opera review: Innocence

A year ago, after I attended a semi-staged production of Kaija Saariaho's Adriana Mater at the SF Symphony and was impressed by it both dramatically and musically, a couple commenters suggested that in that case I really ought to attend when SF Opera was putting on Saariaho's Innocence the next spring.

So I signed up and last night (5th of 6 performances) was it.

I have to say, this is a powerful piece. I'd known it concerned the aftermath of a (fictional) school shooting and, especially after learning that one of the production sponsors was an anti-gun-violence group, I feared that it would be a polemic designed to berate the audience with the fervor of its righteousness. I've seen too many contemporary stage plays like that. I should have trusted the nuanced approach that Saariaho and her collaborators took to the topic of revenge in Adriana Mater. This was nothing like a polemic.

The topical theme for the bulk of the opera was the psychological trauma that surviving a mass shooting (either personally or by being the relative of a victim) imposes on the survivors. This was reflected both in the text (by Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen, adapted by dramaturg Aleksi Barrière) and the music. Characters change singing style when under severe stress: a baritone rises to a falsetto keening, a woman nearly chokes on her words in Sprechstimme style, another woman sings in a piercing nasal folk style from rural Finland. Though the principal action is sung in English, another sign of stress is for characters to revert to their native languages. Along with the student survivors being from an international school and speaking - more than singing - in their native languages, the text was in nine different European languages. (Double supertitling rendered both the originals and translations.)

That being the case, I felt that this theme was rather undercut towards the end, partly by the students embarking on facile self-healing (the writeups deny any such thing happens, but it does) but more by the emergence of the real theme, reflecting the title, of breaking down the distinction between guilt and innocence. Some of the innocent turn out to be guilty also, in ways the audience is intended not to be expecting, and not just in the sense of having enabled the shooter by failing to intervene (though that comes up too). On the one hand, this reveals that the distinction between guilt and innocence can hang on a thread, which is a valuable point; but it also distracts from either the psychological damage theme or the process of healing from it, and while one principal character (Tereza) does begin that healing process, by a striking scene of her mental image of her dead daughter telling her to let her go, the other principals are left shattered and there's no resolution.

I can't say more without spoiling the plot (there was a warning on the synopsis in the program book, which I'm glad I didn't read in advance). Despite the sense that this is two pieces welded together, it was both powerful and effective. The music was clattery and anxious, giving a sense of dread even to opening scenes which are supposed to be calm and normal; the singing was chromatic and drama-oriented. The set was a two-story Bauhaus-modernist cube, whose rooms, with exterior walls of glass, were intended to represent multiple buildings at different times; it was constantly rotating to shift the viewer's attention from scene to scene. The first round of applause at the end went to the stagehands.

I haven't forgotten Adriana Mater and I won't forget this either.