When I learned that the Royal Opera House had booked Russian soprano Anna Netrebko to sing Tosca in the new production which opens its 2025/26 season next month (and, later in the season, Turandot), I felt a surge of anger.
How could they be so callous, so blasé, about the boycott of Russian artists with close ties to the Kremlin. How shameful for Britain that our internationally renowned opera company should treat Ukraine with such contempt. And how damning that its decision to hire Netrebko should be subject to an open letter organised by Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s first deputy foreign minister, and signed by hundreds of Ukrainian writers and artists, British MPs and the likes of Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French public intellectual.
Anna Netrebko may no longer live in Russia, but she has family who do
I review opera, and so I had a decision to take: should I remain true to my principles – I believe the fight to save Ukraine is the defining global issue of our time – and boycott the production myself? I decided that, at the very least, I would write an angry piece about the Royal Opera’s decision. This would be that piece.
But it’s now a very different piece, because I was wrong. As, too, are the signatories of the open letter. There is no reason whatsoever why Netrebko should be boycotted by the Royal Opera or any other company.
It is certainly right that artists who give succour to Putin and who support the invasion of Ukraine should not perform in the West. That’s why Valery Gergiev, for example, the former principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and, until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, one of the most sought-after conductors in the world, has not worked outside Russia and its sphere of influence since then. Gergiev has always been – and, crucially, remains – an open and very vocal supporter of Putin.
It’s this brush with which Netrebko is being tarred. For starters, the soprano first emerged as a protégé of Gergiev at St Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre. And she is on record with flattering comments about Putin as a ‘very attractive man’ and praising his ‘strong, male energy’. In 2012 she was on a list of well-known Russians who supported Putin’s re-election. Indeed, in 2017 she said it was ‘impossible to think of a better president for Russia’ than Putin, who in 2008 had awarded her with the highest honour for Russian artists, the title of People’s Artist, and then in 2014 asked her to sing at the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Worst of all, after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, she was photographed holding a separatist flag. The case against Netrebko seems damning. I certainly believed it to be.
But then I started to do some research for the piece I intended to write, and a very different picture of Netrebko emerged. Within 48 hours of the Russian invasion in 2022, Netrebko issued a statement on social media: ‘I am opposed to this senseless war of aggression and I am calling on Russia to end this war right now, to save all of us! We need peace. #friendship.’ She added, appositely, given the current row: ‘Forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public and to denounce their homeland is not right. This should be a free choice.’ A month later, she said:
I expressly condemn the war on Ukraine, and my thoughts are with the victims of this war and their families. My position is clear. I am not a member of any political party, nor am I allied with any leader of Russia. I acknowledge and regret that past actions or statements of mine could have been misinterpreted.
Questions are obviously begged by this. First, what more is it reasonable to expect her to say or do? She is an opera singer, not a politician or opinion leader. As she says, why should she be forced to take a public stance denouncing anyone when she is not in any way responsible for or even – according to her clear statements – supportive of them?
But in that context, the more important questions obviously relate to her earlier cosying up to Putin. How can that be defended or explained? Netrebko has herself sought to do this:
I have met President Putin only a handful of times in my entire life, most notably on the occasion of receiving awards in recognition of my art or at the Olympics opening ceremony. I have otherwise never received any financial support from the Russian government, and live and am a tax resident in Austria. I love my homeland of Russia and only seek peace and unity through my art.
Why, then, did she endorse Putin publicly in 2012? She has since said that she was asked by the authorities to put her name on the list and it would have been ‘very unwise to refuse to do so’. That is surely understandable. We might love the idea of an artist of Netrebko’s stature standing up to Putin, but we have no right to expect it of her or anyone else living in a dictatorship, as she then was. In 2022 she said she could not criticise Putin himself:
No one in Russia can. Putin is still the president of Russia. I’m still a Russian citizen, so you can’t do something like that. Do you understand? So I declined to make such a statement.
To spell it out, she may no longer live in Russia, but she has family who do, and what happens to the families of dissidents in Russia – and, indeed, to the dissidents themselves – is a familiar story. Netrebko, who has said she did not vote in the 2018 Russian election, has actually criticised the Russian invasion, explicitly and clearly, which is far more than many of her fellow expat Russian artists have done.
As for being pictured holding the separatist flag in 2014: she said she had no idea what it was, or that there would be a separatist leader at the press conference at which the picture was taken. Who knows if this is true? It is certainly plausible. Why would a singer being questioned about her performances and career be expected to be expert in the facts surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
It’s reasonable to surmise that Netrebko’s statements have been self-serving, precisely because she has been widely boycotted since 2022 (although she has returned to La Scala, Milan and the Vienna Staatsoper). So what? If condemning the invasion is not enough, the idea must be that all Russian artists who have at any point in their career supped with the devil – Putin – must forever be barred from performing in the West.
Surely the opposite is more worthwhile – that it should be trumpeted loud and wide that Anna Netrebko, formerly lauded by Putin and the Kremlin, has condemned the invasion of Ukraine, instead of treating her forever as a pariah.
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