NEW YORK, NY.- Pity living composers, toiling away in a field that has long favored dead ones. If they get a precious commission, the cycle tends to go something like this: The work premieres, and then travels to any other ensemble or company that helped to pay for it. After that, who knows. The fate of contemporary music typically comes down to marketability — hits still exist! — and to that strange, slippery thing called legacy.

One recent work that is worthy of the canon yet seemed doomed to obscurity is Thomas Adès’ opera “The Exterminating Angel.” It had a prestigious start, premiering at the Salzburg Festival in 2016, then playing at the Metropolitan Opera the next year. But it was immense: written on a grand scale, with more than a dozen principal roles, a chorus and an orchestra equipped with idiosyncratic sounds like that of the spooky, electronic ondes Martenot.

In his book, “The Impossible Art,” composer Matthew Aucoin recalled hearing an opera administrator say that putting on “The Exterminating Angel” was “like watching money burn.” Regardless of its merits, there didn’t seem to be much hope for this work’s future.

How extraordinary, then, that “The Exterminating Angel” has not only been revived, but has also received something even rarer in opera: a new production, by Calixto Bieito, at the Paris Opera through March 23. And, revised by Adès, with the composer in the pit, it sounds better than ever.

“The Exterminating Angel,” with a libretto by Adès and Tom Cairns adapted from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film, is one of the finest operas of the century so far, alongside works by George Benjamin and Kaija Saariaho. It represents opera at its most fundamental, an elevated expression of humanity on the edge. There is sex, violence and desperation. While the meaning can’t easily be explained, crucially for opera, the plot can be described in a single sentence: People enter a room, then lose the will to leave it.

Many have read into Buñuel’s story an allegory of bourgeois apathy in Franco-era Spain. Adès’ adaptation, in 2024, can feel like a mirror of climate change, a stranger-than-fiction repeat of the 2020 election or an unnerving reminder of pandemic’s quarantine days. But Bieito’s production, while vivid, evokes nothing with specificity, and even abstracts elements that were more literal in the original staging, directed by Cairns. Gone are the lambs and the bear; in their place, balloons and a stuffed animal.

Bieito sets the entire opera — now streamlined into two uninterrupted, entrapping hours — in a banquet room that is white on every surface, a blank canvas for the horrors to come once the dinner guests find themselves unable to exit. With nowhere to hide, they are out in the open, no matter how private and, um, digestive their actions.

As a scenic concept, it falls short in the third act’s chorus scene, which is meant to take place outside the house. Bieito keeps the singers offstage, and it’s unclear whether we are hearing them through the walls or just in the suspended-disbelief space of opera. But that is a quibble in an otherwise persuasive production that, in its madcap energy, “Yellowjackets”-esque descent into barbarism and visual gags, leans into the comedic spirit of Buñuel’s film, unlike Cairns’ grim staging.

Between the score’s breathlessness and Bieito’s athletic demands, the cast is uniformly fearless: One soils himself, another mimes sex with the stuffed bear, and many of them strip. There are too many soloists to name, though particularly memorable were Nicky Spence, with a nerve-wracking mix of bullish heft and wide-eyed energy; Gloria Tronel, effortless in some of the highest notes ever written for a soprano; and Jacquelyn Stucker as a manic host.

The highlight remains Adès’ score, which freely flows from grotesquerie to lyricism to militaristic might and more. His diegetic sound nods to without embodying older styles, and his interludes behave as through they were trying to stare down both hell and the cosmos.

In its original version, Adès’ music was almost too much, overwhelming in its presence and exhausting to hear. But for Paris, he has maintained the score’s shape while shaving off its excesses; it is leaner, more transparent and even more effective. The ondes Martenot, allowed to penetrate the orchestra and singers, lends the opera the character of an old sci-fi horror soundtrack.

Adès has described “The Exterminating Angel” as having an “underground river of meaning,” an apt metaphor considering his other major event of the past week: the premiere of his orchestral work “Aquifer,” at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich.

Composed for Simon Rattle’s inaugural season as the orchestra’s chief conductor and unveiled Thursday at the Herkulessaal, it seems to pack as much into its 17 minutes as Beethoven did in his “Pastoral” Symphony, which was on the second half of the evening. (The program, which opened with the Prelude and “Liebestod” from Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” travels with the ensemble and Rattle to Carnegie Hall in New York on May 3.)

Here, again, is Adès the maximalist, for better and worse. “Aquifer” may be easy to listen to, but it’s not so easy to quickly understand. (On one page in the score, there are 39 simultaneous lines of music.) There may be a hint, though, at representation and form in the title, similar to his violin concerto “Concentric Paths.”

“Aquifer” begins foundationally, with the rumbling of voices rising to the highest in the orchestra. From there, it unfolds in seven sections that are delineated not by movement breaks but by tempo; they are as seamless as the three acts of “The Exterminating Angel.” There are episodes of flaring phrases and passages that swing slowly, brassiness that recalls Ravel’s “Boléro” and a falling, two-note motif that subtly, but coincidentally, presaged the birdcalls of the “Pastoral” Symphony.

As the tempo changes, the momentum never lets up, whether foregrounded or subterranean. Compact and intense, “Aquifer” couldn’t be longer than its running time without wearing itself out. After a chromatic chorale that starts in the winds and builds to include the entire orchestra, the piece euphorically sprints to a climactic finish that featured, if you can believe it, Rattle playing a rattle.

That could have been a comic bit to spotlight the conductor for whom “Aquifer” was written. Or it could have been a logistical choice; the score calls for six percussionists, but those final measures include seven percussion instruments. Either way, after the performances in Paris and Munich, it feels safe to trust that, at this point, Adès knows exactly what he’s doing.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.