Finnish France based composer Kaija Saariaho’s last opera Innocence is coming to Adelaide Festival 2025. We chat to multilingual librettist Aleksi Barrière about Innocence, the process of writing librettos, writing in multiple languages, working with his mother, Kaija Saariaho, Innocence’s composer, and much more.

Aleksi Barrière, firstly, my condolences for the loss of your mother, Kaija Saariaho, the composer of the opera Innocence which is coming to Adelaide Festival next month.
Tell us about this opera.
Thank you for your thoughts. Innocence revolves around a group of people who have suffered an act of extreme violence together, and talks about how, many years later, they deal with this trauma and their own guilt.
It’s an original story, but it’s inspired by a number of cases of mass murder, a phenomenon peculiar to our time and one that raises a lot of taboos. Are we listening to the younger generation in families, schools, and our society? Are we trivialising violence too much or, on the contrary, not allowing it to express itself? What are we doing to really prevent it, but also to support the victims?
You’ve probably seen films or plays about violence or the psychology of killers – there’s none of that in Innocence; it’s a work which is about growing.
Innocence is Kaija Saariaho’s last opera. It’s said to be one of the most important of the century. Why is this opera so important?
I don’t know if we can make this kind of hierarchy with artistic works: we don’t really know, especially without hindsight, what makes a work important – and for whom, since there is a subjective dimension. But perhaps it’s the number of possible reasons to love Innocence that makes it special: the choice of a contemporary subject, the way it’s treated that’s unlike any other, the beauty of the music, the space for expression that this music gives to the characters and performers… Everyone has to answer for himself or herself.
How does this opera compare to other contemporary operas?
Kaija wrote five operas before Innocence, and it’s fair to say that the question that occupied her every time was how to create intimate situations – rather than always taking refuge in the same stereotypes and the same grand spectacle – with performers singing with artificial voices, accompanied by a large orchestra, in an enormous space. All Kaija’s operas answer this question in their own way, but until now that meant concentrating on a maximum of four characters, usually just one or two.
In Innocence, she wanted for the first time to write an opera which, while respecting this search for intimacy, looks at society with a little more distance, through the relationships of a large number of characters who would all have a different point of view on the same event. It’s an opera that doesn’t really have a hero. The fact that there are thirteen characters, all important, and that the opera mixes operatic singing with other vocal expressions (natural speech, rhythmic speech, extended singing techniques, folk singing, etc.) which ensure that each character has a unique vocality, makes it a special work in Kaija’s repertoire, and also in the operatic repertoire in general.
Does this work by Kaija Saariaho follow in the footsteps of other Finnish opera compositions? What is the place of Kaija Saariaho’s work in the world of Finnish opera compositions?
What’s interesting is that in Finland there is one composer who historically ranks above all the others: Jean Sibelius. He’s a true national figure who played a role in building the country’s identity – notably, in 1899, he wrote Finlandia, which is to some extent the unofficial national anthem, and his symphonies are played all over the world. But he never wrote a major opera. There were operas in Finland after him, some of them excellent, but none of them really went beyond the country’s borders. So even though Kaija is also celebrated as a composer of orchestral and chamber music, what particularly sets her apart is that she is the first Finn to have achieved great success, including internationally, as an opera composer.languages that I don’t speak as well but that I have used

Photo by Jean-Louis Fernandez
But as you can hear in her music, being Finnish was only part of her identity (which could also be said of Sibelius, by the way). Kaija brings together many European and even non-European influences in her work, and tellingly her operas are composed in different languages – most of them in French, the language of her adopted country, where she lived the last forty years of her life and where she is buried. We can speak of Kaija in the context of Finland, but she was fundamentally a European artist and person, who believed in the circulation of ideas between cultures and in their enrichment through that circulation.
THE CREATION
You are the librettist and wrote the librettos for this opera. Tell us about your creative process in writing the libretto. Did Kaija give you the idea for the story and the music, and then you produced the librettos? How does this process work? Where did the idea for this opera come from? How did you work with Kaija Saariaho? Both of you in the same room?
Writing the text of an opera is a rather special job because it’s the first stage in the creation of an opera, like the script for a film, and like a script you don’t write it independently of all the people who are going to work on it. In a way, we’re at the service of the composer, to whom we give a working basis and the tools to create the music, like the scriptwriter with the director of a film. It’s very important that when the composer starts work, the libretto gives him or her everything he or she needs to embark on this very long process, which lasts several years, of writing an hour and a half of music or more, so of course this has to be done in dialogue with the composer.
In this case there were two of us working on the text: the writer Sofi Oksanen, who was going to write the first version in Finnish, and me to help her with the form (it was her first work on an opera form) and then do the version in several languages. Kaija came up with the idea of teaming up with us, and the three of us had a lot of meetings to decide what story we wanted to tell together, and how. A lot of the fundamental decisions were taken at that point.
Then Sofi wrote a version that we commented on, and then another. I then did the version in several languages, and we continued to make changes based on what the work became in this form. When we arrived at a satisfactory result in 2016, Kaija was able to start composing. While she was writing the music (which took over two years) she sometimes had questions or requests, and we made a few small changes as we went along.

