The happiest day of your life? Hardly. What begins as a festive wedding descends into an abyss of silence, guilt and suppressed violence. The bride discovers the dark secret of her groom’s family. Ten years earlier, his brother carried out a mass shooting at an international school. While the act continues to resonate unmistakably even many years later, the questions remain the same: Why? How can such trauma be overcome? Could anything have been done differently?

With her fifth and final opera, the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023) created a work of music theatre that is as uncompromising as it is contemporary. Since its acclaimed premiere at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2021, this work has captivated audiences and critics alike at major opera houses across Europe. In a musical chamber drama of harrowing intensity, fragmentary memories, overlapping perspectives, and repressed and unspoken guilt unfold. This opera deliberately refuses to offer simple answers. Instead, it opens a space of resonance in which responsibility, repression and individual guilt are not resolved but continually renegotiated.