In Bernard Taper’s biography of Russian-American choreographer George Balanchine, he describes a moment of deprivation during the Russian Revolution that haunts me still: A horse drops dead in the street, and the starving populace rushes out to carve it up.
Historically, the Russian people have careened from one kind of oppression to another, from the czars to the Soviets, whose empire Vladimir Putin is now seeking to reconstitute with his brutal siege of Ukraine.
Many Russians, including artists like Balanchine, fled that oppression — in his case first to Paris, where he choreographed for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes; and then to America, where he ultimately co-founded the New York City Ballet with Lincoln Kirstein. Balanchine fell in love with his adopted country. He wore western-style string ties and watched “Barnaby Jones” while ironing in his apartment near Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, NYCB’s home. He always said it was a pleasure to pay taxes to the United States, a country in which citizens could live freely.
But mostly he created a company and works that celebrated America — its speed, its savvy, its capacity for possibility. In ballets like “Who Cares?”, set to George Gershwin’ “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” set to Richard Rodgers; “Western Symphony”; and, especially “Stars and Stripes,” set to the marches of John Philip Sousa, in which the dancers high-kick their way to Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” in the finale as an American flag comes up behind them, Balanchine displayed the Broadway and Hollywood showmanship that was his first entrée to this country.
You know what he would’ve thought of Russian conductor Valery Gergiev and soprano Anna Netrebko’s refusal to denounce Putin, which has led to the implosion of their supernova international careers.
Gergiev has always been a Putin supporter. His silence on the subject speaks volumes. Netrebko, a Gergiev protégé, has tried to thread the needle, denouncing the war but not the man who started it while creating a false equivalence between Putin and Western “aggressors” who would force her to denounce her homeland.
Is she right? Isn’t cancelling her for failing to call out Putin a kind of oppression, too? Isn’t it enough that she has spoken out against the war? And when it comes to artists, shouldn’t we, too, thread the needle — enjoy the art and the artist and declare a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it comes to the artist’s political views? Why is what an artist or athlete thinks more important than what we do?
The answer to these questions is that it is important. We are all first and foremost citizens of the world, as Socrates observed of himself. But we are also specific individuals with identities forged by nationality and livelihood. Netrebko is a Russian soprano , a prima donna absoluta who has been second only to Renée Fleming at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan, where she maintains a residence. (She also has a home in St. Petersburg, Russia, and has dual Russian-Austrian citizenship, in part because of what she cited as the difficulty of getting the necessary visas for an international career as a Russian citizen.) Netrebko has benefited from both worlds — Russia and the West. Now those worlds have collided, and fans and the newly interested want to know where she stands as a relevant party.
She is, of course, entitled to her opinion, her parsing of the situation, her silence even. That is her right as a free citizen of the world and as someone who has performed and lived in the United States, a nation that guarantees free speech — something her country does not.
But the marketplace, too, has its opinions. Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, announced that the opera house could no longer do business with people who support totalitarianism — explicitly or tacitly. And so Netrebko is out in the title role in the Met’s April production of “Turandot.” Christine Goerke and Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska will replace the singer, who has withdrawn from her other engagements. (Gergiev’s were cancelled.) Gelb has said she will probably never perform at the Met again.
Once more, art supplies the ironic metaphor: “Turandot” — the last and biggest of Giacomo Puccini’s operas and the subject, along with the Russia-China-U.S. “trivalry,” of a new novel I’m writing — is the story of a Chinese princess whose barbaric treatment of princely foreign suitors stems from an earlier invasion of her country and the defilement of its ruler, her ancestress.
We are at a moment of crisis in which we must ask ourselves who we are and what do we believe. Is it acceptable to slaughter innocent people? If not, can we support the perpetrator and still be on the side of the angels?
We have Netrebko’s answer, and she has ours.