Don’t subject artists to a political inquisition to make yourself feel morally superior.
Don't subject artists to a political inquisition to make yourself feel morally superior.
T he West’s solidarity with Ukraine and opposition to Vladimir Putin’s unjustified invasion of the country have evolved into hostility toward Russia’s people and culture. Witness the growing list of world-touring Russian classical musicians who have been canceled by Western arts institutions.
The cancellations started with conductor Valery Gergiev, then proceeded to the Metropolitan Opera’s leading soprano Anna Netrebko and 20-year-old piano prodigy Alexander Malofeev, before coming for the king of Russian romanticism himself: composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In most cases, these cancellations have been celebrated in Western media, even if some, such as Tchaikovsky’s, have been met with an eye roll. Nearly all have been characterized as morally justified, if difficult, choices.
Yet only one such cancellation — Gergiev’s — is at all morally ambiguous (and one could make a good case that it was still the wrong call). The rest of them are simply absurd.
Maestro Gergiev is one of the five best conductors in the world. His visceral musicality, fresh interpretations, and idiosyncratic yet somehow effective gestures are the envy of the conducting world. He has been artistic director of the Mariinsky Theatre since 1996, and since has become one of Russia’s most recognizable cultural ambassadors. He was the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra from 2007 to 2015 and the music director of the Munich Philharmonic from 2015 until his cancellation this month.
Following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Gergiev was first disinvited from Carnegie Hall, where he was to conduct multiple performances with the touring Vienna Philharmonic. Shortly thereafter, he was ousted from his position in Munich. Then, the cancellation floodgates opened — the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, La Scala in Milan, and finally his own agent.
Gergiev’s crime was his long-standing political relationship with Putin, which began when he took the helm at Mariinsky, a state-funded opera and ballet theater in Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg. Mariinsky had historically played second fiddle (so to speak) in Russia to Moscow’s Bolshoi. With Gergiev’s leadership, increased funding, and friends in high places (namely Putin), it has now arguably surpassed the Bolshoi.
It is true that the conductor has long had a cozy relationship with Putin. In 2012, Gergiev participated in a campaign video for Putin, who awarded him the Hero of Labor of the Russian Federation award the following year. In 2013, gay-right supporters protested Gergiev’s performances in the United States and England because of his support for controversial legislation that Putin had introduced prohibiting the distribution of literature to minors that featured “untraditional” sexual relationships. Gergiev responded to critics by saying that he saw the legislation as anti-pedophile, not anti-gay. After Putin illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, Gergiev’s signature appeared — though possibly under duress — in an open letter from several Russian arts leaders supporting the annexation. And he has thus far failed to denounce Putin’s further invasion of Ukraine.
One can understand the view that Gergiev should be punished for these associations. Yet the zeal and speed of his defenestration should give us some discomfort.
Why? First, because one can’t build a career in Russia’s top cultural institutions and not be at least a nominal Putin ally. The Mariinsky is fully funded by Russia’s Ministry of Culture. If Gergiev had been an outspoken Putin critic, would he have lasted 25 years as artistic director? No. If he had refused to publicly support Putin, would the theater have received the funding it needed to become an international name, synonymous with Russian cultural excellence? No. Might Gergiev have put himself, his family, and associates in physical or other jeopardy by not affirming Putin? Possibly.
The unavoidable conclusion is this: In order to clear his conscience sufficiently for Western tastes, Gergiev would’ve had to leave his music culture behind. Denounce your country’s leadership and become an artist in exile, the West tells musicians such as Gergiev, or don’t share your music with us.
That may provide us a sense of moral clarity, but what does it mean for the civilizing role that classical music has come to play in our world? Does such selective silencing give us all the best opportunity to hear and learn from the world’s most worthwhile artistic voices? Does it risk further isolating an already dangerously isolated culture and further inflame its wounded chauvinism? Considering that Russia, and similarly isolated China, produce about a third of the world’s great concert musicians, this is a question we will be asking ourselves more and more over the years to come.
Gergiev’s case is tricky. But the subsequent cancellations are not.
In many U.S. outlets, news of Gergiev’s cancellation broke alongside news that the Metropolitan Opera had severed its relationship with longtime leading soprano, the legendary Anna Netrebko. In announcing the Met’s decision, General Manager Peter Gelb sermonized in a video statement: “While we believe strongly in the warm friendship and cultural exchange that has long existed between the artists and artistic institutions of Russia and the United States . . . we can no longer engage with artists or institutions that support Putin or are supported by him.”
Netrebko performs periodically in Russia, but, for decades now, she has been mainly a Western artist, performing in opera houses across the U.S. and Western Europe. She became an Austrian citizen in 2006.
Compared with Gergiev’s record, Netrebko’s is a thin dossier of wrongdoing. Her three offenses seem to be that 1) she publicly supported Putin’s election bid in 2012 (two years before his annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine); 2) in a magazine interview during the same election cycle, she naïvely and ill-advisedly said she’d welcome the opportunity to be Putin’s lover and admired his “strong, male energy”; and 3) she donated to a concert hall in the Donetsk People’s Republic, which is controlled by Russian separatists, and she was photographed in the hall, holding a separatist flag handed to her by the separatist leader standing next to her.
Unlike Gergiev, Netrebko issued a quick and unequivocal denunciation of Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. “First of all: I am opposed to this war,” she wrote online in late February. “I am Russian and I love my country, but I have many friends in Ukraine and the pain and suffering right now breaks my heart. I want this war to end and for people to be able to live in peace.” She followed up with a dig at the music administrators who had clearly been pressuring her to issue a statement: “Forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right.” She continued: “I am not a political person. I am not an expert in politics. I am an artist and my purpose is to unite people across political divides.”
