Voicing Innocence: Trauma, Memory, and Contemporary Opera in the Work of Kaija Saariaho

Tuesday, April 7, 4:00 pm

Streamed online live on www.HowlRound.com

Join the Segal Theatre Center for a conversation with librettist and dramaturge Aleksi Barrière about the upcoming 2026 Metropolitan Opera US premiere of Innocence, the final opera by the late Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, Barrière's mother.

The Conference Voicing Innocence: Trauma, Memory, and Contemporary Opera in the Work of Kaija Saariaho—convened by director Tina Frühauf of The Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation at The Graduate Center, CUNY—coincides with the Metropolitan Opera’s presentation of Simon Stone’s original 2021 production of Innocence at Aix-en-Provence. The Segal Talk and the conference provide an opportunity to engage with Saariaho’s innovative compositional voice and the complex thematic landscape of Innocence, an opera that confronts trauma, cultural memory, multilingualism, and the limits of forgiveness. Innocence is an opera project wrestling with the depiction of violence and grief—caused by horrific school shootings and their aftermaths.

Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023) was a leading voice of her generation of composers, in her native Finland and worldwide. She studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she lived from 1982 to her death. Her studies and research at IRCAM, the Parisian center for electroacoustic experimentation, had a major influence on her music, and her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures were often created by combining live performance and electronics.

After her breakthrough piece Lichtbogen for ensemble and electronics in 1986, Saariaho gradually expanded her musical expression to a great variety of genres, and her chamber pieces and choral music have become staples of instrumental and vocal ensembles, respectively.

  She rose to international preeminence as the composer of works taken up by symphony orchestras around the world, such as Oltra Mar (1999), Orion (2002), Laterna Magica (2008) and Circle Map (2012), as well as six concertos (including Graal Théâtre for violin in 1994 and Notes on Light for cello in 2006), and five major symphonic song cycles (e.g. Château de l’âme in 1995 and True Fire in 2014), all of which bear the mark of her relentless attempt to blend the scientific, technological and rational with an approach grounded in poetic inspiration and resulting in deeply sensorial and associative experiences.

Saariaho’s broadest public and critical recognition came from her work in the field of opera: L’Amour de loin (2000), Adriana Mater (2006), La Passion de Simone (2006), Émilie (2010), Only the Sound Remains (2016) and Innocence( 2020), the latter of which was termed Saariaho’s ‘masterpiece’ by The New York Times, were all warmly received at their premieres, and have enjoyed the rare privilege of global tours and multiple stage productions. Their ever-expressive treatment of voice and orchestra, as much as their commitment to renewing the form and the array of stories being represented on the largest stages, have made these six very different opuses classics of 21st-century opera already in the composer’s lifetime.

Saariaho claimed major composing awards such as the Grawemeyer Award, the Nemmers Prize, the Sonning Prize and the Polar Music Prize and two of her recordings have received Grammy Awards. She was named ‘Greatest Living Composer’ in a survey of her peers conducted by the BBC Music Magazine in 2019.

Kaija Saariaho’s life was prematurely interrupted by a brain tumor in 2023. Her musical legacy is carried forward by a broad network of collaborators with whom she has worked closely over the years, and her publisher Chester Music Ltd.

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Aleksi Barrière (b. 1989) is a French-Finnish director, dramaturge, and writer. He works as a versatile creator of music/theatre and is the artistic director of the French performance collective La Chambre aux échos. His work is lauded for its sharp interdisciplinarity extended to intercultural collaboration, and the creative stances of his dramaturgies, in search of the new forms that are called by new narratives.

  In addition to his work as a visiting director, Barrière has developed with his collective, and in collaboration with conductor Clément Mao-Takacs, a broad range of performances where music and theatre meet in renewed ways, expanding on the available forms offered by theatre and opera. The collective’s work has included re-explorations of 20th-century classics (Berio, Cage, Feldman, Henze, Milhaud, Schönberg, Stravinsky…) as well as collaborations with living composers.

  His recent work includes the music/theatre performance Between (text and staging, Finnish National Opera, 2022), The Fatzer Soldier’s Tale (text and staging, Musiikkitalo Helsinki, 2022), the premiere of Djuro Zizkovic’s Bogoluchie (staging, Folkoperan, 2024), and a series of stagings for the Night and Aria Festival in Espoo (Curlew River, 2023; Handel’s Messiah and Peter Maxwelll Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King, 2024). Earthrise, an intertwining of new and baroque music written and directed by Barrière, was premiered at the Finnish National Opera in the fall of 2024.

  As a librettist, Barrière has collaborated closely with composers such as Kaija Saariaho (choral works 2005-2020, the opera Innocence in collaboration with writer Sofi Oksanen, 2021), Juha T. Koskinen (Ophelia/Tiefsee, 2017; Earthrise, 2024; *Waterfire, TBA), and Diana Syrse (Connected Identities, 2017; The Invention of Sex, 2020; Circe, 2021).

  Outi Tarkiainen’s opera Day of Night, on a libretto by Barrière, will be premiered at Aalto-Theater Essen and Finnish National Opera in 2027. New stage works created together with composers Tomás Bordalejo, Sami Klemola, and Lauri Supponen, among others, are in the making.

Photos courtesy of Aleksi Barrière