By most accounts, Kaija Saariaho is the most important composer to have worked in the 21st century. The Finnish composer died in Paris in June 2023. She was known primarily for lieder and classical compositions in the form of concerti and sonatas. However, her fame is most likely to endure on the basis of her three operas L'Amour de Loin, Adriana Mater, and Innocence. When New York's Metropolitan Opera performs Innocence during its 2025-2026 season, this will mark the first time that the Met has performed two works (with Amour de Loin) by any female composer. Critics tend to write about Kaija Saariaho in tones of hushed (or enthusiastic) awe. If you are interested in knowing what this furor is about, go to You-Tube and watch the filmed version of the 2022 Aix-en-Provence festival performance of Innocence, a rather harrowing musical theater piece about a massacre at a Finnish school. In this version of the opera, the work has been handsomely filmed with fluid cinematography featuring many close-ups, carefully edited sequences, and other cinematic flourishes. Unfortunately, the opera is subtitled in French and I had difficulty following the action. In fact, I was so baffled by the absence of an English translation of this work that I watched the whole thing under the misapprehension that one lanky actress (Julie Hega -- she looks like the female basketball star, Brittany Greiner) was playing the role of the school shooter in the opera. (In fact, after reading a half-dozen reviews and summaries of the work, I now understand that the shooter never appears on-stage and Julie Hega with her jean-jacket and long braids and, generally, menacing demeanor is playing Iris or Student #3 as identified by the libretto). Of course, a fundamental mistake of this sort significantly colors my rather tentative interpretation of the opera and my remarks here must be regarded with caution. I hope that my brief summary, necessarily omitting aspects of the opera that I simply couldn't construe due to language difficulties, might be helpful to other adventurous souls who may wish to view this performance. It is worth noting that if you have some High School level French (and I don't) my guess is that you will be able to follow the events depicted. It's also helpful, I think, to know that language problems are intrinsic to this opera -- the events take place, in part, as an International School in Helsinki and seem to revolve around a classroom in which English is being taught. The students all sing in the language of the operatic performers enlisted to present the show -- therefore, the students' internal discourse, at least, and some of their interactions are in Spanish, German, French, and Finnish. When the students speak to one another, they converse (or declaim -- in most cases, the libretto is performed in Sprechstimme, a hybrid of spoken and chanted/sung recitative invented by Arnold Schoenberg) in English. The teacher who has a prominent role also sings in English and words exchanged by members of the wedding party involved in the opera's action parallel to the shooting seem to be intoned in a combination of English and French. The production is pretty much a Babel of languages. As anyone who has attended operas will know, the fact that someone sings in English is no guarantee that the viewer will understand much of what is spoken -- I could only understand about half of what the English-speaking parts were saying -- in fact, coming to opera as a neophyte with no advance knowledge about the show, I couldn't ascertain that parts of the libretto were in English until about fifteen minutes into the 105 minute one-act play.
Innocence involves an archetypal plot, reminiscent of a very dark fairy tale -- it's the story of the uninvited guest at the feast, in this case, a wedding rehearsal or, possibly, groom's dinner. Tomas and Stella are getting married. They are celebrating in a modest banqueting hall with colorful helium balloons. One of the waitresses hired to cater the banquet is a middle-aged woman named Tereza. From the outset, we can see that there is something seriously wrong with Tereza -- she's wild-eyed, her face disfigured with a look of perpetual wide-eyed horror; she looks like an actress in a horror film by Ari Aster, a figure displaying utter shock and disgust as in Midsommar or Inheritance. Teresa has discovered that Tomas is the brother of the school shooter (apparently just released from prison) who killed eight or nine students at the International School ten years earlier. One of the students gunned down by the unnamed murderer (Tomas' brother) was Marketa, Tereza's teenage daughter. Marketa is loitering around the banquet hall and the school as a ghost, clad in white and black, and singing in an unearthly high-pitched timbre -- the part is played by the Finn, Vilma Jaa, and invokes Finno-Ugric folk songs and peasant herding calls; some of her performance involves grating nasal tones, a bit like "throat singing", loud shrieks and yips and other vocal acrobatics including (literally) cow-calling. (The part is so demanding that only Vilma Jaa, who originated the role in Aix-en-Provence, can successfully perform it -- she has been featured in all five versions of the opera to date and will appear at the Met next year.) Somehow, Stella, Tomas' betrothed doesn't know that her fiancee is the brother of the notorious school shooter. The ghastly Tereza makes certain this fact is made public at the banquet, a revelation that results in all sorts of soul-searching and disclosure of awful secrets about the shooting. The libretto by Sofia Oksanen renders the opera's name ironic -- it turns out that everyone is somehow complicit in this school-shooting or thinks themselves to be. Needless to say, the revelation