
literature, with a very similar subject to Halevi’s Zionide. And the variations
that Blanca performs on the piano in Act One are of course not really by
Paradisi but my own variations on the Ladino song ‘Lavaba la blanca niña’,
which has an unassuageable harmonic structure very typical of Jewish music of
longing and bereavement.
And
Leonora, with her obsession with the Kabbalah, completes our trio of ‘witches’.
Long
stretches of the music of Act Three have an obsessive and dissonant, if you like
irrational, quality. Leticia’s aria comes as a release, also in musical terms.
It’s striking that it contains not a single half-tone or tritone, intervals
that have occurred very frequently up to this point.
Thomas
Adès:
Actually, there are no dissonances in Leticia’s aria at all, at least not if
you look at it from the perspective of a time so far back that it’s long before
the rules of our traditional harmonics were established. I wanted this aria to
have something of the quality of music from the twelfth or thirteenth century,
because it can sound as strange to us as music that is very dissonant.
Music
has a tendency to arrange itself either in terms of patterns or cycles. On a
tiny scale, in a single bar, as well as on the huge scale of an entire opera
there is always the possibility to decide not to be part of a pattern.
This is part of my musical make-up, and I think it’s very much part of the
action in The Exterminating Angel. We have figures trapped within cycles
of thought and others who, like Leticia, fight against the cycles and patterns.
To arrive at a real musical resolution, the patterns and cycles have to be
subdued, recombined by the composer’s hand to produce a new doorway, if you
like. And that’s exactly what Leticia does at the end, but of course then her
aria just becomes another dominant waiting for resolution… (laughs)
At
the end of the opera, the bells – which you described as staying in the same
moment all the time – ring, here in combination with a repetitive musical form
that constantly returns to the beginning, one which you’ve used several times
in your works: the chaconne. To a line from the text of the Requiem the chorus
repeatedly sings the same seven bars that it has already sung in the large
ensemble before Leticia effects their release – the scene in which the guests
take the decision to kill Nobile, their host, as a sacrifice, and which has a
lot in common with the ‘delirious’ second dream sequence in the film.
Thomas
Adès:
Obviously, depending on how it’s written, a chaconne can have the quality of
constantly not going through a door. When the chorus begins to sing that line
from the Requiem off-stage, I want to convey the feeling that it’s been singing
it forever and that it will go on forever after. That’s why this music returns
at the end of the opera in a heightened form. With this chaconne – as opposed
to the chaconne in The Tempest – my idea was that it never ends; that it
just goes round in a spiral, down and down. My opera starts without a clear
beginning – the bells one hears could just be the bells from outside
(especially here in Salzburg) following one into the auditorium – and it has no
real end. The score does not end with a double bar.
Buñuel’s
film also has an open ending; it’s in the nature of the story. The final scene
of the opera, however, differs from the film in several respects.
Tom
Cairns:
The final scene of the film takes place in the cathedral. The idea is that the
guests have returned to the bourgeois or aristocratic world they had left – they’re
back in their elegant clothes, they’re duly humbled, and of course they have to
give thanks for their release – and then everything starts again from the
beginning. For me, personally, this repetition is the least important part of
the end. It’s the bigger issue that really matters: that there is no escape. We
felt that this could be delivered within the context of our piece just as well
without relocating the last scene, perhaps even more effectively. Ultimately we
– that is, the audience in an opera house – are not that far removed from the
people we’re watching on stage in The Exterminating Angel, very close in
some cases; so why not ‘release’ the guests straight into the theatre, into the
auditorium? At that moment they become other characters in a wider dramatis
personae which now includes the members of the audience.
Thomas
Adès: The
feeling that the door is open but we don’t go through it is with us all the
time.
Interview
by Christian Arseni
THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL THE PLOT
Act
One
At
the mansion of Edmundo and Lucía de Nobile guests are expected for dinner, but
strange things are happening. The butler, Julio, fails to stop Lucas the
footman from running away, and the maids Meni and Camilla also attempt to
leave. The Nobiles arrive after attending a performance at the opera. Among
their guests are the evening’s prima donna, Leticia Maynar, and the conductor,
Alberto Roc, with his wife Blanca, a famous pianist. Meni and Camila finally
escape along with some other servants when the guests go into the dining room.
At
dinner, Nobile toasts Leticia, whom brother and sister Silvia and Francisco de
Ávila jokingly call ‘the Valkyrie’. Lucía announces a first course of Maltese
Ragout, which the waiter spills spectacularly on the floor. Not everyone finds
this funny, least of all the elderly Señor Russell. Lucía decides to postpone
her other ‘entertainments’, and a performing bear and a number of lambs are
removed to the garden. The rest of the servants flee the house despite Lucía’s
protestations. Only Julio remains behind.
In
the drawing room Blanca performs a piece on the piano. A young engaged couple,
Eduardo and Beatriz, dance, and Leonora flirts with her physician, Doctor
Conde. When he declines to dance, she kisses him instead. The Doctor confides
in Raúl Yebenes that Leonora is gravely ill and does not have long to live.
Blanca’s performance ends to general acclaim and compliments. The guests
encourage Leticia to sing, but Señor Roc protests that she has performed enough
for the evening.
