Festival review: Innocence
Complex and challenging in its subject matter, Innocence is an opera that makes us question profoundly the phenomenon of mass killings, from their causes to their repercussions.
Innocence is a most powerful opera that tackles head-on some of the most difficult of contemporary themes. It is not the disturbingly violent work that one might have imagined from a casual acquaintance with its subject matter. Yes, it is ostensibly about a school shooting, yet the traumatic events it relates are fictional and not at all gratuitously presented. Rather, it is the layers of memory and the repercussions on the lives of survivors — as well as on the audience, as onlookers — that occupy this opera.
Innocence provides no answers, only questions. Yet the overwhelming feeling from this opera is that librettist Sofi Oksanen and composer Kaija Saariaho have risen above events that shake our lives with thoughtful grace and sanity.
Who is to blame for acts of brutality is not what this opera is about. Instead, Innocence takes us past the distraction and debris of a headline-littered world and reminds us of where the fault lines often really lie: in a fragmented society, broken families and, sometimes in the classroom, in bullying.
Rarely have the elements of word, music and stage design been fused together so extremely well as in Innocence. This is what one admires most and particularly appreciates despite its multi-layered complexity. No other contemporary opera even comes close to the way the creative team under director Simon Stone have executed it.
A giant two-storied cube slowly rotates to reveal each facet of the opera, scene by scene. First we see a bunch of young adults vexing over their troubled lives years after the shooting. A wedding scene then comes into view, in which it transpires that the bride has absolutely no knowledge that she is marrying into the very family that birthed the killer. They have hushed it all up, including her husband. Then we see the classroom where the violence took place, the kids and teacher each recalling the harrowing events as they experienced them, ten years earlier.
Designed by Chloe Lamford with lighting by James Farncombe, it is a brilliant set. Its closed, boxed-in look adds forcibly to the opera’s feeling of psychological oppression.
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For a composer who started writing operas late in her career, Saariaho approaches her task in a most original way, working on a subliminal level without recourse to overtly descriptive methods. Her score begins from the grimmest, murkiest depths, more ominously than Berg’s Wozzeck (with which Innocence has been compared), with the lowest sonorities that the orchestra can muster. Textures are detailed and colouristic, frequently calling on individual instruments to ride up above the rest of the orchestra in filigreed figures and flourishes.
Finnish like Oksanen, Saariaho grew directly out of European avant-garde, and through her acquaintance with Darmstadt and the new French school, she perfected an aesthetic of undiluted purity. Very sadly, she died two years after this work’s premiere at Aix-en-Provence in 2021.
Claire de Sévigné and Tuomas Pursio in Innocence. Photo: Jean-Louis Fernandez / Supplied
In this work, we hear sounds that are readily recognisable in the shifting densities and textures she creates. Ligeti’s Atmospheres comes to mind. Often, her work has a spectral quality of suspended mystery, but in Innocence this becomes a seething bed of perpetual agitation. Her score sounds unremittingly serious, but that’s to be expected with a subject such as this; and it possesses a beauty all of its own.
As each character reveals themselves one by one, we also notice how excellently Saariaho writes for voice. Innocence is proof that atonal language can be made to feel entirely natural and can convey real, visceral human emotion. She makes her decisions carefully. All the school students have speaking roles, except for one: Markéta, who appears as a ghost before her classmates and her waitress mother Tereza, sings in a spontaneous, untutored folk style that sometimes verges on yodelling — suggesting her innocence.
The opera’s final scene, when Markéta (sung by Erika Hammarberg) bids farewell to her heartbroken, wailing mother (Jenny Carlstedt), is incredibly moving. Her poignant last words are “Mama, let me go”.
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Saariaho writes yet more differently for the choir. Ethereal strands of massed voices augment the orchestra in a way that resembles electronic music.
We have in Adelaide the same prestigious production that Stone and team premiered at Aix-en-Provence and took to Finland, London, Amsterdam and San Francisco. The cast is essentially unchanged but for a few swaps. Vocal quality is superlative, as are acting and diction — important when there are no less than nine languages in Oksanen’s libretto.
Photo: Jean-Louis Fernandez / Supplied
Faustine de Monès, as Stela the bride, and Sean Panikkar as Tuomos the bridegroom, are strongly characterised, as also the parents-in-law Claire de Sévigné (Patricia) and Tuomas Pursio (Henrik). The latter, behaving like a drunken idiot by the end, really does deserve a sizeable portion of the blame as the killer’s neglectful, egotistical father. But he pleads for forgiveness.
Lucy Shelton as the teacher and Teddy Tahu Rhodes as the priest both give highly magnetic performances, while Julie Hega adds huge force as the sultry student Iris. Her face-off with Markéta in the classroom scenes is one of the key points of tension in this opera, and it’s all about bullying — be sure to follow this strand if you go.
The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under French conductor Clément Mao Takacs play at their absolute best. Their precision is exemplary and another reason to appreciate this opera.
Innocence holds a mirror to society as few contemporary operas do, and one comes away really feeling that art has captured the Zeitgeist of today’s strange, contorted world.
It is a huge credit to the Adelaide Festival to have this opera here, and it should not be missed.
Innocence by Kaija Saariaho is performed again at the Adelaide Festival Theatre on March 2nd, 4th and 5th. This is a review of opening night on February 28th
Read more 2025 Adelaide Festival coverage here on InReview