Classical
The connection between a wedding in Helsinki in the 2000s and a traumatic event 10 years earlier is revealed with gut-wrenching assuredness.
Claire de Sévigné as the mother-in-law (Patricia), second from left, Miles Mykkanen as the bridegroom (Tuomas), Lilian Farahani as the bride (Stela), Ruxandra Donose as the waitress (Tereza) and Rod Gilfry as the father-in-law (Henrik) in “Innocence” by Kaija Saariaho, Sofi Oksanen and Aleksi Barrière.
Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera
“Innocence,” the fearless, emotionally ravaging 2021 opera that had its U.S. premiere Saturday, June 1, at the War Memorial Opera House, takes guilt, the title’s nominal opposite, as its thematic leitmotif.
In this dramatic exploration of a mass school shooting and its aftermath, survivors and victims, the shooter’s family and his collaborators, a self-lacerating teacher and a priest who saw something and did nothing revisit and relive their roles in a tragedy that left 10 students and one teacher dead at an international school.
Powerful though it is as a force that both isolates and connects the characters, guilt is only one aspect of this deeply imagined work. With a dynamically brooding score by the late Kaija Saariaho, multi-valenced Finnish libretto by Sofi Oksanen and multilingual libretto and dramaturgy by Aleksi Barrière, “Innocence” peels away the carapace of secrets and self-deception, cruelty and rationalization to get at the time-defying permanence these gun tragedies can impose and the remorseless churn of time itself.
Rowan Kievits as student No. 4 (Anton), left,Beate Mordal as student No. 2 (Lilly), Lucy Shelton as the teacher, Marina Dumont as student No. 6 (Alexia),Vilma Jää as student No. 1 (Markéta), Camilo Delgado Díaz as student No. 5 (Jerónimo) and Julie Hega as student No. 3(Iris) in S.F. Opera’s “Innocence.”
Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera
To call the opera timely is both self-evidently true to the drumbeat of mass shootings and reductive. “Timeless” is more apt. As the action shuttles back and forth from a Helsinki wedding party to the shooting 10 years earlier, scene after vividly realized scene binds past and present together onChloe Lamford’s revolving two-level set. Doorways, balconies, glass-walled rooms and stairways become an Escher-like maze leading from a wedding banquet room to a terror-struck classroom with students running for their lives and back to the wedding hall kitchen, where the quotidian business of catering calmly proceeds. An ingenious design, effected by a team of backstage technicians, makes the time-spanning transitions seamless.
Jointly co-commissioned and co-produced by San Francisco Opera and multiple other companies where the piece has been or will be presented, “Innocence” is a triumph in Simon Stone’s exacting and resonant production. The performances, by a brilliantly focused ensemble cast that sing and/or speak in multiple languages and psychologically distinct styles, are by turns stark and subtle, blunt and battened down. Amplification, usually an unwelcome crutch in opera, is used to pointedly heightening effect. Conductor Clèment Mao-Takacstaps the darkly colored, volatile temperament of Saariaho’s score. The offstage San Francisco Opera Chorus provides subliminal, chant-like musical ballast.
Miles Mykkanen as the bridegroom (Tuomas), left, Lilian Farahani as the bride (Stela), Claire de Sévigné as the mother-in-law (Patricia) and Rod Gilfry as the father-in-law (Henrik) in S.F. Opera’s “Innocence.”
Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera
Like “timely,” the “triumph” characterization, richly deserved as it is, nonetheless feels inadequate to the experience of this 100-minute, intermission-free performance. The sustaining achievement of “Innocence” comes not in some cathartic communal discovery but in the way its characters try and fail and try again to come to terms with the unfathomable.
More Information
“Innocence”:San Francisco Opera. Through June 21. $26-$426. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-3300,sfopera.com
“Innocence” live stream: 7:30 p.m. June 12. Available on demand 10 a.m. June 13 for 48 hours. $27.50.sfopera.com
For some, like the shooter’s bridegroom brother (an imploded Miles Mykkanen) it means a tormented late confession. For others, like the classroom teacher (Lucy Shelton), speech itself has slowed to take in every minute detail she might have missed. Julie Hega offers an essence of curdled adolescent rage. The shooter himself appears as an anonymous huddled figure. When his wishfully naive mother (Claire de Sèvignè) and stolid but fragile father (Rod Gilfry) grasp at hope and despair, respectively, their voices stretch toward unreachable pain-scarred heights.
The inventive two-story set of S.F. Opera’s “Innocence,” by Kaija Saariaho, Sofi Oksanenand Aleksi Barrière.
Photo: Cory Weaver/San Francisco Opera
In a cast full of glinting specificity, mezzosoprano Ruxandra Donose is the opera’s defining center of gravity as a waitress who recognizes the family of the student who murdered her daughter. Moving in a kind of tense trance from room to room, her voice composed but barely contained, she bares her grief like a fresh wound. It pours forth in a bruising scene with the shooter’s father and the achingly tender exchanges with a daughter she summons as a grown woman (the exquisiteVilma Jää).
“Innocence” ends with a quiet, bittersweet aubade, as one character moves on and another stands still. Here, as throughout this contemporary masterwork, agony, aspiration and unanswerable questions fuse.
Steven Winn is a freelance writer.
Steven Winn