What comes after

It’s a strange thing to survive a mass shooting and, years later, feel grateful for the knowledge it leaves behind. Grateful for understanding what comes after, and how that single event reshapes every life it touches. Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence is built entirely from that “after.”

I’ve just returned from seeing it in New York, and I can’t shake the feeling that Innocence is one of the great works of art of the 21st century so far. It may be the most honest work of art I’ve ever encountered about what gun violence actually does to people.

I’ve been skeptical of much contemporary opera. Too often it chases novelty or becomes overly self-conscious about its own form. Innocence has some of those familiar issues—there’s more speak-singing than I prefer—but Saariaho bends the form more effectively than most composers do. In the role of the teacher, Lucy Shelton delivered her lines with a dragging cadence, as though each word was being wrenched from the specific pain of believing she failed to shield her students from the unthinkable. Vilma Jää’s folk-inflected role, as a victim, daughter, and ghost, focused the opera’s brutality and confusion. The grieving mother, played by Joyce DiDonato in this production, was suffused with the aching pain that comes from losing a child. Every survivor and perpetrator has a vocal line shaped precisely by their particular damage.

The libretto, by Sofi Oksanen and Aleksi Barrière, is remarkably dense with meaning. Every line carries weight, often deepened by what is happening simultaneously elsewhere on stage. Just when you think you understand where the story is headed, another complication lands. The opera withholds and reveals information in a way that steadily intensifies the characters’s anguish.

What the production gets exactly right is the messy, nonlinear way trauma spreads. Violence does not end when the shooting stops. It moves through time, affecting everyone it touches for years afterward. Saariaho’s score pulses, curdles, and bites, utilizing a drab sonic palette unsettled by electronic processing and sharpened with the subtle amplification of voices. The production’s rotating set mirrors this fractured reality, physically juxtaposing the present with the weight of the past. As the stage turns, moments of clarity inevitably slip away, and we watch as characters shift through time and place, caught in the relentless movement of their own history.

I was a first-year law student when the Columbine shooting happened. There was no social media then, no endless scroll of coverage. As the details emerged, my mind kept returning to the survivors. I wondered how their lives would be permanently changed and what it would feel like to search for meaning after something so senseless.

A decade later, those abstract questions became my own hard reality. I survived a mass shooting, and 20 years on, the event still pulses through the lives of everyone who lived through that day. It is a legacy of trauma therapy, the clinical grind of medical appointments for the wounded, and relationships that either buckled or broke under the strain. It leaves you with a permanent, hyper-focused awareness of exits. As the public memory of the tragedy inevitably thins, the weight shifts; the personal experience of survivors and their families is eventually all that remains. I felt that shift watching Innocence, as the production laid bare the specific, jagged edges of each character’s damage.

Saariaho and her creative team capture this long aftermath with uncanny accuracy. The shooter appears only briefly onstage, even though his impact is everywhere. No firm explanation is offered or motive is given to the audience for his crime. That absence feels true. The rest of us rarely get explanations either

There is only one performance of Innocence left at the Metropolitan Opera. Go if you can.

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Around New York:

Justin Davidson, New York Magazine

“What makes Innocence difficult for me to digest is the gulf between the opera’s stylized form and its brutal content, between the symbolic stasis of the plot and the emotional directness of the music. That fusion, I know, is the source of the art form’s strength: We turn to opera so we can mainline someone’s inner life with a drip of narcotic music, regardless of whether the character is a death-row inmate, an 18th-century nun, or the king of Sweden. In this case, though, I can’t accept the urge to decorate the mass slaughter of children with a flourish of beguiling sounds. Certain truths should not be delivered in song.”

Kurt Gottschalk, Bachtrack

“By the time of its New York City premiere, Innocence – Kaija Saariaho’s final opera – was already reverberating beyond the Metropolitan Opera House walls. On the Lincoln Center Plaza steps, Gays Against Guns activists assembled in white gowns and veils with signs depicting victims of school shootings. Nearby, City University of New York hosted a two-day seminar examining Saariaho’s work and the relationship between music and trauma. Tragedy is hardly new to opera stages, but this much reality, it seemed, had to be dealt with carefully.”

Joshua Barone, New York Times

“As her daughter, Marketa, the Finnish vocalist Vilma Jaa was an enthrallingly spectral presence. Saariaho wrote the part for Jaa’s specialty as a folk and pop singer, with cadenzas that make room for Karelian herding calls and whips of pitch. The freeness of folk music can make it sound as if it’s coming directly from the soul; it’s devastating to hear it from the mouth of a girl as she recounts being shot three times in the heart.”