‘The events still haunt’: New York stage production examines aftermath of Finnish school shooting | Opera

Gun violence, particularly the high-profile incidents that take place on school campuses, are often seen as a uniquely American phenomenon, one that exemplifies the nation’s deep history and complicated relationship with guns.

But an opera set around a mass shooting at a Finnish international school 10 years ago approaches this topic through a global lens. Innocence, which opens at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on Monday, is performed in nine different languages including English, Swedish and Spanish, and delves into themes like guilt, grief, anger and how time doesn’t always heal the damage done by violence.

The opera begins with survivors listing the ways the shooting deaths of 10 classmates and a teacher at a school in Finland in the early 2010s have hindered their ability to go to work or public places like movie theaters, or compelled them to sit with their backs to doors for fear of being caught off guard by another shooter. The statements are set music by piano and wind instruments composed by the lauded Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, who died of brain cancer in 2023.

“It’s been 10 years and these thoughts are still coming back and the events are still haunting [the characters],” said Innocence’s conductor, Susanna Mälkki. “It’s important to understand that even if there are things that aren’t spoken about openly, it doesn’t mean they’ve disappeared.

“There’s the question of if this guilt is ever finished. Do we have a right to continue our lives and have a new start? Is there a chance of forgiveness? How can we overcome this kind of trauma?”

The five-act, one-hour-and-45-minute performance is set across two different timelines and locations – the present-day wedding of the brother of the teenage boy who opened fire, and the school where the shooting took place a decade earlier.

With contemporary music as background to the scenes of the school shooting’s survivors and victims, and operatic singing and more classical melodies used for the scenes at the wedding, Saariaho aimed to show that people who are joined by the same tragedy can have wildly different experiences as time presses on, Mälkki said.

“With this choice the composer shows that these are two different universes and that you can’t always relate to the other person’s point of view. And that’s the power of music,” Mälkki said.

Innocence originally debuted in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 2021, and had its first US show in June 2024 at the San Francisco Opera. This will be the final opera composed by Saariaho, who enlisted fellow Finn Sofi Oksanen to write the libretto.

Oksanen said that she and Saariaho knew they wanted to create an opera that would allow for multiple characters to be on stage at once, and were intrigued by the idea of a portraying a wedding. The school shooting element was brought in by Oksanen, a novelist who often writes about gender-based violence, including gun violence. She was keen to delve into an issue that many Finns don’t talk about despite the country’s history of hunting and high-profile violence.

“The word count is very tight in a libretto, yet the story has to be huge,” Oksanen said. “It’s a genre where you have to have something that is a big story but you squeeze it into the size of a walnut.”

Finland, a country of 5.6 million people, has not been insulated from mass shootings. School shootings in 2007 and 2008 left a total of 17 people dead. In 2009, a man killed his ex-girlfriend and four others at a mall in a suburb of Helsinki. Most recently, in 2024, a 12-year-old killed one student and injured two others.

“In Finland, gun violence is not uncommon at all,” Oksanen said. “That is something that surprises people.”

Oksanen said it was important to her to focus on the impact of the shooting on its victims and those closest to the tragedy, rather than on the shooter, who only appears once in a flashback scene of the opera, but has no lines. This choice, she said, is to counter the fascination and focus on those who commit violence rather than their victims. This pattern, she said, is one that she has noticed in shootings that happen both in the US and Finland.

“It’s so unfair and so I’m trying to give the victims as much space as possible as I can as an author,” she said. “That’s one form of justice.”

Simon Stone, the opera’s director, said that many people have a “fascination with evil”. “We’re obsessed with watching things from the criminal’s perspective in TV and movies. Because we kind of think, ‘What’s different about them?’

“But no one watches the story of a group of victims and says, ‘Oh, I wish I was in that situation.’ There’s nothing alluring, it’s just awful. And I think it’s important some things are shown as being terrible for victims,” he said.

Since its debut in 2024, the opera has been staged around the world, including in Australia and London. This is just the second time it will be shown in the US. Mälkki hopes that its global reach can show people that despite geographical bounds, when it comes to violence and the trauma it brings, “we’re all in the same boat”.

“People come from different places but I hope people take away a sense of community … We have to solve this together,” she said.