Innocence review – Covent Garden’s phenomenal new opera

Everyone was stunned by what we had been seeing and listening to. It was simply brilliant and unlike anything else I had ever experienced. Innocence tells the tale of a Finnish town in which a wedding is about to take place, but this is a place with a terrible history. Ten years earlier, it had been the scene of a school shooting, now referred to simply as “the tragedy”, when one teacher and ten students had been shot by another pupil. They try not to talk about it, but the wedding stirs memories of the tragedy, as one of those getting married is Tuomas, the brother of the boy convicted of the killings.

Tuomas, however, has told his bride Stela nothing of this grim history but its revelation becomes inevitable when a waitress from the wedding’s caterers falls ill and is replaced at very short notice by Tereza, who was the mother of a girl killed by the groom’s brother all those years ago.

One by one, the main characters tell of the trauma they suffered from the shooting from which they have never recovered: the father of Tuomas, who taught his other son, the killer, to shoot; the mother who blames herself for bringing up a murderer; the priest who sensed that there was something wrong with the boy but did nothing; the woman who barricaded herself in a cupboard, not letting others find refuge there.

They all blame themselves for not stopping the tragedy or not saving the victims. As one of the characters says, the community immediately split into two groups: those who were there and those who were not. The latter put the terrible event behind them and got on with their lives; the former could not do so.

Such a powerfully emotional topic demands music to match and Saariaho’s score is stunningly original and effective. More a changing sound sculpture than a conventional operatic score, it creates a mood of pure horror, mixing low growling sounds with high shrieks that are never so dominating that they distract from the action, but bring another dimension to the story.

The libretto, which was originally in Finnish, has now been changed to add several other languages including English, French, German and Italian, emphasising the international nature of the ideas being expressed. 

Whether we are talking about Dunblane in Scotland in 1996, Erfurt in Germany in 2002, Utøya in Norway in 2011 or any of the dozens of school shootings in America, the story is the same: after the massacre, the authorities turn up to express their grief, and say that measures must be taken to ensure it never happens again. Until next time anyway. Those who were not involved soon forget but others never recover and communities are shattered.

Saariaho’s Innocence is truly an opera for our times, revealing the real, lasting, destructive emotions caused by such tragedies. I feel that anyone who watches it will be changed by the experience, which must be the true measure of the excellence of this production.