by Jeff Dunn
About his 2000 opera Dead Man Walking, composer Jake Heggie wrote that his librettist Terrence McNally “recognized that an opera is about the music and that he would do whatever he could to serve that.” 24 years later, on the same San Francisco Opera stage, composer Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence, just like Heggie’s Dead Man, grips audiences in a story about a horrific crime and its relation to participants, victims, and society.
But Saariaho’s work is so less about the music, that I doubt it would fit McNally’s characterization of opera. Instead, the score, brilliant in mood-setting, character delineation, and orchestration, remains a handmaiden to staging and acting. With the notable exception of the music for Marketa, a slain student, it avoids song, that mainstay of the operatic past. It’s more of a film soundtrack with voices as instruments.
” … Performances by the 21 principals are excellent … “
Nevertheless, opera or not, Innocence is a powerful experience. Sofi Oksanen’s libretto begins with Tuomas’s wedding to his Romanian bride, Stela, in Helsinki. She doesn’t know that her groom is the younger brother of a school shooter who killed 10 of his fellow students and a teacher a decade earlier. Things unravel as she learns the facts from the mother of Marketa, one of the murdered students.
Chloe Lamford’s mesmerizing set is a variably rotating, two-story collection of chambers doing double duty as hotel facilities of the wedding’s present and school rooms of the shooting’s past. Survivors, along with the murdered, wander through the set like rats in a maze, telling or singing their heartbreaking stories. The shooter himself never appears. While one side of the massive set faces the audience, 29 stage crew members quickly and silently refurbish the back rooms to match the setting of upcoming scenes.
It is a tribute to Oksanen’s genius that the progressive introduction of 11 vocalists and eight actors rarely makes one wonder who’s who in the story. As more and more is revealed about the tragedy, one is dragged deeper into the pain of the participant’s despair, aptly underlined by Saariaho’s underscore. At the same time, one discovers that hardly anyone can be deemed innocent of wrongdoing.
The drama forces us to contemplate that from the point of view of today’s society, innocence is not only an ironic misnomer but an impossibility for adolescents and anyone older. There are tiny glimmers at the end that a few survivors are moving on with their lives, but Saariaho provides no obvious indication of it in her dour music, despite what the text indicates—a blow to optimists.
Performances by the 21 principals are excellent, especially those by the shooter’s father, Henrik, sung by baritone Rod Gilfry, and Marketa, sung in an unforgettable folk-song-like manner by soprano Vilma Jää. Conductor Clément Mao-Takacs does a fine job of sensitively guiding the 64 orchestra and 40 offstage chorus members.
Innocence is meticulously engineered to put its audience in an empathetic thrall with the precursors and consequences of school massacres. Even traditional opera lovers should attend — once. Even if it isn’t about the music.
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ASR’s Classical Music Section Editor, Jeff Dunn, is a retired educator and project manager who’s been writing music and theater reviews for Bay Area and national journals since 1995. He is a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle and the National Association of Composers, USA. His musical Castle Happy (co-author John Freed), about Marion Davies and W.R. Hearst, received a festival production at the Altarena Theater in 2017. His opera, Finding Medusa, with librettist Madeline Puccioni, was completed in January 2023. Jeff has won prizes for his photography, and is also a judge for the Northern California Council of Camera Clubs.
| Production | Innocence |
|---|---|
| Musical Direction | Clément Mao-Takacs |
| Stage Direction | Louise Bakker |
| Producing Company | San Francisco Opera |
| Production Dates | Thru June 21st |
| Production Address | 301 Van Ness Ave, SF, CA |
| Website | www.sfopera.com |
| Telephone | (415) 392-4400 |
| Tickets | $32-$426 |
| Reviewer Score | Max in each category is 5/5 |
| Overall | 4.5/5 |
| Performance | 4/5 |
| Music | 3.5/5 |
| Libretto | 4.5/5 |
| Stagecraft | 4.5/5 |
| Aisle Seat Review PICK? | YES! |