Photo by Jean-Louis Fernandez
Your librettos are multilingual, in Finnish, Czech, French, Romanian, Swedish, German, Spanish and Greek. What are the challenges of writing the libretto in several languages? Do you speak all these languages?
From the outset, Kaija had the idea that as she wanted the characters to be highly characterised and different, including musically, she was interested in creating a work in which many different languages would be spoken. She didn’t yet know what story we were going to tell, but she had the vision that it would be a story specific to our world today, because for her multilingualism is a concrete reality of life in urban centres: it’s the music of our world.
But she didn’t have any preference about the languages used, we simply knew that we were going to set the story in Finland, the country that Kaija, Sofi and I all had in common. So we started with the languages I speak best: Finnish, French, English and German. Then we gave a little less space to languages I have only practised: Czech, Swedish and Spanish. The languages I’ve only had a little contact with, Greek and Romanian, are the most minor in the work. So you could say that my capabilities inspired the choice of languages and, to a certain extent, the nature of the characters.
For the languages I spoke least well, I worked in collaboration with other translators, and in any event I had each translation proofread by native speakers, who also recorded the text so that Kaija could listen to them and draw inspiration from them in creating the music (since each language has its own rhythms and intervals). During the rehearsals in 2020-2021, the artists who played these roles were themselves native speakers, so I continued to make corrections with them to make the text more idiomatic and natural.
What are the unique challenges of writing a libretto?
Generally speaking, it’s a type of writing that poses a challenge in terms of concision: in concrete terms, you can’t use as many words as in a play or a film, because singing them takes much longer than saying them. So, we have to find a way of saying a lot with very few words. It was also to address this issue that I suggested that certain roles be played by actors, because speaking takes less time and therefore allows for more text. This meant that the characters could be given greater depth, because when there are thirteen of them, automatically there’s less speaking time for each of them in 1h45 minutes of music.

Did working with your mother (I know you had already done so previously) bring a different dynamic to the creative process?
It’s always an added comfort to work with people you know, because it’s a multi-year process that requires a certain amount of mutual trust. Of course, our personal relationship was part of that, but I think that to create something as complex as Innocence the most important thing was to have a certain solid working relationship behind us, because I had already written texts for several of Kaija’s musical works and directed some of her works, so we knew each other’s ways of working well. And insofar as we had Sofi with us, and beyond that, the commissioning parties who followed the creation of the work, and later the musical and stage team, etc., we never had the impression of working ‘as a family’, or of mixing the intimate with the professional. We’re just two members of a work team, who also happen to have another personal bond.
The world premiere took place on 3 July 2021 at the Grand Théâtre de Provence in Aix-en-Provence. When did you start writing this opera?
Kaija received a commission from the Royal Opera House in London for a new opera in 2012, and invited Sofi and I to join her to work on it in 2013. More than three years of exchanges followed, and the ‘ready’ text, in several languages, was completed by mid-2016. Kaija finished writing the music at the very end of 2018. Then came the long process of editing the score, passing it on to the performers and learning it, and we reached the summer of 2020 when we had our first rehearsals. The premiere was due to take place at that time, but COVID meant that it had to be postponed for a year.
How many versions were written before arriving at the one the public hears today?
There were several versions of the text before we started work on the music, as I said earlier. Then during the rehearsals and performances, there were very localised corrections to the text and music that Kaija and I made, but what we hear is the score as Kaija finished it in 2018, improved in the details.
According to director Simon Stone it is an ‘beautiful exploration about the scars that we carry with us, and the need to sometimes reopen wounds to make sure that we can heal them properly a second time around.’ He says it’s a heartbreaking, humanistic and positive message about humanity. How do you convey such emotions and messages in your libretto?
I think we already have enough works and media that convey raw emotions, that tell us what to feel: so many of the stories we consume are packaged in such a way that we know exactly what to think of all the characters, what we’re supposed to feel at every moment. I think the greatest gift we can give the public today is to offer them the space to feel things freely. That’s what Kaija’s music is for: it’s not bad film music that tells us when to be excited or sad, or wants to inflict on us the violence in the story, but music that slows us down at the beginning of the evening and tells us: look and listen to all these things, let your thoughts and emotions come to you. These emotions belong to you. They will be conflicting and contradictory. That’s not a problem, on the contrary: here you have a space to feel and examine them, and you’ll see that you have to be wary of first impressions. In a way, it’s each of us in the audience who can have this experience of letting our emotions mature. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the scars will close in the end, it’s a lifelong process.
What emotions did you feel when writing the libretto and what emotions do you hope to evoke in the audience?
It’s obviously quite exhausting to deal at length with the emotions of thirteen characters who are all deeply wounded in different ways. It was especially difficult for Kaija, who spent the most time with these characters, as writing the music takes so much longer than writing the words. Even if the spectator, by contrast, spends less than two hours with them, we hope that the care we put into creating them is passed on to the audience in the form of a desire to understand them, of empathy. We’re not interested in judging these people on stage, but we want to try to understand them and receive the fragment of truth that they carry.
OTHER THINGS
You worked with Clément Mao-Takacs on Innocence, and you are both co-founders of the musical theatre collective La Chambre aux Echos. How did you meet? Why did you set up La Chambre aux Echos?
We set up La Chambre aux échos after our first collaboration in 2010, to give us a free creative space for our ideas. Clément as a musician, and I as a director and writer, believed deeply in the power of collaboration between music and text, and theatre. But opera houses are difficult for young artists to get into, and there’s very little teamwork: often the director and conductor are hired separately, and they don’t get to choose which pieces they work on either. It was important for us to experiment with the idea that we could imagine together what a project could be, and find solutions together, each bringing his or her own skills to the table. In this process we were gradually joined by other artists from different disciplines who were interested in this way of working, which exists in the theatre and in chamber music, but not so much in opera. As a result, we’ve created a number of shows that simply couldn’t have existed otherwise, without this desire to let ourselves be influenced by other disciplines.

