In his review of the premiere in The New York Times last year, Anthony Tommasini wrote: “In his opera, Mr. Adès seizes the story and makes it his own, delving into its ‘underground river of meaning,’ as he says in an interview in the program. His powerful score reveals the harrowing absurdity of the situation.”

Our time is, like the Franco era, one in which many have vividly perceived a stagnant elite; the dinner party of “The Exterminating Angel” can be seen in the 21st century as an orgy of the 1 percent. And the sensation of frozenness, of being enmeshed in a crisis from which it’s impossible to withdraw, may well be familiar to anyone who follows the news.

THE OPERA REMAINS CLOSE TO THE FILM After the premiere last year, Mr. Adès told The Times: “We stick fairly closely to the movie in terms of the order of incidents. We stick fairly closely to the final screenplay.”

BUT THERE ARE KEY DIFFERENCES The film’s cool, low-key surrealist dispassion (and absolute absence of music, even though several of the characters are musicians) has been traded out by Mr. Adès for more overt, expressionistic horror. “Even more than the film,” Mr. Ross wrote in The New Yorker, the opera “tilts toward the apocalyptic.”

As Mr. Adès put it: “I amplified some things that in a way are suppressed in the final film,” adding, of Buñuel, that “the acting, with certain exceptions, is quite restrained. With an opera, one’s doing in a way the opposite and bringing out the latent psychological and emotional meaning. The music underlines the power of the feeling.”

So the effect of the opera is grimmer, blunter and less winking. And it takes longer to sing than to talk: A 90-minute film has been expanded to a two-and-a-half-hour opera, even as the number of dinner guests has been reduced to 12, from 17. (They include a prima donna, a pianist, a doctor and a duchess.) This is still an unusually large cast for contemporary opera; the financial exigencies of the art form have generally encouraged smaller forces, but Mr. Adès clearly had different ideas.