AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France – “Innocence”, the new opera by Kaija Saariaho, begins in a soft, gloomy gloom. A shadowy cymbal mist rises from long, ghastly tones in the bass and contrabassoon, before a screeching bassoon fragment penetrates the silence with melancholy singing.
It’s only a few seconds of music, but a mood has established itself – comprehensive, unforgettable and yet subtle. Before we know the plot of “Innocence”, we feel it: Something dark and deep has happened, out of which the memory swings into an uncertain future, engraved with grief.
We feel it again and again in the following hundred minutes when we get to know a tragedy and its aftermath. Great yet reserved, a thriller that is also a meditation, “Innocence” is the most powerful work Saariaho has written in his career in the fifth decade.
Seen here at the festival in Aix-en-Provence until July 12th (and streamed on arte.tv on Saturday), after its planned debut in 2020 was canceled, it would be the premiere of the year even in a normal season – even if his audiences weren’t so hungry for real, great, important live opera after so many months. It deserves to travel well beyond an already global itinerary: Helsinki, Amsterdam, London, San Francisco, the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
This is undoubtedly the work of a mature master who has mastered her resources so well that she can simply focus on telling a story and illuminating characters. In contrast to so many contemporary operas, “Innocence” – with the mighty London Symphony Orchestra, conducted with sensitivity and control by Susanna Malkki – does not seem like a sung piece with a more or less incoherent, artistically self-centered orchestral soundtrack.
In fact, during the performance I attended on Tuesday, I tried to listen only to the instrumental lines and their interplay from time to time, but despite the apparent virtuosity and density of the score, my ears kept lifting up to the stage, to the clear, relentless ones Action, the integrated theatrical whole. Porous and agile; Boils under and around the voices; and only occasionally, exploding briefly, is this music as a vehicle for exploring and intensifying the drama. It’s complex but confident enough not to exist just for its own sake.
With a libretto by the Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen and translations in more than half a dozen languages by Aleksi Barrière, “Innocence” is set in Helsinki 21st. The plot alternates between a memory of the disaster by six students and a teacher who went through it , and a wedding reception that takes place 10 years later.
It quickly becomes clear that the two events are related. The bridegroom is the brother of the Sagittarius, and his family, ostracized and desperate about what happened, withheld the whole thing from the bride. (If that wasn’t enough, there’s a reason a waitress crept around the edge of the wedding with clenched jaws: She’s the mother of one of the victims.)
For an innocent young woman who is blindly led by her lover into a world of violence and deception, there are plenty of role models in opera: think of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande”. In its relatively modest, non-stop length, “Innocence” is reminiscent of this as well as the cruel economy of Berg’s “Wozzeck” and Strauss’s “Elektra”.
But “Innocence” is a large part of our time and – in its play with several languages and speaking and song registers – very much itself. Saariaho gave it the working title “Fresco”; It was inspired by “The Last Supper”, from which she derived the size of the cast (13 soloists) and the wider guilt questions of the piece and the related but separate experiences of people who shared a trauma.
Members of the wedding party sing: the groom, a tenor, in loud admonitions; the bride, a soprano, with sweet lyrics. A priest, the family’s only friend, mumbles ominously about his lost faith.
The surviving students and teachers, on the other hand, speak – but in precise rhythms that are artfully coordinated with their respective languages Czech, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Greek and English. The waitress’s daughter, Marketa (a memorably rapt Vilma Jaa), appears as a kind of phantom and sings in the incredibly simple style of Finnish folk music. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir sings backstage, a touch of a world beyond the feverish hustle and bustle of the action. All these disparate vocal worlds are connected by the orchestra, which wraps itself easily and smoothly around the singers – never underlining them explicitly, never competing.
The cast matches Saariaho’s score in their dedication and discipline, their refusal to lapse into dubbing or grand guignol. As a waitress, Magdalena Kozena is a laser beam of pain; As the groom’s mother, Sandrine Piau conjures up the eerie effect of a voice thinned to a thread from suffering.
Saariaho’s previous operas – beginning with the stylized medieval parable “L’Amour de Loin” (2000) – were mostly collaborations with the director Peter Sellars, who even gives canonical works the abstraction of ritual. Here, however, she benefits from a hypernaturalistic staging by Simon Stone, whose style “Innocence” anchors in reality without losing its surreal fluidity. (Chloe Lamford’s rotating, ever-changing two-story set, a terrifying mix of school and restaurant, is a key player in the drama.)
The story unfolds with the crushing inevitability – and disgusting surprises – of ancient Greek drama. Different feelings of guilt slowly seep out from the Sagittarius to encompass even seemingly impeccable characters. A weapon was accidentally provided; suspicious behavior was not reported; a boy was mercilessly bullied and attacked.
This is not an unknown plot, and like any great opera, “Innocence” would appear flat if its text were delivered as a play. It is thanks to the music that it has brooding nuances instead; the varieties of utterance; Saariaho’s suggestion, though it gives a clear story, that there is much more than what is being said. The opera here is still a home for emotions that can seem flat, implausible, extreme, but are now mysterious and natural.
“Innocence” also gains depth from the politics and history from which it emerged. When you watch events of this kind happen in and around an international school during this period, it is difficult not to think of Europe itself and its formation as a Union in the wake of unspeakable violence. There was a dream that trauma would prove unifying; we have gradually come to realize that the opposite is the case. In the transition from earlier times – mother tongues and folk songs – to the lingua franca of English and musical modernity, this stage company seems to have gained little. Certainly not the ability to fully integrate new members, to function.
But the last moments of the opera are not without a certain hopeless hope. Students describe small steps they took to overcome tragedy; the daughter’s vision prompts the waitress not to buy her birthday presents anymore, to let them go. The music simmers sadly, but the dissonance runs through a sublime moment of consonance – around the sunshine – before it drifts back into tension and then fades up into pure shimmer, almost tonelessly. So it is through both the music and beyond the music that Saariaho comes to an end that, if not happy, is oddly completely exhilarating.
innocence
Until July 12th at the Festival of Aix-en-Provence, France; and livestream on arte.tv July 10th; festival-aix.com.
