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    Review: A Composer Creates Her Masterpiece With ‘Innocence’

    Kaija Saariaho’s grand yet restrained new opera about a tragedy and its reverberations is the most powerful work of her five-decade career.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — “Innocence,” the new opera by Kaija Saariaho, begins in soft, somber gloom. A shadowy mist of cymbal rises off long, sepulchral tones down in the basses and contrabassoon, before a keening fragment of bassoon pierces the quiet with melancholy song.It’s just a few seconds of music, but a mood has been established — comprehensively, unforgettably, yet subtly. Before we know the plot of “Innocence,” we feel it: Something dark and deep has happened, from which memory vibrates into an uncertain future, etched with mourning.We keep feeling it over the hundred minutes that follow, as we come to know intimately a tragedy and its reverberations. Grand yet restrained, a thriller that is also a meditation, “Innocence” is the most powerful work Saariaho has written in a career now in its fifth decade.Appearing through July 12 here at the Aix-en-Provence Festival (and streaming 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 its audience were not so hungry for real, big, important, live opera after so many months largely without. It deserves to travel far beyond an already global itinerary: Helsinki, Amsterdam, London, San Francisco, the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Magdalena Kozena, standing at left next to Jukka Rasilainen, with Pursio at right, is a waitress at the wedding with a connection to the family.Jean-Louis Fernandez/Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceThis is undoubtedly the work of a mature master, in such full command of her resources that she can focus simply on telling a story and illuminating characters. Unlike so many contemporary operas, “Innocence” — featuring the mighty London Symphony Orchestra, conducted with sensitivity and control by Susanna Malkki — doesn’t feel like a sung play with a more or less disconnected, elaborately self-regarding orchestral soundtrack.In fact, during the performance I attended, on Tuesday, I periodically tried to listen exclusively to the instrumental lines and their interplay, but despite the obvious virtuosity and density of the score, my ears kept lifting back up to the stage, to the lucid, inexorable action, the integrated theatrical whole. Porous and agile; simmering beneath and around the voices; and only occasionally, briefly exploding, this is music as a vehicle for exploring and intensifying drama. It is complex, yet confident enough to exist not merely for its own sake.With a libretto by the Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen, and translation work on more than a half-dozen languages by Aleksi Barrière, “Innocence” is set in 21st-century Helsinki, where there has been a deadly shooting at an international school. The action continually shifts back and forth between a recollection of the disaster, by six students and a teacher who went through it, and a wedding party happening 10 years later.It quickly becomes obvious that the two events are linked. The groom is the shooter’s brother, and his family, which has been ostracized and is desperate to move beyond what happened, has kept the whole thing from the bride. (If that wasn’t enough, there’s a reason a waitress has been skulking around, jaw clenched, on the nuptial sidelines: She is the mother of one of the victims.)There is ample operatic precedent for an innocent young woman guided blindly by her lover into a world of violence and deception: Think of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.” “Innocence” recalls those, as well as the ferocious economy of Berg’s “Wozzeck” and Strauss’s “Elektra” in its relatively modest, intermissionless length.Lucy Shelton, at top, as a teacher, and, from left at bottom, Beate Mordal, Julie Hega, Simon Kluth, Camilo Delgado Díaz and Marina Dumont as students affected by a school shooting.Jean-Louis Fernandez/Festival d’Aix-en-ProvenceBut “Innocence” is very much of our time, and — in its play of multiple languages and registers of speaking and singing — very much itself. Saariaho gave it the working title “Fresco”; it was inspired, she has said, by “The Last Supper,” from which she derived the size of the cast (13 soloists) and the piece’s broader questions of culpability and the linked yet separate experiences of people who have shared a trauma.Members of the wedding party sing: the groom, a tenor, in boisterous exhortations; the bride, a soprano, with sweet lyricism. A priest, the only friend the family has left, murmurs ominously about the faith he has lost.The surviving students and teacher, on the other hand, speak — though in precise rhythms artfully tailored to their respective languages of Czech, Swedish, French, German, Spanish, Greek and English. The waitress’s daughter, Marketa (a memorably rapt Vilma Jaa), appears as a kind of phantom, singing in the eerily plain style of Finnish folk music. