In Baden-Baden, the usual gestures of complacency, which don't cost much but don't help anyone, are dispensed with: the Festspielhaus is not illuminated in the colors of Ukraine, and the anthem of the country that has just been struck in the heart is not played either.
What for?
Jan Brachmann
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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You won't win the war with it, and the Ukrainians themselves would have to see it as something of a mockery at the Easter Festival, which is all about Russian music.
It also doesn't help the Russian chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Kirill Petrenko, that he was one of the first to condemn Russia's war against Ukraine.
It also doesn't help that his ancestors are from Ukraine (his grandfather was born not far from Lutsk, in Volhynia, now north-western Ukraine).
Andriy Melnyk, the Ukrainian ambassador in Germany, sees all Russians as his enemies anyway, regardless of their origin and intellectual background, including Petrenko.