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Kaija Saariaho’s opera Innocence is an ardent plea against looking away

Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023), who died last summer, created a haunting masterpiece with Innocence, her fifth and last opera. It is an ardent plea against looking away, captivating for the full one hundred and forty-five minutes, providing much food for thought. The audience at the Amsterdam Opera rightly rewarded the Dutch premiere with stormy applause.

Just as we have looked away from Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians for decades and are surprised when their frustration erupts into an apocalyptic outbreak of violence, so too the bystanders of the school shooting in Innocence ignore the many signs that something was wrong with the young perpetrator.

The father confesses to having taught his son ‘to shoot like a man’ from childhood; the priest recounts how the boy enjoyed the death throes of a bird he had poisoned himself; the teacher recalls his fascination with serial killers, while his younger brother (the groom) watched him steal their father’s gun from the locked safe. None of them spoke out, so the massacre (referred to as ‘the tragedy’) could have been prevented.

As the survivors in Sofi Oksanen’s rock-solid libretto bitterly observe: we react collectively shocked at a bloody act and politicians publicly promise to take action, but their interest fades as soon as the headlines highlight other tragedies. In the end, nothing happens. Indeed, those who remain must learn to remain silent, learn not to remember: – ‘Until the next shooting.’

The story is set in 2000, during Tuomas and Stela’s wedding. Waitress Tereza replaces a sick colleague and, to her horror, recognises the family of her daughter Markéta’s killer. Tereza acts as the opera’s lynchpin. She confronts her customers about the misdeeds of their son and brother and reveals the family secret to the bride.

Chloe Lamford’s revolving, two-storey set artfully switches between the dining wedding guests and the classrooms where the shooting took place ten years earlier. The victims squirm across the floor, seeking bleeding cover in the toilets, in the corridors or under the tables.

Meanwhile, the survivors recount how their traumatic experience still defines their lives. One dares not sit with his back to a door, another makes distorted movements and yet another experiences ringing church bells as funerals: ‘There were too many of them.’

The title Innocence is well chosen, as innocence turns out to be an elastic concept. At first, the mother-in-law even claims that her son did not know what he was doing, while his friend Iris reveals that together they had spent a year carefully planning the massacre. She herself dropped out the night before.

As the opera proceeds, ever more chilling pieces of the puzzle fall into place. For instance, Tereza’s angelic daughter Markéta turns out to have bullied the murderer terribly, the schoolchildren spread naked images of him on the internet and the survivors only brought themselves to safety. Towards the end, Tuomas even confesses that he knew about his brother’s plans. He had wanted to take part in them, but was too cowardly to pull the trigger. Still he looks up to him: ‘I loved my brother, I love him still.’

Saariaho wrote shimmering music that keeps shifting colour. She builds an ominous atmosphere out of layers of elongated lines, from which short melodic motifs flare up. At moments of fear and dismay, she unleashes a turmoil of dissonant brass, boisterous percussion and jazzy rhythms, which unfortunately do not always come across flawlessly. Nor does Saariaho hesitate to (almost) completely silence the orchestra in more reflective passages. For instance, Tuomas sings a cappella of his love for his older brother.

Throughout the opera, the choir weaves a subtle, barely audible lament of wordless cantilenas, sometimes devolving into a desperate reiteration of the names of the victims. The Choir of Dutch National Opera shines in this role, sung from the wings. The soloists, too, are generally well cast and partly the same as at the world premiere in Aix-en-Provence in 2021.

Finnish-Swedish Jenny Carlstedt dazzles as Tereza, making her pain palpable with her warm mezzo and strong acting. Finnish Vilma Jäa, in her schoolgirl dress, is the personification of the angel her mother sees in Markéta. However, the girl expresses her dark side in chillingly piercing vocals familiar from Slavic and Karelian folk music. Thomas Oliemans is also strong in his role of father-in-law, against which Markus Nykänen stands out somewhat pale as the groom.

Equally impressive are the mostly spoken roles of the survivors. Rowan Kievits gives a poignant portrayal of Student 4 with his distorted movements and truncated German phrases, while British alto Lucy Shelton impresses with her fragile Sprechgesang as the teacher who stops teaching out of guilt. Truly superior is French-Cameroonian Julie Hega in her role of Iris. With her walk in slow-motion, her penetrating gaze and snake-like hissing speech, she seems like evil incarnate; meanwhile, she holds up a merciless moral mirror to the others. 

Despite the ink-black scenario, there is some hope in the epilogue. Student 4 thinks he can start a new life in another country; student 5 notes with surprise that for the first time he was not afraid to sit with his back to a door and Stela (a wonderful Lilian Farahani) decides to marry Tuomas after all, defying his conviction that she will always see his brother in him. Deeply moving is the final scene where Karméta begs her mother to stop buying her birthday presents and finally let her go.

With Innocence, director Simon Stone and Dutch National Opera have put on a top production that deserves to be heard and seen many more times.

This review first appeared in Dutch on the website Theaterkrant
Seen 10 October 2023, the opera runs through 22 October

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