A number of guests prepare to depart, while Roc
falls asleep. In the cloakroom Lucía gives her secret lover, Colonel Álvaro
Gómez, a fleeting kiss. The guests become lethargic and distracted – although
it is now very late, none of them attempt to leave. Nobile is confused but
behaves graciously, offering beds to anyone who wishes to stay. Señor Russell
and the Colonel are horrified as some guests remove their tailcoats, but
eventually they lie down like everyone else to sleep either on sofas or the
floor. Eduardo and Beatriz retreat to a private corner to spend their first
night together.
Act Two
The guests wake the following morning. Silvia
announces that she slept very badly. The Doctor examines Russell: the old man
is dying. Julio is supposed to prepare breakfast but reports that no supplies
have arrived at the house. When Lucía tries to take some of the ladies to her
bedroom to freshen up, they do not make it past the threshold of the dining
room. Blanca is worried about her children, but even she and her husband are
unable to make the decision to
leave. Silvia finds the unusual situation amusing, particularly as she knows
her son is in good hands with his private tutor, Padre Sansón. A further
attempt by the guests to leave fails when Julio approaches with coffee and the
leftovers from the previous evening’s dinner. Leticia entreats the butler not
to enter the drawing room, but in vain. Blanca is desperate, while Raúl sees no
reason to over-dramatize the situation. Francisco complains he cannot possibly
stir his coffee with a teaspoon. When sent to procure coffee spoons, Julio also
seems to have become a prisoner in the drawing room.
Evening approaches. Russell’s condition has
worsened: he has fallen into a coma and needs urgent medical attention. Panic
spreads among the guests: there is nothing more to drink, the outside world
seems to have forgotten about them – and why did the servants leave the mansion
the night before for no obvious reason? The Doctor pleads for calm, although
even he seems to be losing his composure. Raúl becomes aggressive and holds
Nobile responsible for the situation. Francisco is at the end of his tether and
resists all attempts at pacification. Russell suddenly and unexpectedly regains
consciousness, expressing his relief that he will not live to experience the
‘extermination’. Beatriz is troubled by the thought of dying amidst all these
people, rather than alone with Eduardo. Blanca, Silvia and Leticia share a
strange experience in the walk-in cabinet, which has been repurposed as a
toilet.
During the night Russell dies. The Doctor and the
Colonel haul his corpse into the cabinet, witnessed by Eduardo and Beatriz.
Act Three
Police guarding the mansion drive back a crowd of
people who try to come to the aid of those imprisoned inside. Although some
people break through the police ranks, nobody is able to enter the house.
In the drawing room Julio and Raúl burst a water
pipe and the guests rush desperately to quench their thirst. Tormented with
hunger, everyone’s behaviour becomes increasingly irrational. Blanca combs only
one side of her hair, driving Francisco to hysterical desperation. When
Francisco is unable to find the pills for his stomach ulcer, he immediately
presumes that someone has hidden the box. Raúl goads Francisco about his
relationship with his sister and triggers a volley of insults between the two
men. Nobile tries to keep the peace, but this merely earns him recriminations.
Leonora, who is in great pain, expresses her longing for the assistance of the
Doctor and the Virgin Mary. Francisco is nauseated by Blanca’s smell and once
again loses his nerves.
In her delirium Leonora sees a disembodied hand
wandering around the drawing room. Trying to stop it, she stabs Blanca’s hand
with a dagger. In the walk-in cabinet, Eduardo and Beatriz decide to die
together. Señor Roc appears to molest Leticia, but Raúl accuses the Colonel
instead. Nobile is injured during the ensuing scuffle. The lambs from the
garden wander into the drawing room and the roaring of the bear terrifies the
guests.
The army has quarantined
the mansion. Padre Sansón appears with Silvia’s son, Yoli, and the people
demand that the boy be sent inside. Despite encouragement from the crowd, Yoli
is unable to get into the house.
The guests have slaughtered the lambs and cook
them on a makeshift fire. Leonora recalls a premonition she had on the evening
of the opera performance and attempts a magic ritual with Blanca and Leticia.
It fails and she claims that innocent blood is needed. The bodies of Eduardo
and Beatriz are discovered in the walk-in cabinet. During the course of yet
another quarrel, Raúl hurls Francisco’s box of pills over the threshold of the
drawing room. Silvia no longer takes any interest; cradling the cadaver of one
of the lambs in her arms, she thinks she is rocking Yoli to sleep.
The bear appears
across the threshold. Gradually the idea takes hold among the guests that a
sacrifice is needed to secure their liberation: Nobile must be killed. The
Doctor and the Colonel try in vain to make the others reconsider. Nobile
declares that he will sacrifice himself of his own free will, but Leticia
interrupts him. She says she has realized that at this moment each one of them
is in exactly the same place as when their strange captivity began. With her
encouragement the others hesitantly repeat the actions and dialogues from that
moment. When Leticia is then asked to sing once again, this time she actually
does so. Together they approach the threshold – and they are able to cross it.
The guests and the crowd outside the mansion encounter one another. Their
freedom will not last long.