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir chants offstage, a hint of a world beyond the fevered hothouse of the plot. All these disparate vocal worlds are linked by the orchestra, which wraps around the singers lightly and sleekly — never explicitly underlining them, never competing.The cast matches Saariaho’s score in its commitment and discipline, its refusal to fall into overplaying or Grand Guignol. As the waitress, Magdalena Kozena is a laser beam of pain; as the mother of the groom, Sandrine Piau conjures the uncanny effect of a voice thinned to a thread by suffering.Saariaho’s past operas — starting with the stylized medieval parable “L’Amour de Loin” (2000) — were mostly collaborations with the director Peter Sellars, who lends even canonical works the abstraction of ritual. Here, though, she benefits from a hypernaturalistic staging by Simon Stone, whose style anchors “Innocence” in reality without stinting its surreal fluidity. (Chloe Lamford’s rotating, ever-mutating two-story set, an anxiety-inducing amalgam of school and restaurant, is a crucial player in the drama.)The story unfolds with the crushing inevitability — and sickening surprises — of ancient Greek drama. Varying degrees of guilt slowly seep outward from the shooter to encompass even seemingly blameless characters. A gun was inadvertently provided; suspicious behavior went unreported; a boy was mercilessly teased and assaulted.This is not an unfamiliar plot, and like any superb opera, “Innocence” would seem flat if its text were delivered as a play. That it instead has brooding nuance is thanks to the music; the varieties of vocalization; Saariaho’s intimation, even as she delivers a clear story, that there is much beyond what is enunciated. Opera, as it always has been, is here a home for emotions that could come across as flatly, implausibly extreme, but which are rendered newly mysterious and natural.Kozena and Farahani in the opera. The story unfolds with the crushing inevitability — and sickening surprises — of ancient Greek drama. Jean-Louis Fernandez/Festival d’Aix-en-Provence“Innocence” also gains depth from the politics and history from which it has emerged. Watching events of this kind, in this period, unfold in and around an international school, it is hard not to think of Europe itself, and of its formation as a union in the wake of unspeakable violence. There was a dream that trauma would prove unifying; we have witnessed the gradual realization that the opposite is true. In transitioning from the before times — native languages and folk song — into the lingua franca of English and musical modernism, this onstage society seems to have gained little. Certainly not the ability to fully integrate new members, to function.Yet the opera’s final moments are not without a certain hopeless hopefulness. The students describe small steps they’ve taken to move beyond the tragedy; the vision of the daughter asks the waitress to stop buying her birthday presents, to let her go. The music seethes sadly at this, but the dissonance passes through a sublime moment of consonance — courting sunshine — before drifting back into tension, then transpiring upward into pure shimmer, almost toneless. It is both through and beyond music, then, that Saariaho arrives at an ending that is, if not happy, strangely, completely exhilarating.InnocenceThrough July 12 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, France; and livestreamed on arte.tv July 10; festival-aix.com. More

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    A Reigning Opera Composer Writes of Trauma and ‘Innocence’

    Kaija Saariaho’s labyrinthine work, premiering in France after a pandemic delay, is the most anticipated new opera of the year.AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — Susanna Malkki wanted more.“Can you make the crescendo even bigger here?” she asked the London Symphony Orchestra as she conducted it in a recent rehearsal here. “Don’t be afraid to go beyond the mezzo-piano on the page.”They played the passage again, and this time the music swelled to a shock, one of many in the most anticipated new opera of the year: Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence,” which premieres Saturday at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Commissioned by a host of major houses, it will travel in the coming years to the Finnish and Dutch national operas, the Royal Opera in London, San Francisco Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Nearly a decade in the making, and nearly thwarted by the pandemic, “Innocence” is taut yet immense: a labyrinth of mystery and memory navigated at a breakneck pace, with the forces of a full orchestra, a chorus and a cast of 13.Its plot, so contemporary you could imagine reading about it in tomorrow’s newspaper, recalls Saariaho’s 2006 opera “Adriana Mater” — and is light years from her most famous stage work, the ethereally seductive “L’Amour de Loin” (2000), set in medieval times. Like both of those, along with her comparatively intimate, Noh-inspired “Only the Sound Remains,” from 2015, it has the makings of a singular contribution to the art form, on a scale rarely seen in new operas.From left, the singer Fiona McGown, the composer Kaija Saariaho and the conductor Susanna Malkki.Jean-Louis Fernandez“I have a long career in commissioning,” Pierre Audi, the Aix Festival’s director, said in an interview. “And this is one of the five greatest pieces that I’ve ever been involved with.”It’s difficult to summarize “Innocence,” and its creative team has been intentionally secretive about the plot, which reveals itself like a fuzzy image that gradually comes into focus. The action alternates between a present-day wedding and a long-ago tragedy at an international school, with surprising connections between the two becoming an exploration of trauma and its permeating effects.The core of the opera is its multilingual libretto, by the Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen with translations by Aleksi Barrière, Saariaho’s son and occasional collaborator. The text’s use of different languages — including German, French, English, Greek, Finnish, Spanish and Czech — prompted Saariaho to employ similarly varied vocal techniques, such as folk, Sprechstimme and lyrical, rhythmic speech. (The cast includes a mixture of singers and actors.)Some of the languages were new to Saariaho, and required time to learn the contours of their words and the cadences of their sentences. One role was written specifically with the Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena in mind, for example; before setting to work, Saariaho met with Kozena in Paris to record her speaking.