The title of the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s opera Innocence is presumably intended ironically, given that every one of its 13 characters is either racked with guilt or otherwise suffering from the aftershocks of a fatal school shooting 10 years previously.
It’s an extraordinarily powerful and disturbing opera on a timely contemporary theme, first performed at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021 and now receiving its keenly awaited UK premiere at the Royal Opera.
Some of those 13 individuals are victims of the shooting, others are survivors, though it becomes clear that none has escaped unharmed, psychologically if not physically. The revolving set of Simon Stone’s production – familiar from his work directing Yerma with Billie Piper and Phaedra, which recently ended its run at the National Theatre – is once again deployed to great effect.
We see characters atomised in storerooms, kitchens, lavatories. One girl, barricaded in a closet, as on the day of the shooting, berates herself that she failed to help anyone else. Another, the waitress Tereza, serves at a wedding 10 years on, aware that the groom is the brother of the perpetrator.
Despite the overlapping time zones, there is little confusion (except perhaps between survivors and victims); on the contrary, the convolutions of the set (designed by Chloe Lamford, lit by James Farncombe) gradually reveal the traumas of all those caught up in the tragedy. The dramaturg, Aleksi Barrière, working with librettist Sofi Oksanen, has additionally created a multilingual text – nine language coaches are credited – which certainly enhances the sense of alienation. Rarely has one been more grateful for surtitles!
Many a composer might have produced a score that replicated the appalling violence and terror underlying the story. Saariaho’s approach is subtler. There are indeed passages of snarling menace, but the predominant mode is of sustained sonorities, pierced by shards of sound or more often swishes and taps of percussion. It’s frozen in time, just as the characters have been unable to move on after 10 years.
A notable feature is the use of a specialist in Finno-Ugric folk-singing techniques, Vilma Jää, for the character of Markéta, the dead daughter of Tereza. Initially her otherworldly yodel suggests the naïve innocence of the “angelic” daughter mourned by Tereza. But when we learn how she cruelly mocked the perpetrator as a “frog boy”, goading him to exact revenge, her ululation seems more sinister.
Susanna Mälkki is the assured conductor, and the entire cast is admirable, not least Christopher Purves as Henrik, Timo Riihonen as the Priest, Lucy Shelton as the Teacher and Julie Hega as Iris, whose accusation of Markéta is one of the electrifying moments of the opera.
Another is the bridegroom Tuomas’s confession that he and his sister Iris conspired with their brother in planning the shooting. The clarity and corresponding immediacy of vocalisation are especially welcome in a work where shifts of emotional and moral perspective are used to such devastating effect.
