About the work
"Innocence" is the fourth and final opera by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, premiered on 3 July 2021 at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, directed by Simon Stone and conducted by Susanna Mälkki. The libretto is by the Finnish-Estonian writer Sofi Oksanen, shaped dramaturgically into a multilingual text by Aleksi Barrière: the characters speak and sing in nine different languages. The work was co-commissioned by an international consortium of houses including Dutch National Opera, the Royal Opera House, San Francisco Opera, the Finnish National Opera and the Metropolitan Opera.
Plot
Two time planes are inextricably interwoven. In the present, a wealthy family in Finland celebrates a wedding at an upscale restaurant. Ten years earlier, a mass shooting at an international school shattered the community. A stand-in waitress, Tereza, turns out to be the mother of one of the murdered girls — and the groom is the brother of the perpetrator, a secret the family has kept ever since. Their collision forces buried guilt, complicity and grief to the surface, while the dead schoolgirl Markéta returns as a voice from the past. Saariaho sets the opera-singing "wedding world" against the spoken, whispered Sprechgesang of the survivors, weaving orchestra and electronics into a dense sonic space.
Cultural significance
"Innocence" is regarded as one of the most significant operas of the 21st century and travelled internationally after Aix — to Helsinki, Amsterdam, London and the Metropolitan Opera, among others. Saariaho's death in June 2023 makes the work a capstone to her career. It is celebrated for interweaving two timelines, for the radical multilingualism that gives the collective trauma many voices, and for Saariaho's characteristic, spectrally inflected soundworld. The opera asks how a community goes on living after an act of violence, where complicity begins, and how long the consequences of a crime endure.