On Sunday evening, the Ballet Festival Week 2022 and the short era of Igor Zelensky came to an end with a performance of Christopher Wheeldon's "Cinderella", a version of the beautiful Prokofiev classic with imaginable pink glasses, at the Munich National Theater.

Immediately after the performance, around 10 p.m., a press release was sent out by the Bavarian State Opera.

It announced Zelensky's departure as director of the Bavarian State Ballet, news that the Minister for Science and Art, Markus Blume, had kept the public waiting for a month.

The wording suggests that contractual issues led to the delay.

The German public will apparently never find out the result of a questioning of Zelensky by the ministry in early March about his part-time activities for a Russian cultural heritage foundation close to Putin.

The door slams behind Zelensky, but the surprising justification is that family matters need to be settled, and these cannot be reconciled with the duties of a ballet director.

That is why he is resigning with immediate effect, according to the Russian-born dancer, who took over the company in 2016.

In the same message written by the Ministry, State Opera Director Serge Dorny and Minister of State Blume politely thank Mr. Zelensky.

"Private family matters" are also an interesting formulation in that they apparently affect Zelensky's wife Yana so little that she remains in Munich, where she has been employed, like her husband, since 2016.

Your NV stage contract (“normal contract” stage) as a ballet mistress runs for one season from the beginning of each season and is automatically extended for the following season if it is not terminated in good time in autumn.

So your contract will run for at least the whole of the next season.

Zelensky, on the other hand, stepped onto the stage for the last time on Sunday, when the applause had died down and the curtain had closed, where the dancers, happy and exhausted after the performance marathon of the Ballet Festival Week, lay in each other's arms.

With the usual terse words, he said goodbye to the ensemble and disappeared.

Where to is easy to guess.

Russia has some vacancies to fill on the ballet scene, not least at the helm of Moscow's second largest ballet, the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Ballet, which Zelensky directed until 2017;

his French successor, Etoile Laurent Hilaire, left when the war broke out.

The director general of the Bolshoi Theatre, Vladimir Urin, had spoken out against the war and has apparently fallen out of favor.

Putin is said to be considering placing the two giant institutions, Mariinsky and Bolshoi – the latter alone has three thousand employees – under the direction of conductor Valery Gergiev, who was fired in Munich.