The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s final work is an immersive, astonishing achievement, viscerally depicting a group of people affected in different ways by a school shooting.
By
Heidi Waleson
Vilma Jää (above) and Joyce DiDonato (below) in a scene from ‘Innocence.’ MET OPERA
New York
Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” one of the most important new operas of this century, finally made it to the Metropolitan Opera on Monday in a superb performance. I have now seen it four times, including the video of its 2021 premiere at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and it feels more remarkable with each experience. Through an alchemical synthesis of music, text and dramaturgy, the audience is immersed in the deepest feelings of its characters. It’s not just a story—it’s a living world, growing out of a violent event that is only too familiar. Through “Innocence,” we understand that world viscerally.
Sofi Oksanen’s crystalline Finnish libretto, translated into multiple languages by Aleksi Barrière, Saariaho’s son, takes place on two levels that gradually meld into one. A wedding is being celebrated in Helsinki in the 2000s; at the same time, seven people existing in the “world of memory” recall a tragic event that took place 10 years earlier. Bit by bit, the connection between the two is revealed and deepened—the Bridegroom’s brother shot up his high school, killing 10 students and a teacher. The Waitress, a last-minute substitution at the banquet, is the mother of one of the dead. On the surface, the wedding-party family has seemingly moved on; the others have not.
Saariaho’s interests are not preachy or didactic. Rather, the opera illuminates the enduring underlying trauma of everyone affected by the shooting and extends that uncomfortable sensation to the audience. The uneasy orchestral writing acts as a collective, disturbed subconscious. The opera begins with a low rumble, and snippets of sound—a bassoon, a celesta, a flute—emerge out of the darkness, like memories fighting their way to the surface, and continues in that vein, as the remembered pain surfaces and grows progressively more explicit over the opera’s 110 minutes. An unseen chorus acts like another orchestral element, echoing the singers and amplifying the music’s insidious power.
Rod Gilfry and Ms. DiDonato MET OPERA
The solo vocal writing is similarly evocative, its mix of styles making each character distinctive. The bright coloratura of the Mother-in-Law (Kathleen Kim) is full of anxiety and denial (she still insists her son’s act was “an accident”). As the Father-in-Law, baritone Rod Gilfry wrestles with his sense of responsibility for the shooting, and the heavy, deliberate bass of the Priest (Stephen Milling) conveys his guilt—he knew “something was wrong with that boy” but said nothing. The Waitress’s agony is ever-present—in mezzo Joyce DiDonato’s blistering performance it manifests as rage, searing the others as she confronts them one by one.
In the “memory” universe, most of the surviving students speak—jaggedly—in multiple languages (it was an international school) as they recount their present circumstances (“I can’t go to work”) and relive the shooting and its aftermath. One of them, Lily (soprano Beate Mordal), sings, her surface insouciance concealing something darker. As the Teacher, Lucy Shelton’s increasingly exaggerated Sprechstimme suggests that she is losing her mind. Most distinctive of all is the Waitress’s dead daughter Markéta (Vilma Jää): Her high, vibrato-less, folk-style leaps and yelps make her seem both eerie and childlike—the “angel” that her mother, inaccurately, insists she was.
Lucy Shelton MET OPERA
Simon Stone’s incisive production, first mounted in Aix, makes visual how the complex strands of the two stories wind together, mirroring the opera’s varied pacing. As Chloe Lamford’s brilliant two-level set rotates, we—and the characters—travel from the banquet room to the classroom, through intermediate spaces like a bathroom, a kitchen and a supply closet. Students frantically flee between the desks and down the stairs; the Bridegroom’s parents argue in a vestibule; the Waitress and Markéta, on different levels, recall that last morning as though in a dream. Markéta slowly walks on a lunchroom table, singing “Frog boy,” the bullying song that set the tragedy in motion.
As the truth is revealed, the spaces transform, almost magically. The entire set becomes the school, and then a series of empty rooms, with blood stains on the walls, as the full impact of the tragedy overtakes the present day. The saddest revelations happen here, against blank walls: The Bride (soprano Jacquelyn Stucker), who had been kept in the dark about the secret, poignantly renounces her hope of a real family; the Bridegroom (the piercing tenor Miles Mykkanen) admits that he was part of the shooting plan but chickened out. “I loved my brother,” he sings, a cappella. “I love him still.”
James Farncombe’s precise lighting underscores the time shifts; Mel Page’scostumes limn character—such as the Goth look of the student Iris (Julie Hega), the shooter’s death-besotted friend and co-conspirator, who also left him to act alone. Arco Renz’s choreography of the students as they haunt the present day makes their distress visible through physical contortions. Timo Kurkikangas’s sound design could use some tweaks—the spoken text was sometimes tinny or drowned out by the orchestra. Susanna Mälkki was the sensitive conductor.
The opera is dark, yet Saariaho offers some light. In the final scene, the haunted students relate how they are starting to regain some normalcy in their lives; the twitching, turbulent orchestra settles a bit, like a calmed nervous system; and Markéta quietly tells the Waitress, “Mom, let me go.” Guilt is pervasive in the opera, Saariaho’s last before her death in 2023, yet it is called “Innocence,” a reflection of its deep humanity, and the idea that tragedy can also encompass survival and forgiveness.
AndyManshel.nyc 