The media have often invoked Netrebko’s decade-old admiration for Putin and her flag-waving photo as reasons for her sacking at the Met. But if those were fireable offenses, Gelb would have let her go then. Her real crime was probably that she publicly shamed Gelb and his colleagues for their virtue-signaling in coercing her to voice the correct political position. Whatever she chose to say or do after that, she was doomed.
I would guess that most artists and art lovers agree with Netrebko’s assertion that artists should not be forced to make political statements. But the empathy of the music-loving world will not save Netrebko’s career at the Met, which is effectively over, or in Western Europe, where most opera houses have canceled her appearances. Last week, Netrebko, who is 50, announced her retirement from live performance. If permanent, the early retirement of such a supreme talent will be an almost incalculable loss for the musical community on both sides of the new Iron Curtain.
Some suggest that Netrebko could have saved herself by denouncing Russian aggression more vociferously. But the experience of Alexander Malofeev, a 20-year-old Russian pianist with even less political baggage than Netrebko, makes that look unlikely. A rising star, Malofeev was slated to perform a concert with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in April as well as a solo recital in Vancouver in August. Both events were summarily canceled by their presenting institutions last week.
The cancellations occurred despite Malofeev’s public opposition to Putin’s actions in Ukraine; at some risk to himself, he has, by Russian standards, been an outspoken critic of the dictator. On March 2, he wrote on Facebook, “The truth is that every Russian will feel guilty for decades because of the terrible and bloody decision that none of us could influence and predict.”
Alas, Malofeev’s courageous stance did not protect his performance prospects in Canada. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a group of Ukrainian Montrealers complained about Malofeev’s upcoming appearance at the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. They acknowledged his denunciation of the war but still asked the orchestra to refrain from promoting a Russian “cultural product” at this time.
The OSM ultimately folded. Its spokesman announced last week that it would be replacing Malofeev with another pianist. “The OSM feels that it would be inappropriate to receive Mr. Malofeev this week,” the spokesman wrote. “We continue, however, to believe in the importance of maintaining relationships with artists of all nationalities who embrace messages of peace and hope. We look forward to welcoming this exceptional artist when the context allows it.” Guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas dutifully fell in line, commenting: “I was very pleased to be working in Montreal for the first time with the extraordinary young pianist Alexander Malofeev. It is regrettable that political situations have made it impossible.” The Vancouver Recital Society canceled Malofeev’s appearance shortly thereafter.
Malofeev was not the only Russian pianist to lose performing opportunities despite clearly denouncing Russian aggression. Ludmila Berlinskaya, a pianist who has lived in France for the past three decades, has seen her performance canceled in Germany and Japan.
If a Russian musician, untarnished by association with the Russian regime, cannot escape cancellation, it begins to look as though the target is not individual artists but Russian culture itself. As if to prove such suspicions, the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra in Cardiff, Wales, last week expressed its solidarity with Ukraine by replacing an all-Tchaikovsky program.
The program was set to include the 1812 Overture, originally written to commemorate Russia’s victory over Napoleon in 1812 but now appropriated all over the West as a musical representation of triumph against adversity. Perhaps most ironically, the centerpiece of the program would have been the composer’s Symphony No. 2 — which was inspired by a trio of Ukrainian folk songs.
Why cancel Tchaikovsky? He bears no taint of Putinism; he died 59 years before Putin was born, and his music is hardly a symbol of Russian imperial power. It would be difficult to identify a more internationally beloved composer. But he was unlucky enough to be born Russian.
Writing about the cancellations of Gergiev and Netrebko in the New York Times a week ago, music critic Zachary Woolfe invoked two historical precedents: the cases of German conductors Karl Muck and Wilhelm Furtwängler.
Muck, after an illustrious conducting career in Europe, conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the first two decades of the 20th century. During World War I, rumors arose that he remained sympathetic to the Kaiser, culminating with the untrue allegation that Muck had refused to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a wartime concert in Providence, R.I. On the strength of these rumors, Muck was interned for over a year at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia.
Wilhelm Furtwängler was a German conductor who chose to stay in Germany during the Third Reich and regularly conducted concerts in support of Hitler’s regime. After World War II, despite Furtwängler’s nearly universal acclaim as one of the greatest conductors to have ever lived, and despite his own protestations that he was merely an apolitical musician, he was effectively blackballed from music directorships with major European and American orchestras.
Woolfe’s point in making these two comparisons seems to be that the present cancellations of Russian artists have more in common with the treatment of Furtwängler than Muck. He is wrong. Gergiev’s cancellation is the only one with a faint whiff of Furtwängler’s. The rest are pure Muck — instances of censure motivated by fear.
Amid these modern-day musical witch hunts, Western artistic institutions ought to remember the central role that cultural diplomacy — particularly music — played in bringing the Cold War to a peaceful and positive end. Few efforts during that conflict proved as humanizing on both sides as the trips of Louis Armstrong or Van Cliburn across the ocean to perform in Moscow and St. Petersburg, or Emil Gilels’s and David Oistrakh’s sojourns in America. Audiences on both sides of that conflict saw in such artists vulnerable souls much like themselves, not vessels of geopolitical power. As we stand on the precipice of what may be another cold war — perhaps two, if we consider China — is stifling such cultural exchanges the precedent we wish to set?
When he dismissed Netrebko, Gelb acknowledged that she was “one of the greatest singers in Met history” but said that, “with Putin killing innocent victims in Ukraine, there was no way forward.” I do see a way forward for Gelb and other artistic administrators throughout the West: Let your ticket-buying audience decide whether there is a “way forward” by choosing whether or not to attend the concert. Unless artists are committed lackeys of an entity with which we are at war, do not subject them to a political inquisition in order to make yourself feel morally exceptional.