Inside Innocence: An Interview with Aleksi Barrière
Michael Bragg: Was this the first project you worked on with your mother? If not, what was the first?
Aleksi Barrière: Our collaboration started when I was a teenager—Kaija had commissions for two works for children’s choirs, for which she asked me to write librettos. At the time I wrote stories, plays, and poetry, but the experience of writing in collaboration with musicians was new and has been something I’ve been developing ever since. We later wrote two other, more mature, choral works together: “Echo!” for chorus and electronics, and most recently the science-fiction madrigal “Reconnaissance.” Both were featured on the Helsinki Chamber Choir’s album that got a Grammy this year.
In the meantime, Kaija also consulted with me as a dramaturg when she wanted an extra pair of eyes on text collages for her other work. And although it’s less of a collaboration (because the music already exists), I directed productions of her operas La Passion de Simone and Only the Sound Remains, and of her first stage work, Study for Life. Our last collaboration was on a show I created (like the others, with conductor Clément Mao-Takacs, who is now doing Innocence at San Francisco Opera) based on her violin concerto “Graal Théâtre,” for which I wrote a new spoken text woven into the music and a new staging. This work also forms the basis of her last composition, written during the final stages of her illness, her trumpet concerto “HUSH.”
MB: How did you get involved in creating the libretto for Innocence?
AB: When Kaija received Kasper Holten’s commission for an opera that would capture something of our time, she immediately had the threefold vision of a choral form, a contemporary subject, and a variety of languages. So in 2013 she put together a libretto team consisting of Sofi Oksanen—a master storyteller—and myself as a guide into the possibilities of the libretto form and creator of the multilingual version. It took us many discussions to decide all together on the right story to tell. Once there was a storyline we all agreed on, Sofi started writing the script in Finnish, and as I created translations (with the help of native speakers of each language) the characters were gradually defined. By 2016 we had the libretto as it would be composed, in nine languages, and Kaija started writing music. The libretto work doesn’t stop at that moment of course—the three of us were in touch during the composition process about small adjustments; Kaija asked me for clarifications or alternatives in the text, and I kept making changes to the text during the rehearsals in 2020–2021, in collaboration with the performers on stage.
MB: Why so many languages?
AB: Having multiple languages was one of the very first intuitions Kaija had about the piece, even before there was a plot. To her it was a way to capture the feel of the world she lived in, the texture of different languages overlapping, with the richness it entails and also the sense of the difficulty of communicating. It ended up being a tool we used to make it immediately perceptible how lonely everyone is in their own lived experience. Down the line, it also became key to the creation of Kaija’s music. I had the texts in different languages recorded, and Kaija’s first compositional step was to analyze those recordings, notate rhythms of different languages, analyze their pitch patterns, to develop her music material from that. So the music is basically born from the multiplicity of languages, and is deeply woven into it.
MB: What about the content of the opera informed the production?
AB: I cannot speak on behalf of the creative team of Simon Stone’s production, who have worked independently from Kaija, Sofi, and myself.
I think the production is doing a strikingly good job at physicalizing the piece’s structure, how the level of the suppressed trauma bleeds into the present. It is also working hard to bring the story into a naturalistic visual world—maybe it’s showing too much, or too illustratively, but that is also something that has made the opera very accessible to people who weren’t familiar with the genre, especially younger audiences.
MB: What about the subject matter was important in inspiring your mother to write an opera?
AB: As stated above, the starting point was not the subject, but the idea of writing a choral form, of tackling how different characters react to a shared traumatic event. So when we decided to tackle this through situations of bullying and a school shooting, it was very important to us to do it differently than in all media that underline the fascination for the perpetrators, the proverbial ‘monsters.’ The polyphonic possibilities of opera, of having multiple overlapping lines interacting in sophisticated ways, meant we could really make it about the collective experience as a dynamic complex made out of singular voices, and really center how trauma can fork into continued violence or healing, rather than on the shooter (whom we refused to feature or even to name).
Kaija’s music has always been about examining slow processes and transformations, and this is really what she was after here too by making an opera about healing as a slow and imperfect process. Any hint at the thriller form is intended to subvert it to offer an alternative to the forms and narratives of mass media, not to lean into them (which this staging sometimes does, albeit gracefully).
MB: In an interview with Matthew, your mother expressed how emotionally difficult and draining it was to compose the opera. Did you have a similar emotional response or difficulty writing the libretto?
AB: None of us had to live with the characters of this opera as long as Kaija. From mid-2016 to early 2019 she woke up every morning and got to her desk to spend the day with them, immersing herself in their trauma and toxic defense mechanisms. The libretto work is much less draining because it’s less immersive, even though you absorb a lot of horrible, horrible material in the documentation phase. One peculiar thing is that we originally kept ourselves at a distance from the characters by not naming them, we just called them Student 3, Teacher, Bride, Father-In-Law, etc. It’s not very important for the piece itself because they rarely call each other by names, and as an audience member you don’t want to spend the whole piece trying to learn the names of thirteen characters. But Kaija insisted on giving each one of them a name, because she wanted to feel closer to them. In conversation with us, Sofi found a beautiful, deeply meaningful name for each one of them.
MB: There are many different styles of vocal expression in the piece, what was the impetus behind that?
AB: It’s a direct consequence of the different languages, and Kaija’s urge to create different forms of expression for her thirteen characters. She first started developing that within a narrower range of singing (and attributing each character a set of instruments from the orchestra, which ultimately became the key to her orchestration), but as we were also wondering how we could give more space for the text, I suggested that we have more vocal expression that is closer to speech, which is better suited to longer lines than operatic singing, and so we developed a richer palette of techniques to use. I also suggested we use something more peculiar for the character of Markéta, as she exists on a different plane, and we came to the idea of a natural voice with elements of folk technique. Kaija was drawn to the cow herding calls of Carelia, her family’s native region, where she spent all her summers as a child. For her they had something archaic, childlike because of her personal associations, but also potentially violent when the vocal expression required that.
MB: What moment is the most powerful and moving for you?
AB: The more you spend time with the piece, the more you discover new gems in it. Of course Markéta’s scenes often steal the show—they are just heartbreaking. But Kaija’s art truly shines in the simplest moments. One thing she does here (that she has always done with her male characters) is to push them to the limit of their upper register to break the veneer of self-assured masculinity, show them at their most vulnerable, and there are beautiful moments like that with both the father, Henrik, and the son, Tuomas—a simple fragile vocal line on a sheer orchestral texture, as simple as it gets. In a space saturated with everyone’s past, their trauma, the bigger narratives, we simply get to experience what it is that makes someone human, the naked vulnerability and heartbreaking absurdity of trying to exist, and not be miserable and not make others miserable along the way.