Opera about a school massacre holds a mirror up to the brutality of the United States

When Innocence premiered in 2021 at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, EL PAÍS critic Luis Gago wrote: “If there are still those who think that opera is an outdated or anachronistic genre, with no possible place in the current world, as soon as they see and hear Innocence they will immediately change their minds.”

Nowhere is the story told in Kaija Saariaho’s Finnish opera — the aftermath of a school shooting — more relevant than in the United States. The Metropolitan Opera premiered it on April 4, and three more performances are scheduled for this week. In New York, the applause has been unanimous for a work (“A call to make history,” as Gago remarked) that, after Saariaho’s death two years after its French premiere — where she appeared in a wheelchair, already very ill — became the swan song of a grand dame of European composition.

Last Saturday morning’s performance was followed by a standing ovation lasting several minutes for the performers and for Susanna Mälkki, who conducts the orchestra with determination. The audience, warned by the program notes of the difficult subject matter, also felt a chill after witnessing a performance of a story all too familiar in a country plagued by mass shootings.

There is, of course, American society’s intimate connection to the epidemic of gun violence, whose most brutal expression regularly manifests itself in tragedies in schools in towns and cities, where children quickly learn, through drills, what to do if a gunman bursts into their classroom. But there is also the depth with which the script addresses the issue in all its complexity.

A work by the award-winning Finnish novelist Sofi Oksanen (author of Purge), adapted by playwright Aleksi Barrière, Saariaho’s son, Innocence blends, in several languages ​​(from French to English and from Spanish to Romanian), the day the tragedy unfolds, with its wounds, still open 10 years later. It is then that the perpetrator of the massacre, hiding behind a new name, is released from the prison where he was incarcerated as a minor.

The plot unfolds in five brief acts without intermission and within an elegant stage design, conceived on several levels by Simon Stone, which slowly rotates while imperceptibly transforming. The story focuses on the traumas of the survivors and also on the responsibility of the victims; on the guilt of those who dodged the bullets; and, particularly, on the pain of two characters played by the stars of the production: American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and the young Finnish pop star Vilma Jää, a specialist in Finno-Ungrian folk songs. DiDonato plays a mother who lost her daughter (Jää) and unwittingly accepts a job as a waitress at the wedding of the killer’s brother, a job that resurrects her worst memories.

Innocence also lingers, driven by Saariaho’s concise and unsentimental music, on the remorse of the shooter’s family, a ghostly presence. Could his parents have done more to prevent the tragedy? Does his brother have the right to put those terrible events behind him and embark on a new life with the woman he marries, from whom he has thus far concealed his past?

An urgent debate

That part is the most unsettling and unexpected. It’s not common to see the most pressing debates on a current issue take to the stage of an opera house. The responsibility of the monster’s parents is a matter that, since the opera’s premiere, has been placed at the center of the discussion about mass shootings in the United States, given that gun control seems far beyond the reach of a society built on the right to own them.

Six months after the premiere in Aix-en-Provence, a 15-year-old boy named Ethan Crumbley entered his high school in northern Detroit with a 9mm pistol that his father had just bought him as an early Christmas present. He killed four students between the ages of 14 and 17, and wounded seven others.

Nothing seems particularly exceptional about this story in a country where, between 2008 and 2024, 794 mass shootings were recorded in schools, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, Everytown, and Education Week databases. Nor is it particularly unusual in a country where, of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in history, two occurred in elementary schools: Sandy Hook in 2011 (26 victims), and Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were killed in 2022.

What’s extraordinary about the Detroit tragedy is what came after it, when a jury held the boy’s parents responsible, for failing to see (or choosing not to) the glaring warning signs. They were sentenced to 15 years in prison, however contradictory it may seem that the killer was tried as an adult responsible for his actions in order to be sentenced to life imprisonment.

That precedent led a court to find Colin Gray guilty last March; he is the father of a 14-year-old boy who killed four people (two students and two teachers) at a high school in Georgia in 2024. Gray, who also gave his son the gun, will learn his sentence in July. The father in Innocence (played at the Met by American baritone Rod Gilfry) also teaches his son to shoot and blames himself for having been too strict with his upbringing.

At the Met, the echoes of another infamous massacre, that of Columbine, a town in Colorado where two teenagers murdered 12 students and a high school teacher before taking their own lives, also resonate.

That tragedy ushered in a new era of mass shootings in the United States in 1999, especially in high schools, and took root in the collective imagination thanks to two films: a documentary by Michael Moore and a chilling fictional reconstruction by Gus Van Sant.

Before you continue: if you haven’t seen the opera and you’re the kind of person who considers it a crime to have a story spoiled, perhaps you should stop reading here.

Like the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre, the killer in Innocence also meticulously plans his carnage for a year, along with his brother and a friend, who have second thoughts at the last minute. This is how Saariaho tells the story, not through song: another of the staging’s strengths is that, in the present, which takes place in the wedding hall, the performers are singers, while in the past, which unfolds in an international school in Helsinki, the story progresses with dialogues in the amplified voices of the “musical actors,” as Saariaho and Oksanen define it.

The ending of Innocence is not as punitive as those handed down by judges in the Crumbley and Colin Gray cases. The final word on stage is reserved for the ghost of the victim, Markéta (Jää). With her ancient voice, she asks her mother (DiDonato) to forgive the killer’s family and move on.

After Saturday’s performance, the audience left the Metropolitan Opera House with the echo of that hymn to forgiveness still ringing in their ears. And less than 24 hours later, a new tragedy brutally shattered the spirit of the opera. It wasn’t at a school, but in a home in Shreveport, Louisiana, where a man killed eight children, including seven of his own, before police shot and killed him.

It was just another day of violence in the United States, a country with more guns (393 million) than inhabitants (343 million). A society whose brutality is now being stared down by an opera.

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