Yesterday afternoon I returned to the War Memorial Opera House for a second encounter with a performance by the San Francisco Opera (SFO) of Innocence, Kaija Saariaho’s sixth and final opera. On my first encounter, Orchestra seating provided an excellent account of the rich complexity taking place on stage. However, my subscription ticket also affords an equally excellent view of the orchestra pit, which turned out to be very informative.
The fact is that, for a relatively brief opera (about 105 minutes), Innocence begins with a moderately lengthy overture, which makes full use of the instrumental resources. This includes a large percussion sections, divided between the right and left extremes of the orchestra pit, framing a rich collection of strings, winds, and brass. Listening to that orchestra became a visual journey to discover how different combinations of instruments were deployed, all in the interest of establishing the performances that would take place by both the vocal soloists and the choral resources after the rising of the curtain. All of those resources were meticulously managed by conductor Clément Mao-Takacs, beginning with the opening gesture of that overture.
Soprano Vilma Jää as one of the high school students with soprano Lucy Shelton as the teacher (left) and Rowan Kievits as another student (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of SFO)
After the overture concluded, I was back on familiar territory. The basic time-line of the plot is fragmented in such a way that each episode accounts for an event that has both predecessors and successors. Central to that time-line is a violent shooting incident, which took place at an international high school. The event justified the creation of a libretto developed by dramaturg Aleksi Barrière in which Finnish (Saariaho’s own language) is interleaved with English, Czech, Romanian, French, Swedish, German, Spanish, and Greek, presumably all spoken by different students at the international school where the shooting took place. An all-English account was projected above the stage, while on both the right and left of the stage, there were projections of the words actually being sung. This approach enriched the context of the school in which the shooting took place, and those in the audience could appreciate the diversity of the students when they “spoke” in their own respective languages.
The narrative of the opera itself unfolds through the disclosure of the events that take place before and after that shooting. The “after” events deal with how the family of the shooter moved on, and the opera begins with the reception for the wedding of the family’s younger brother. As might guessed, in such a celebratory event, denial of the past dominated. However, much of the drama hinges on how the caterer is just as connected to the school shooting as were the groom and his parents. On the other hand, the “before” events are only disclosed towards the very end of the opera, throwing an entirely new light of the viewer’s perspective of just about all the members of the cast.
Between the polyglot libretto and the meticulous reordering of the time-line, Innocence is an impressively sophisticated undertaking. Nevertheless, the staging by Simon Stone (making his SFO debut) and the direction here in San Francisco by Louise Bakker (also an SFO debut) never confounded the audience with too-much or too-obscure. The clarity of the overall time-line emerged through the interplay of the individual episodes. One might almost say that this is a narrative that does not reveal itself until the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle is put in place, but the unfolding of the episodes themselves never bogs down the attentive viewer in confusion.
In my earlier article, I discussed the individual members of the cast. On this second encounter I found myself more wrapped up in Saariaho’s music. Having already familiarized myself with the diversity of personalities, I could focus on how the music disclosed the events they experienced. Of course all operas are products of the interplay between narrative and music. In this case, however, the narrative was so sophisticated that I came away highly impressed by how effectively the music guided me through its many twists and turns, enhancing the clarity of the experience, rather than merely accompanying it.
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