In order to starve Vladimir Putin’s regime of anything that might bolster its diplomatic prestige, sanctions have been applied to the cultural as well as the sporting sphere. Loans to and from Russian museums have been stopped; the Bolshoi Ballet’s European summer tour has been cancelled; and two of Russia’s most prominent classical musicians, the conductor Valery Gergiev and the soprano Anna Netrebko, have in effect been blacklisted alongside the oligarchs.
This is not unjust. Gergiev has shown open and consistent support for Putin and his pan-Slavist obsessions. Based in Vienna and cushioned by Austrian citizenship, Netrebko has tried to have it both ways, but is certainly not very astute. The price they will both pay is high: it’s unlikely either of them can ever resume their lucrative careers in the west—and no great loss, some might add.
In marked contrast, ballet stars living in Russia like Olga Smirnova have displayed astonishing courage with public declarations of horror
at the Ukrainian invasion that expose them to official reprisals. (Smirnova has since announced a move from the Bolshoi to Dutch National Ballet.) Other Russian artists, principally expatriates, have been more circumspect, ready to call for peace but stopping short of outright condemnation of Putin’s aggression.
It’s a difficult situation, and one can sympathise with their dilemmas.
But beyond the tricky question of what can reasonably be expected of individuals who work in the west lies the knottier problem ofhow we should showcase Russian music. In the present fraught situation, it would surely be crass to programme something so triumphalist as Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, celebrating Russian victory at the battle of Borodino. The Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra was surely right to abandon scheduled performances of the piece. Now is not the time for Prokofiev’s thrillingly brutal score for Alexander Nevsky either (though Prokofiev was born in Ukraine).
But what about Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony—given that the composer himself was oppressed by Stalin, and that the music embodies heroic resistance to foreign invasion? Or Mussorgsky’s operas like Boris Godunov, full of ardent Russian patriotism but also profound critiques of tyranny, corruption and cronyism that should make Putin shiver? Have we the stomach for their ambiguities?
It’s interesting to look back to the Second World War, when the British Council’s music committee and the BBC took the view that the enemy’s music transcended its national origin. Handel and Mendelssohn could even be considered honorary Brits. During the Blitz, English pianist Myra Hess’s legendary concerts in the National Gallery were largely made up of German composers—Bach, Mozart, Schumann, Brahms, with Beethoven the staple. And it was Beethoven, born in Bonn, whose fifth symphony provided the BBC with the four-note “V for victory” Morse code motif. To those who balked at the choice, Vaughan Williams sharply retorted that Beethoven demonstrated not “how horrible” Germany had become but “what it had lost.”
More remarkable is the clean bill of health granted to Wagner, given that both his virulent antisemitism and Hitler’s penchant for his work were well known. Yet over 250 extracts from his operas were played during wartime Proms seasons, including the whooping Ride of the Valkyries and the fervently Teutonic overture to his opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
In the First World War, a different line was taken. As Samuel Hynes writes in his superb book A War Imagined, there was “a widespread effort, with official support, to eliminate German influences from English cultural life.” German scholarship, so revered by the Victorian intelligentsia, was widely derided as dry, pedantic chaff, and even Goethe was identified in the Times as “a megalomaniac.”
German music survived at the Proms, but was excluded from ancillary “All English” and “No German” seasons—the latter organised by Thomas Beecham (who, ironically, continued to conduct at the Nazified Berlin State Opera up to 1938). German musicians in British orchestras were dismissed en masse and a “National Association for the Protection of British Interests in Music” set up. The boycott and the jingoism didn’t last, but it was mean-spirited—and ridiculous too—while it did. It will be interesting to see how this summer’s BBC Proms—always a political flashpoint—tackles the issue.
To end on a personal note: I work for a small foundation that sponsors young classical pianists. Inspired by Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and its symbolic conciliation of Israelis and Palestinians, we will be distributing money equally to Russians and Ukrainians studying in British conservatoires—our hope being that both nationalities will sit down and play four-hand music together. No, it’s not much, but it’s something.
