In the last week of February, Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, was in Moscow to cast his eye over the dress rehearsal of the Met’s co-production with the Bolshoi theatre of Wagner’s Lohengrin. Six days later, minutes before curtain-up on the new season in New York City, Gelb was watching Vladyslav Buialskyi, a 24-year-old Ukrainian bass-baritone in the Met’s young artists programme, give a hurriedly ad hoc pronunciation lesson to the Met chorus for them to sing the Ukrainian national anthem before the performance. In the intervening week relations with the Bolshoi had been severed, plans to build scenery and costumes for an exclusively home-produced Lohengrin had been set in train and Anna Netrebko, the leading soprano of her generation and the Met’s longtime star, withdrew from her performances with the company while failing to renounce Vladimir Putin.
“When I was in Moscow there was obviously great political tension in the air,” says Gelb. “I remember speaking to colleagues in the Bolshoi about how at moments like this, artistic exchange is more important than ever. I meant it. That has been the way I’ve operated all my life. But I then got off a 10-hour flight home and what everyone thought was unthinkable, but apparently had been planned all along, happened. Putin had invaded Ukraine and at that point I switched gears. There was no great moral dilemma or difficult decision to make. We had to immediately sever relations with Putin-backed organisations, which sadly included the Bolshoi. I greatly admire them artistically, but it is Putin who literally signs the contract of my counterpart there and so the decision was clear.”
The response of the arts world to the invasion of Ukraine was immediate and wide-ranging. From Louis Tomlinson pulling Russian gigs and The Batman release being postponed, to paintings recalled to Madrid’s Prado museum from Moscow and the Queen withholding swords due to go to Russia. Putin-linked donors, trustees and board members have been forced to resign from prestigious arts institutions all over the world. There have been high-profile benefit concerts and performances to raise money for Ukrainian charities but also a slew of classical music and dance cancellations, resignations and withdrawals including young Russian pianists being excluded from competitions and abandoned performances of Tchaikovsky.
The Met provides a useful case study of some of the moral, practical and aesthetic challenges facing cultural organisations as they negotiate the repercussions of war. And Gelb has an almost unique perspective. Long before assuming his current role as the most powerful person in opera, he had exhibited a Zelig-like propensity to be present at the moments where east/west politics have crossed over with classical music. In the 70s Gelb took the Boston Symphony Orchestra to China at the end of the Cultural Revolution to mark the normalisation of relations between President Jimmy Carter and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. During the cold war in the 80s, Gelb worked with Vladimir Horowitz when the great pianist returned to the Soviet Union after more than 60 years of exile. Gelb was on another music assignment in Berlin when the wall came down and was in Leningrad, producing a TV concert for Tchaikovsky’s 150th anniversary in 1990, on the day money rationing was introduced as the Soviet Union moved towards collapse.
The two classical musicians most closely associated with Putin are the conductor Valery Gergiev and Netrebko. The hyperactive Gergiev was dropped by institutions he was associated with outside Russia – and also by his own management – but this wasn’t a direct problem for the Met as there were no plans to work with him. Netrebko was a different matter. For two decades she had been more or less the face of the Met: its reigning diva who had been given many of the plum premieres and, equally prestigious today, its live HD broadcasts to cinemas around the world.
“It was a painful but obvious decision,” says Gelb. “When I arrived at the Met, Netrebko was just getting launched and I immediately saw that she was someone on whose career the Met could hang its hat, and vice versa. I provided her, deservedly so, with an enormous range of roles and opportunities that opera singers’ careers are measured by.” Gelb says that he wanted to give Netrebko a chance to disown Putin but “she had put herself in that impossible position where she couldn’t repudiate him. And even if I hadn’t made the decision on moral grounds, on a practical level there is no way she could possibly perform. Our audience wouldn’t allow it.” Subsequent statements from Netrebko seeking to clarify her position, and expressly condemning the war against Ukraine, have not changed things for the Met.
Gelb is careful to point to the specifics of Netrebko’s case. “She took a public stance over a period of years. Most Russian artists, including other singers who perform at the Met, have not taken any public political position. Their private positions are theirs to keep private. I have no problem with that. We’re not asking them to fill out questionnaires, or for their loyalty to the Met or to the west. We’re doing none of that and nor do I think it’s appropriate.”
This position is now becoming the orthodoxy in classical music with a petition signed by high-profile figures such as Simon Rattle, Antonio Pappano, Nicola Benedetti and others calling to end any “blanket boycott against Russian and Belarusian artists”. Gelb cites the case of Russian baritone Igor Golovatenko, now playing the title role in the Met’s Eugene Onegin alongside several other Russian artists in smaller roles. “He’s one of the great Verdi baritone hopes and we have him booked in many productions. It’s ridiculous if artists are being dropped for being Russian and it is wrong that some orchestras and opera companies are cancelling Russian repertory. It sends exactly the wrong message. The great Russian masterpieces are not responsible for Putin. We are cancelling Putin, not Pushkin. So we’re not going to be making changes to our plans for the performance of the Russian repertory.”
Musicians of all stripes have responded to the invasion, from Russian rappers expressing solidarity to the Ukrainian band who adapted the Clash classic to Kyiv Calling to singers from the Odesa opera performing in front of the tank traps set up to protect their building. The leadership of the Bolshoi were among the Russian arts signatories to a petition calling for peace. At times of national and international crisis – and of triumph – classical music can find itself being intertwined with the state and with diplomacy. The Met’s relationship with government officials in the US is “nonexistent” says Gelb, but the Met concert for Ukraine staged shortly after the invasion was attended by 35 UN ambassadors, including that of the US. “It was probably the closest that art and politics in the US had been aligned in some years. Not that we were necessarily looking for any government endorsement. We were making an artistic statement of solidarity. But I think our government wanted to show support as the Ukrainian ambassador was the guest of honour.”
Gelb was delighted that the concert was broadcast on Ukrainian public radio and notes some other unanticipated benefits accruing to Ukrainian music. Netrebko’s absence prompted the need for a replacement in the forthcoming production of Turandot. “The best available soprano happened to be Liudmyla Monastyrska. We didn’t engage her because she is Ukrainian, but the fact that she is and will be performing on stage and in the HD broadcast provides some poetic justice, perhaps.”
Half an hour after Buialskyi had coached the chorus he was on stage in the season opening Don Carlos. “He’s one of the contingent of Flemish deputies who sing that beautiful melody to King Philippe II, who is of course destroying them on behalf of the Spanish Inquisition,” says Gelb. “The parallel is not going unnoticed by our audience.”
Although he has found himself at the confluence of art and politics many times over the years, Gelb notes that usually cultural exchange occurs as the “first baby steps of re-engagement. Even at the height of the cold war with Horowitz in Moscow and so on, it was seen as a step forward. This is a different situation. I hope that art will play its part in a wider reconciliation in due course, but for now, with war raging, it is hard to see any direct role that art can play and of course that can make us feel helpless. But at the same time it’s important to do what we can and for us that is to make a difference to people’s spirits. To provide moral support to Ukraine, to demonstrate the power of a united world against Putin and to the extent that it’s possible in these dark times, provide nourishment for the soul.”
• The Met’s Live in HD production of Turandot will be broadcast in cinemas around the world on 7 May.
