The Exterminating Angel surprised me. I’d never gone to an opera before, but I’d heard that they were just entirely song. Not musicals, but song nonetheless. I was excited to hear beautiful voices expressing beautiful things. I also had my preconceptions of the audience in an opera—predominantly middle-aged and older, and white. I was pretty disappointed when I got to heard beautiful voices performing choppy thoughts, and confusing plotlines. But even in my disappointment, I found nuggets of surprise.
My mother always drones about Italian operas and how at the performance, there were little translating screens. I would think, why even go. But after our trip, I realized without that little screen, I wouldn’t know what was said even if English was my first language. And if I were to guess, who had the time to indulge in the storylines of predominantly or entirely white casts, singing about God knows what, I would have assumed—like I did assume—that like the predominantly or entirely white cast, the audience would also be predominantly or entirely white. I went into the opera house expecting that, and I was correct. There were people of color here and there, but nothing compares to the amount of whiteness I saw. And specifically, 40 years old and older. While Singh urges readers to liberate themselves from their preconceived notions and possible expectations, I couldn’t seem to do so, since my assumptions were proven true.
Not all was bad, however. I never thought operas could bend the lines of artistry the way The Exterminating Angel did. But before that… It never registered to me that there would be an orchestra. I assumed the voices of the cast would carry the entire show. But The Exterminating Angel proved that any work can be redeemed at least somewhat if the music is good. And the orchestra was brilliant, probably my favorite part. Because I had not assumptions going in, I was able to experience raw and true art, the kind that Singh urges the audience to seek out, not the art that slides into the molds we have, but the kind that reminds us that life, real life, doesn’t have perfectly crisp edges and ends. Instead, it is unpredictable. And boy was The Exterminating Angel unpredictable. Never in my life would I have expected sheep on a stage. And here they were. Front and center for all of us to see. Boundaries that I didn’t even know I set up were broken with this opera. I placed the opera into a box it did not b elong. I tried to define it in a way we try to define photography. I tried to demand technicalities that didn’t need to exist. Instead of the thirds principle of photography, I expected archetypical tragic plot—boy that is not what I got.
The element of surprise if very powerful in artistic form. We all have expectations of the forms of art we consume, and when those expectations are ignored and we are given something entirely different, regardless of the quality, the newness of the experience sears it into memory. And that memory is the most powerful of all, for it is art in its truest form, and Singh believes.
