Ever since its beginnings in the late sixteenth century, opera has been preoccupied with death. Illness, murder, and suicide stalk countless libretti, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Puccini’s Tosca to Berg’s Wozzeck and Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves. To the litany of horrific fates which have historically befallen the medium’s protagonists – stabbings, immolations, death by snake bite, poison and toxic mushroom, to say nothing of various wasting diseases and literal descents into hell – can now be added that most contemporary and shocking of demises: death by mass shooter.

Innocence, which was completed by the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho in 2018 and had its première at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021, is an unsparing depiction of the aftermath of a gun massacre at an international school in Finland. The libretto, originally by Finnish-Estonian novelist Sofi Oksanen and given a multilingual refashioning by Aleksi Barrière, bleeds together two times and places: the school itself during the shooting, and a wedding party at a Helsinki restaurant a decade later.