“Analyzing the languages I don’t speak was fascinating, but that’s why it took so long to compose this piece,” Saariaho, who spent several years developing “Innocence” and the better part of four years writing it, said before a rehearsal.During that time, a team came together. Saariaho asked Malkki — one of the world’s leading interpreters of her music, and the dedicatee of this year’s orchestral work “Vista” — to be the conductor.“It was very important for her to know early on who would be doing it,” Malkki, who led “L’Amour de Loin” at the Met when it arrived there and conducted the premiere of the 2006 oratorio “La Passion de Simone,” recalled. “Which of course I felt was an incredible gesture of trust.”A rehearsal for the production, whose action takes place mostly within a rotating building-size set piece.Jean-Louis FernandezMore recently, Saariaho was introduced through Audi to the director Simon Stone, and felt that his temperament was “very well suited” to the opera. In a promotional interview for the festival, Stone spoke about the work’s “beautiful exploration of the scars that we carry with us and the need to reopen wounds so we can heal them properly.”“It’s got,” he added, “a kind of Chekhovian empathy for its characters.”The premiere was planned for last year, but was canceled during the pandemic’s spring surge. By summer, however, the virus’s spread had ebbed enough for the creative team and cast — though not the chorus or orchestra — to rehearse the opera in something of a bubble residency. The work was more or less staged, and the music was prepared as much as it could be with only a piano.“In some ways we were all disappointed,” Kozena said. “But any time you rehearse something, then leave it and come back, it grows and you digest it better. It was a complete luxury for us to rehearse in peace and really just explore it.”Audi referred to that period as “a stroke of luck.” Some premieres originally planned for the past year have been stranded, but “Innocence” was in a position to return as soon as possible. The previous work on it even allowed Stone to be double booked for the 2021 festival, directing “Innocence” and Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” with relatively little friction. Crucially, Audi said, Saariaho’s opera will now be able to travel without further delay.Simon Stone, left, on floor, rehearsing his production, which is running at the same time as his Aix staging of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.”Jean-Louis FernandezOn a recent evening, Stone was able to attend only the first half of a rehearsal for “Innocence,” stopping by Kozena’s dressing room on the way out for a quick note but otherwise looking visibly pleased and saying, “It really is a good show.”“We couldn’t see him very much this year,” Kozena said after he left. But the most pressing work, she added, was musical anyway. She had originally learned the opera with a piano reduction, which inevitably lacked the layered textures of Saariaho’s score.“So now it’s a challenge,” she said. “Hearing the full orchestra, it’s like, ‘Where’s my note?’”A single note can be hard to find in Saariaho’s dense score — a sound world haunted by a ghostly chorus and spectral flourishes that vanish as suddenly as they arrive. Like many of her works, the music is never truly at rest and keeps organically changing shape, with subtly specific characterizations for each role and a fluidity that matches the libretto’s interwoven timelines and perspectives.“I don’t know why or how, but I kept coming back in my mind to ‘The Last Supper’ of Leonardo da Vinci,” Saariaho said. “I was thinking about how all of these 13 people have their own story and their own motivations, and how we all experience every moment differently. We all pay attention to different things. This became a kind of idée fixe for me.”The characters have their own musical signifiers — which means, Malkki said, that “in the beginning, there’s a lot to take in, but then that is the element which makes it very understandable.”Despite the score’s overall density, Kozena has found the vocal writing comfortable. Saariaho, she said, “really understands voices”: “She lets you express yourself, with colors and melody that gives you space to really concentrate on the music and let it be in your body. Only then can you give emotions that are really deep.”With the orchestra finally in the pit, Malkki said, she has continued to make new discoveries. And the more time she spends with “Innocence,” the more she is convinced that it represents the future of opera.“It’s not escapism,” she said. “It’s a work that actually helps us better understand the world that we live in. These are huge themes, bringing all these different destinies together and showing how we have to live together in reconciliation. And that coexistence is there in the music.” More