The new opera, which anchored the Aix-en-Provence Festival, is a monumental cry against gun violence.<\/p>\n
Kaija Saariaho\u2019s opera \u201cInnocence,\u201d which had its premi\u00e8re at the Aix-en-Provence Festival on July 3rd, contains one of the most unnerving scenes I\u2019ve witnessed at a theatre. About forty minutes into the piece, in a scene marked \u201cIT,\u201d the chorus chants the phrase \u201cWhen it happened\u201d in staggered rhythm, with low piano and double-basses punching up each syllable. A frame drum raps out sixteenth notes in rapid-fire bursts, and two trumpets let loose a series of \u201crips\u201d\u2014quick, shrieking upward glissandos. Then the orchestral mayhem cuts off abruptly; sopranos oscillate queasily between the notes A-flat and G; and the brutal rhythm resumes in the percussion. The terror is made explicit onstage, as a high-school student stumbles through a door, his arms covered in blood. A shooter, a fellow-student, is laying siege to a Finnish international school. Opera, which has been making art from death for more than four centuries, is recording a new kind of horror.<\/p>\n
The shock of the moment is redoubled by the fact that the audience is only just discovering what the opera is really about. At the beginning, a strangely cheerless wedding reception is in progress, at a restaurant in Finland. The groom\u2019s brother was involved in an unnamed tragedy ten years in the past; the bride, an immigrant from Romania, knows nothing of that history. A waitress is sickened upon learning which family has hired her for a wedding: her daughter died in the tragedy in question. Evasive locutions of politeness and shame conceal the specifics of what happened until performers begin enacting the memories of the survivors.<\/p>\n
The libretto is by the Finnish-Estonian novelist Sofi Oksanen, who knows how to play on our expectations and then short-circuit them. The title is ironic: the characters refuse to arrange themselves into a simplistic array of heroes and villains. The killer is never heard from, though there are glimpses of him as a bullied kid. The aftermath is chaotic: media sensationalism and political doublespeak have done their work. The groom confesses that he rejoices at the news of new shootings, because they confirm that \u201cmonsters are bred in other families, too.\u201d A teacher subjects her students\u2019 papers to paranoid analysis, searching for signs of mental instability: \u201cI reported any weird syntax in their essays, any change in their handwriting, until I understood I wasn\u2019t fit for teaching anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
The psychological-thriller components of \u201cInnocence\u201d mark a change for Saariaho, who rose to fame by employing modernist and avant-garde techniques to summon otherworldly, dreamlike spheres. Her best-known score is the opera \u201cL\u2019Amour de Loin,\u201d which premi\u00e8red in Salzburg in 2000 and arrived at the Met in 2016; it gorgeously evokes the rarefied longings of the twelfth-century troubadour Jaufr\u00e9 Rudel. Saariaho\u2019s second opera, \u201cAdriana Mater\u201d (2006), made a turn toward contemporary reality, telling of a woman raped in time of war, but its approach was more meditative and abstract. \u201cInnocence,\u201d which Saariaho completed in 2018, has a seething rawness. It\u2019s as if the turmoil of recent years had prompted her to abandon aesthetic distance and enter the melee of the real.<\/p>\n
Saariaho has said in an interview that she modelled \u201cInnocence\u201d on two great Expressionist shockers of the early twentieth century, \u201cElektra\u201d and \u201cWozzeck.\u201d Like those operas, \u201cInnocence\u201d lasts less than two hours, its five acts and twenty-five scenes unfolding without interruption. The orchestral prologue introduces familiar elements of Saariaho\u2019s sound world: solo woodwind and brass lines that twirl about or trill in place; eerie clockwork ostinatos on celesta and harp; grandly groaning textures for full ensemble. Sharper-edged, more propulsive patterns soon break in, but they seldom establish a steady forward motion. The atmosphere is at once sensual and unsettled\u2014dread in vivid colors.<\/p>\n
Generational and demographic divides in the opera\u2019s community are evident in a controlled squabble of vocal styles. The members of the wedding party\u2014labelled Bride, Groom, Mother-in-Law, Father-in-Law, Priest, and Waitress\u2014are conventional singing parts. Five survivors of the shooting are portrayed by actors or singing actors, who speak, variously, in Swedish, French, Spanish, German, and Greek. An English teacher chants her lines in Sprechstimme\u2014the half-spoken, half-sung manner associated with Schoenberg\u2019s vocal works. Mark\u00e9ta, the shooting victim mourned by her waitress mother, makes ghostly visitations, her folkish, singsong melodies slicing through the prevailing density of Saariaho\u2019s harmonic textures.<\/p>\n