ChristianO’s LitMusicFoodArtGram

Not since Elektra has an opera so relentlessly hovered at the edge of bristling tension as Innocence, Kaija Saariaho’s final masterpiece. At its core, the work confronts the persistence of trauma in the aftermath of communal tragedy—a school shooting whose pained memories recursively fracture and dissolve into the present, rendered in an innovative musical idiom at once spectral, unstable, finely wrought, and hauntingly beautiful. Working with librettist Sofi Oksanen, Saariaho constructs a polyphonic tapestry that interweaves spoken text and sung lines across multiple languages—a narrative strategy that both connects and destabilizes perspective, mirroring the disorientation of those left behind.  Saariaho’s swan song is as probing as it is beautiful, posing difficult questions: can blame be contained within a single perpetrator, or does it radiate outward—into family, school, society? Is anyone truly innocent? The opera ultimately unsettles the very notion of innocence as a fixed moral category. Grief in this opera is experienced as communal stratified, and often contradictory—each perspective held in uneasy counterpoint against other voices. The drama builds toward revelation that denies catharsis, instead culminating as a fragile ethical reckoning. Having seen Innocence during its American premiere in San Francisco and more recently at the Metropolitan Opera, I’ve come to regard it as my favorite modern opera. At the Met, Joyce DiDonato was most devastating as Teresa, and the ensemble largely met the work’s formidable demands. However, I found myself preferring several aspects of the San Francisco performances: at the Met, the uneven amplification occasionally rendered spoken lines indistinct, and Susanna Mälkki’s conducting, though finely detailed, felt less taut than Clément Mao-Takacs’s more immediate, dramatically charged reading. Among the spoken roles, Lucy Shelton and Julie Hega (a sinuously menacing Iris) stood out, while Rod Gilfry and Miles Mykkanen once again brought intelligence and gravitas to Henrik and Tuomas. Vilma Jää’s eerie vocalizations made Markéta’s folk singing emerge as one of Saariaho’s most ingenious and final musical inventions.