that the Groom's brother committed mass murder is pretty much of a buzz-kill and the party deteriorates into mutual recriminations -- it seems that the actual wedding is going to be indefinitely deferred while the unfortunate guests ruminate on their own entanglement in the shooting This dysfunctional fiesta includes a scene in which Tereza, bringing out a white wedding cake on a cart, actually shoves part of the pastry in the face of the groom's mother -- a rude intervention that is both risible and a breach of etiquette. Although the opera is resolutely serious, grave, and shocking, it's also more than a little comical when viewed from a perspective not wholly cowed by the horrific subject matter. One of the problems with the opera and its libretto is that it dares you to laugh at the unruly and melodramatic proceedings at the wedding party -- and viewed dispassionately what takes place at this ill-fated party is pretty funny; I found myself laughing out loud, particularly during the cake-fight, pie-in-the-face episode. Not funny at all is the parallel action which occurs, more or less simultaneously with the wedding dinner -- this is a depiction of the shooting at the school. Although we never see the actual bullets being fired what happens is arguably worse. As the opera progresses, the set fills up with twitching, writhing, spastic bodies of gun shot victims and the walls and floors are emblazoned with bright red gouts of blood and brain. The school sequences involve scenes in which the students blame one another for the killings -- why? I couldn't divine since I wasn't able to read the French subtitles and the German and English singing was impossible to decipher. The teacher at the school says that she has become paranoid -- she thinks she should have read warning signs in the murderer's essays that she graded and, now, she looks at all writings submitted to her with an eye toward diagnosing symptoms of mass murder. (It's not clear to me why this matters to her now, since she was killed in the shooting -- there are many aspects of the show that remain completely obscure to me.) A priest similarly confesses that he should have realized that the shooter was on the brink of mass murder. He says that "love forgives all," a cliche that no one on hand is willing to credit. The groom ultimately admits that he knew his brother was harboring murderous rage, but, nonetheless, didn't do anything to prevent the killing -- he even says that his brother was his hero and that he still admires him: "I loved my brother; I love him still." This admission is a deal-breaker as far as the upcoming nuptials are concerned. At the end, the dead students line-up and each sings a bit. The insane, grief-stricken Tereza confronts her dead daughter, Marketa, and the two of them sing a sort of screechy duet. Then, Marketa says: "Let me depart." Marketa walks out the door which Tereza gently closes and the strings gasp in a kind of very high-pitched whispering tremolo as the opera fades out, more with a whimper than a bang.
Opera experts opine generally that Innocence is presented with impeccable skill and musicianship. The set consists of a house-size two-story cube, divided into two interconnected spaces top and bottom on each side. The set, mounted on a sort of turntable, rotates continuously showing different arrays of locations to the audience. There is a minutely detailed schoolroom, the outer facade of the school with some exterior terraces, lots of nondescript white boxes -- the area where the banquet occurs and the adjacent toilet and corridors gradually fill up with mutilated corpses as the show progresses. The mise-en-scene gradually collapses the banquet and shooting at the school ten years earlier into one location.
I'm ambivalent about the opera and don't understand it well enough to form any clear conclusions. The subject matter is meretricious and, in more cultured times, this opera would be regarded as a vulgar work of exploitation -- it hijacks a school shooting to achieve its sense of profundity and gravitas. On the other hand, the show is quite disturbing and, certainly, leaves the audience with a strong impression of the enduring horror and chaos caused by an event such as a school shooting. Whether this effect, which is pretty obvious if you think about it, is worth displaying in this way is an open question. I can't comment with any confidence on the music. It sounds to me like Richard Strauss around 1900 -- the tonal vocabulary and the big band sound (a very large orchestra with an offstage choir) reminds me of Salome or Elektra. The music has the character of a soundtrack for a particularly gruesome slasher movie or horror picture -- it's got shrieking off-key glissandos, enormous leaps of several octaves in a single bars of vocal line, battering drum cadences that are like something from Rammstein, and all sorts of eerie tremolos, strange fluttering arpeggios and the like. There is nothing like a melody in the score --it's all whoops and whispers and screams. Professional musicians believe that the score, which is tremendously overwrought, is a fantastically ingenious and, if not beautiful, then, expressionistically powerful. In fact, the music sounds like German expressionistic compositions by Alban Berg, but with more ornate and peculiar orchestration. The opera's theme is tonic and should be reiterated every time cable news pundits pontificate on a mass shooting -- look down at your own hands and you will see that they are dyed in gore.
Kaija Saariaho was dying of brain cancer at the time that the opera was premiered at Aix-en-Provence. She appears briefly at the end of the filmed version of the opera, taking a curtain call in her wheelchair.
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