A 'cathartic' vision of a school shooting

Sung in nine languages, with music by one of the world’s best composers, Innocence is already being hailed as a defining work of our time

- Erica Jeal

When BBC Music Magazine last year canvassed dozens of international composers about who they thought was the greatest of all time, Kaija Saariaho was their most frequently nominated living colleague. She was ranked at No 17, between Brahms and Haydn. The esteem in which the Finnish composer, now 70, is held helps explain the anticipation around her latest opera, Innocence, as it reaches London’s Royal Opera House in Simon Stone’s production.

So do the reactions of many of those who saw its premiere at the Aix-en-Provence festival in 2021 – and those who performed in it. “I’m absolutely sure that this is one of the most important works of our time,” says Susanna Mälkki, who conducted that premiere with the London Symphony Orchestra in the pit, and is in London to conduct the Covent Garden dates. She has lived with the work for three years, as Covid forced the last-minute postponement of the originally scheduled premiere. That first summer of rehearsals was an intense time, she says – because of the pandemic backdrop and the subject matter of the opera.

Innocence opens at a wedding reception where a waitress realises the groom is the brother of the boy who killed her daughter and others in a school shooting a decade earlier. More secrets emerge as the events of that terrible day are peeled back, layer by layer.