What other projects are you currently working on?
With La Chambre aux Echos, we’ve been working on the music that Beethoven composed based on Goethe’s play Egmont, a very topical story about how insurrections are born and why they often degenerate into tyranny. I’ve written a new text that alternates with the music, and we’ve turned it into a musical film, which we’ll be presenting in the near future. Otherwise, I’m working on several projects with composers, always to transform original stories into musical and interdisciplinary experiences, because I think that’s the best way to make us look at the world differently. Clearly, facts and analysis are not enough, since their omnipresence does not prevent us from heading towards a collective catastrophe. We need to experiment, as diversely and heterogeneously as possible, to learn how to deal with the images and narratives with which we are constantly bombarded, which are so poor that they impoverish us.
Are you coming to Australia for the performances of Innocence or do you no longer follow the performances once you’ve finished writing?
Unfortunately I won’t have the opportunity to come to Australia because of other projects. Indeed, the opera continues to live its life without its creators. However, I will be attending the premiere of a new production of Innocence in Germany in March, which will no doubt be very different from the one presented in Adelaide, because the work allows for different interpretations. I don’t have any role to play in it, just to pass on anything that might help the artists and the audience to complete the experience.
Why should audiences come and see Innocence at the Adelaide Festival?
I know that there are a lot of interesting things happening artistically in Australia, and that a lot of things are now available online. But it’s rare for a work like this to travel the world – I’d even say it’s rare for new stage works of this size and with these resources to be produced – and there’s no doubt that it’s a completely different experience to be in the theatre to experience it rather than in a cinema or in front of a computer screen. It’s an opportunity not to be missed. If you like the combination of drama, song and orchestra that we call opera, go for it. And if it’s not a form you’re particularly interested in, or even if you’ve had bad experiences of opera, go along too: it’ll be different from anything you know!
Anything else you’d like to add?
Unless you have any other questions, I think I’ve already said enough!

KEY INFO FOR INNOCENCE
WHAT: Innocence, by Kaija Saariaho / Original Finnish Libretto by Sofi Oksanen & Multilingual Libretto by Aleksi Barrière / Conducted by Clément Mao-Takacs / Directed by Simon Stone
WHERE: Festival Theatre, Adelaide
WHEN: Four performances only:
- Fri 28 February, 7:30pm
- Sun 2 March, 5:30pm
- Tue 4 March, 7:30pm
- Wed 5 March, 6:00pm
HOW: Purchase your tickets to Innocence at Adelaide Festival via this link
HOW MUCH: Ticket prices range from $89 to $369.
You may also like to read our interview with Clément Mao-Takacs, conductor for Innocence