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Apparently lightning can strike twice in the same place. Following the enormous success of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay earlier this season, the Metropolitan Opera now has a second brilliantly adventurous new work on its stage, Simon Stone’s production of Kaija Saariaho’s final opera, Innocence. Opera is not usually a place I look to for social relevance, but this opera’s topic is one we hear about practically every week – a school shooting. While that may not seem like a promising topic for an opera, Saariaho and her excellent librettists, Sofi Oksanen and Aleksi Barriere, prove otherwise. A student at an international school in Finland kills ten classmates and a teacher. Ten years later a young man (Miles Mykkanen) is getting married to a Romanian orphan (Jacquelyn Stucker) he met on holiday. We soon learn that the young man is the shooter’s brother and the waitress (Joyce DoDonato) called in as a last-minute substitute to serve at the wedding is the mother of Marketa (Vilma Jää), one of his victim’s. The groom’s parents (Rod Gilfry and Kathleen Kim) give the initial appearance of having been able to move forward with their lives, but they really haven’t; nor have the families of the victims, nor the survivors, nor the teacher (Lucy Shelton) and the priest (Stephen Milling) who overlooked warning signals. Even one of the victims appears from beyond the grave and begs to be released from her mother’s grief. The opera’s title is ironic, because no one connected to the incident, including some of the victims, is blameless. Will the waitress tell the bride about her brother-in-law’s crime? What facts about the crime has classmate Iris (Julie Hega) kept hidden? Can anyone put the shooting far enough behind them to have a reasonably normal life? The music, conducted by Susanna Mälkki, serves the story beautifully, from providing an ominous undercurrent for the large part of the libretto that is spoken to the outbursts of emotion in the arias. Among the strong singers, it’s hard to single anyone out, but Stucker, Jäa, Shelton and Hega made an especially strong impression. As the libretto skillfully intertwines the various strands, the remarkable set by Chloe Lamford rotates in synch, revealing a catering hall, a classroom, a kitchen, a supply closet, a school cafeteria, a lavatory and other locations. (It works so well that I forgive her for the ugly set of the current Broadway production of Death of a Salesman.) The costumes by Mel Page fit each character well and the lighting by James Farncombe is excellent. The five acts are performed without intermission in one hour 45 minutes. I highly recommend it, but unfortunately only two more performances remain.
I was not as taken by this opera as the majority. My sense was that it was too diffuse in its drama. Obviously, school shootings are horrors. But we’re used to them now (as we were when the opera was composed), but it's impossible not to be shocked, saddened, and depressed when they happen. Likewise, there are standard explanations and emotional responses (anger, guilt, shame, self-doubt), which this opera and pretty much every dramatization of such an event evokes: the waitress’s anger, the parents’ sense of shame, the priest’s banal psychological assessment of the shooter, the shooter’s relentless moroseness and gloom, his schoolmates’ teasings and tauntings—these are predictable, even if more or less true-to-life. This work would have been more compelling if it had focused the drama on the groom (otherwise unnamed), who harbors a terrible secret that he keeps from his bride and who has the most affecting line when he says that after his brother’s crime, whenever he heard about a shooting, it made him feel “better,” less alone, less deviant.
ReplyDeleteAs it is, the opera did a good job of communicating the universal horror and the inescapable persistence of the past in the present. The set was effective and the music, if not memorable, successfully adumbrated and reinforced the emotions of the characters.