Kaija Saariaho’s clever but cold “Innocence”
<First published online in the Financial Times on April 18, 2023>
Why was I left cold by Innocence, the new opera by Kaija Saariaho, which was greeted with rapturous ovations by its first-night audience in Covent Garden on Monday? The Finnish composer’s music has been acclaimed in London before: L’amour de loin (2000) was staged in 2009 by English National Opera, and her music is part of the superlative dance creation Four Quartets (2018), choreographed by Pam Tanowitz and seen in 2019 at the Barbican.
Innocence, however, is the first production of a Saariaho work at the Royal Opera House, which co-commissioned it. It’s an ambitious work, set in the present day, about the trauma experienced by 13 people of multiple nationalities, all affected by a gun massacre of children at a school 10 years earlier.
Having loved those earlier Saariaho works, I took no pleasure from this production, which was first staged in Aix-en-Provence in 2021. The programme synopsis made it sound impressive and moving, an impression unmatched by the opera itself. Although Innocence is intelligent, imaginative and deeply concerned with expression, its effect is chilly and detached. I could argue that this is related to the effect of trauma on the psyche; but my heart wouldn’t be in it.
The five-act opera runs without intervals at one hour and three-quarters in multiple languages. Some of the characters speak (their voices heavily amplified), others sing. At only one point — in the final act, when Tuomas (Markus Nykänen) recalls his brother (who did the shooting while Tuomas and his brother’s friend Iris, despite having planned it with him, got cold feet) — does a vocal line take on the expansive melodic quality that lies at the heart of opera. In L’Amour de loin, that melodic aspect, wonderfully connected to the music’s harmonies and adventurous sound world, was a large part of the work’s haunting and poignant beauty. In Innocence, by contrast, the characters labour to demonstrate expressiveness in ways that seldom ring true and are seldom touching.
The music abounds with ideas, however, all of them clever. As Markéta, a child killed in the shooting, Vilma Jää sings in a manner derived from Finno-Ugric folk music; her plaintive final calls to her mother are the opera’s most haunting moments and bring us closest to the innocence of the title. Those who know Janáček’s operas may recognise echoes of some musical speech patterns. Elsewhere, some of the polyglot overlap recalls a beach scene in Britten’s Death in Venice. Above all, Saariaho’s palette of orchestral colours keeps changing: at the opera’s conclusion, both highest and lowest notes are softly sustained. Yet do these 13 characters have pulses and nervous systems? Innocence is less drama than laboratory, with characters submitted to a series of experiments.
Simon Stone’s direction exacerbates the lack of dramatic propulsion in Saariaho’s music. Chloe Lamford’s almost continually revolving set has two levels, with different rooms on either floor, so that we often see four characters or groups. Susanna Mälkki conducts. The stage performers, led by Nykänen, Jää, Jenny Carlstedt, Sandrine Piau, Lilian Farahani and Christopher Purves, are all more than efficient.
@Financial Times, 2023