By the time of its New York City premiere, Innocence – Kaija Saariaho's final opera – was already reverberating beyond the Metropolitan Opera House walls. On the Lincoln Center Plaza steps, Gays Against Guns activists assembled in white gowns and veils with signs depicting victims of school shootings. Nearby, City University of New York hosted a two-day seminar examining Saariaho's work and the relationship between music and trauma. Tragedy is hardly new to opera stages, but this much reality, it seemed, had to be dealt with carefully.
Innocence exists in aftermath, the title suggesting what was lost before the story began. The plot is revealed slowly, in scant and harrowing detail. A shooting at the International School in Helsinki left ten students dead. We don’t see it, but we bear witness to the paralyzing fears and crippling anxiety that permeates the families a decade later. A two-story cutaway structure turns continually throughout the two-hour, uninterrupted production, housing scenes in a restaurant, a home, the school. Every angle of the tragedy is played out from every angle of the slowly turning set. Saariaho's score likewise turns continuously, without building or repeating, in an elongated line.
The work was created with Sofi Oksanen, who wrote the original libretto in Finnish, and dramaturgist and multilingual librettist, Aleksi Barrière. It received its premiere at the Festival d'Aix in 2021 in a production by Simon Stone. The Met brought back Stone and his realization for the current run. Susanna Mälkki conducted the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra with Tilman Micharl leading the chorus.
It's a gripping and perhaps divisive piece. There's no resolution, no reprieve. Innocence reflects reality, with no real hope of finding peace. It's harrowing, relentless, and stunningly good. The story revolves around women, their pain and their loss at the hands of a young man. We never meet the shooter. Instead, a classmate and would be accomplice who bailed at the last minute, played with conviction by Julia Hega, recalls the day of the attacks. Rob Gilfry delivers a moving aria of regret and remorse as the shooter's father, but the story revolves around the women. The anguish of the teacher (powerfully portrayed by Lucy Shelton) is visceral. Joyce DiDonato plays a waitress who unexpectedly encounters the shooter’s family, reopening the wound of her daughter’s slaying. Finnish pop singer Vilma Jää magnificently portrays daughter Markéta, as either ghost or memory. Mother and daughter are the center of the story. In a decidedly contemporary context, DiDonato is often syllabic or delivers her text in Sprechgesang, seeming decidedly modernist. Jää sometimes employs a folkloric joik singing style, at other times seems to be performing kabuki theater. They're lost in time as the world proceeds without them.
While there’s little repetition in music or text, the names of the ten victims do become a simple song and a briefly repeated motif, striking when some characters aren’t even named. At one point, part of the ensemble sings together (but not in unison) “until the next shooting”, another rare musical theme, if not a melodic one. Saariaho’s score carries the story but at the same time seems lost in it.
Innocence involves an actual shooting in Finland, but could be set most anywhere and, arguably, felt distinctly American. The students at the International School become, in Innocence, a global microcosm. In the final scene, Markéta tells her mother to let her go. It's a crushing moment, but it isn’t an ending. There is no end because the story will play out again and again, on another stage, in another town, at another school.
