Gergiev and Putin: The Conductor and the Dictator

In the world of social media, the conductor Valery Gergiev is already being shot at: "CancelGergiev" is a current hashtag on Twitter, under which the cancellation of all opera and concert engagements for the Russian citizen of Ossetian origin abroad is being demanded.

As a victory, both Gergiev and pianist Denis Matsuev canceled their participation in a number of Vienna Philharmonic concerts, including at New York's Carnegie Hall.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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In the world of cultural politics, people haven't gone that far yet, but the time for ultimatums has dawned here too.

Munich's Lord Mayor Dieter Reiter (SPD) announced on Friday: "I made my position clear to Valery Gergiev and asked him to also clearly and unequivocally distance himself from the brutal war of aggression that Putin was launching against Ukraine and now especially against our twin city of Kiev leads.” He gave the head of the Munich Philharmonic until Monday to position himself.

Otherwise Gergiev "could no longer remain chief conductor of our Philharmonic".

The day before, Milan's Mayor Beppe Sala, in coordination with the director of La Scala, Dominique Meyer, had declared: "We ask the Russian Maestro to take a clear position against the Russian invasion.

If he doesn't do that, we'll be forced to give up this cooperation.” A written declaration from him “in favor of a peaceful solution to the conflict” is even demanded.

Heaped with money from Putin

Such demands are understandable, on the one hand, because of the impulse of cultural organizers to take a stand in a political conflict without being able to exert any effective influence on the conflict itself.

They are also understandable given Gergiev's behavior to date: he has become vocal as a supporter of Vladimir Putin.

In the 2008 Georgia conflict, he vehemently supported the Russian view of things, and in 2014 he signed an open letter approving the annexation of Crimea;

Gergiev also officially endorsed the Russian law banning “propaganda for non-traditional sexual relations”.

But now one may ask what the actors who give Gergiev an ultimatum expect from his explanations.

Like few other artists, the conductor is an exponent of Russian cultural policy.

He sat on the Council for Culture and the Arts in the Kremlin.

And to turn down the invitation there would probably have had unpleasant consequences for his career.

Putin showers Gergiev with money.

He also benefits from this privately;

but at the same time he had opera branches of his Saint Petersburg Mariinsky Theater built in Vladikavkaz and Vladivostok, financed several music festivals in the country, and regularly supports choirs and children's choirs as well as promoting young musicians.

So he trades: money for political allegiance.

In his official statements, he can speak much less freely than the soprano Anna Netrebko, who celebrated her fiftieth birthday in the Kremlin in October with a four-hour gala including a laudatory speech by Putin that was broadcast on television.

Netrebko bears hardly any cultural-political responsibility for opera houses, orchestras and festivals and thus for many hundreds of people.

She delivers her devotion for free, Gergiev doesn't.

The incident became famous when journalist and composer Nicolas Nabokov asked composer Dmitri Shostakovich at a press conference in New York in March 1949 whether he approved of the Stalinist ban on Igor Stravinsky's music in his home country, the Soviet Union.

Shostakovich was at that moment publicly forced to support Stalin.

Otherwise he should have immediately applied for political asylum in the United States.

For decades he was considered an artist loyal to the party, until after the publication of Solomon Volkov's interview book "Witness Statement", whose authentic documentary character is disputed to this day, Shostakovich's work was revalued and today the dissident can be heard in every bar.

Julian Barnes' novel The Noise of Time popularized this view of things again, so much so that the American musicologist Richard Taruskin felt compelled to warn against confusing fiction and fact.

According to Taruskin, it is much more likely that with his opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” Shostakovich wanted to politically support the kulak murders and Stalin’s genocide of the Ukrainians through the Holodomor and was surprised that Stalin did not recognize this.

In any case, one should not look at Shostakovich's dissidentism in a one-dimensional way, opportunism was always part of it.

that Shostakovich with his opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" wanted to support the kulak murders and Stalin's genocide of the Ukrainians through the Holodomor politically and was surprised that Stalin did not recognize this.

In any case, one should not look at Shostakovich's dissidentism in a one-dimensional way, opportunism was always part of it.

that Shostakovich with his opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" wanted to support the kulak murders and Stalin's genocide of the Ukrainians through the Holodomor politically and was surprised that Stalin did not recognize this.

In any case, one should not look at Shostakovich's dissidentism in a one-dimensional way, opportunism was always part of it.

If Gergiev now has to explain himself politically to the West, he is in a similar situation.

If he distances himself from Putin and his criminal war against Ukraine, he will only continue his career outside of Russia, possibly even fearing for his life. In any case, he will have to give up everything in his homeland that he has built up there over the past three decades.

If he doesn't, in Western Europe - with the possible exception of Switzerland - he will be treated morally like an economic oligarch and put on a cultural sanctions list.

A plea for this war, however forced, would be intolerable.

But how Gergiev really feels about Putin and his war is not known at this point in time. Perhaps in fifty years a novel will tell a more credible story about the noise of our time.