Anna Netrebko’s return to Covent Garden was always going to be contentious. The Russian soprano, 53, was pictured in 2014 bringing gifts to Russian-armed separatists in Crimea. Two years earlier, she put her name to a list endorsing Putin for president. Until February 2022, she was a Kremlin puppet who did as she was told, either by Putin’s office or by her mentor, the powerful conductor Valery Gergiev. They summoned, she sang.
Everything changed when Russian planes bombed Kyiv and Putin bragged of winning the war within weeks. Netrebko, who lives in Vienna on an Austrian passport, kept her head down until, seeing her dates being cancelled, she emerged after five weeks with a statement that disowned the war, but not Putin’s responsibility for it. In her words: “I expressly condemn the war against Ukraine and my thoughts are with the victims of this war and their families.”
It was too little, much too late. Her record label and management agency disowned her. New York’s Metropolitan Opera tore up several years’ worth of contracts. Other stages – chiefly in Austria and Italy – broke the general boycott, but Netrebko was now a political hot potato whose every appearance generated scattered demonstrations and the wrong kind of attention.
So why has Covent Garden now brought her back to sing Tosca next month, followed by Turandot later in the season and the rare privilege of an “intimate” main-stage recital next June? It looks like massive human error all over again at the introspective and increasingly accident-prone opera house.
Last month, the Royal Opera director Oliver Mears tried and comically failed to take down a Palestine flag waved by a rebellious extra during curtain calls. The CEO Sir Alex Beard followed up by cancelling a co-production with Israeli Opera, belatedly claiming this had nothing to do with pressure from pro-Palestine agitators, just a matter of staff safety. This week a battery of British MPs and pro-Ukraine culturati have published a letter in the Guardian, challenging the Royal Ballet and Opera to sack Netrebko – a “defining choice” they say “between status and responsibility, between profit and values, between silence and conscience.” Tough call.
Mears, with some prescience, specified at the season announcement that Netrebko’s return was not his decision, or Beard’s but the specific request of the incoming music director Jakub Hrusa. No executive was to blame. This was art for art’s sake, right?
But the new Tosca production for which Netrebko was engaged is directed by Mears himself. It is an opera of torture, attempted date-rape, murder and suicide which works best with a big name in the title role. There is no bigger name than Anna Netrebko, even if her voice is fraying in middle-age and her audience is fragmented by the Ukraine conflict. British audiences surely have a right to hear her one last time is part of the thinking behind her engagement.
Or have we all got it wrong? Are we victimising an important artist for her country’s crimes, a single mother who is raising a neurodiverse child and needs the validation of her talent just to put bread on the table and maintain self-belief. It is hard not to feel some sympathy for Anna Netrebko who, for all her faults, has been an epic interpreter of Italian operas great and gruesome. When I last saw her at La Scala in Andrea Chenier, she was a force of nature that held the house in an iron grip. When she exited stage left, the tension dropped with her. Such magnetism is in the class of Callas and Sutherland, of Sonya Yoncheva and Asmik Grigoryan, a species that demands to be protected. Perhaps Netrebko needs to be embraced for what she does best, rather than what she signed.
On the other hand, she did herself so few favours in her glory years that no colleagues protested her dismissal. She is presently suing the Met for defamation and discrimination on grounds of national origin, hardly the best way to rehabilitate herself in the opera profession.
Where that leaves Covent Garden is damned if they let her sing, sued if they don’t. Between now and Tosca on September 11 objections will mount, demonstrators will shout and Mears will struggle to justify opening a season with so costly and unnecessary a distraction. Netrebko cannot be blamed for that. This is more to do with what our last fully-functioning opera house ought to be offering the nation in these deprived and demented times.
Norman Lebrecht is the editor of slippedisc.com
Anna Netrebko’s return to Covent Garden was always going to be contentious. The Russian soprano, 53, was pictured in 2014 bringing gifts to Russian-armed separatists in Crimea. Two years earlier, she put her name to a list endorsing Putin for president. Until February 2022, she was a Kremlin puppet who did as she was told, either by Putin’s office or by her mentor, the powerful conductor Valery Gergiev. They summoned, she sang.
Everything changed when Russian planes bombed Kyiv and Putin bragged of winning the war within weeks. Netrebko, who lives in Vienna on an Austrian passport, kept her head down until, seeing her dates being cancelled, she emerged after five weeks with a statement that disowned the war, but not Putin’s responsibility for it. In her words: “I expressly condemn the war against Ukraine and my thoughts are with the victims of this war and their families.”
It was too little, much too late. Her record label and management agency disowned her. New York’s Metropolitan Opera tore up several years’ worth of contracts. Other stages – chiefly in Austria and Italy – broke the general boycott, but Netrebko was now a political hot potato whose every appearance generated scattered demonstrations and the wrong kind of attention.
So why has Covent Garden now brought her back to sing Tosca next month, followed by Turandot later in the season and the rare privilege of an “intimate” main-stage recital next June? It looks like massive human error all over again at the introspective and increasingly accident-prone opera house.
Last month, the Royal Opera director Oliver Mears tried and comically failed to take down a Palestine flag waved by a rebellious extra during curtain calls. The CEO Sir Alex Beard followed up by cancelling a co-production with Israeli Opera, belatedly claiming this had nothing to do with pressure from pro-Palestine agitators, just a matter of staff safety. This week a battery of British MPs and pro-Ukraine culturati have published a letter in the Guardian, challenging the Royal Ballet and Opera to sack Netrebko – a “defining choice” they say “between status and responsibility, between profit and values, between silence and conscience.” Tough call.
Mears, with some prescience, specified at the season announcement that Netrebko’s return was not his decision, or Beard’s but the specific request of the incoming music director Jakub Hrusa. No executive was to blame. This was art for art’s sake, right?
But the new Tosca production for which Netrebko was engaged is directed by Mears himself. It is an opera of torture, attempted date-rape, murder and suicide which works best with a big name in the title role. There is no bigger name than Anna Netrebko, even if her voice is fraying in middle-age and her audience is fragmented by the Ukraine conflict. British audiences surely have a right to hear her one last time is part of the thinking behind her engagement.
Or have we all got it wrong? Are we victimising an important artist for her country’s crimes, a single mother who is raising a neurodiverse child and needs the validation of her talent just to put bread on the table and maintain self-belief. It is hard not to feel some sympathy for Anna Netrebko who, for all her faults, has been an epic interpreter of Italian operas great and gruesome. When I last saw her at La Scala in Andrea Chenier, she was a force of nature that held the house in an iron grip. When she exited stage left, the tension dropped with her. Such magnetism is in the class of Callas and Sutherland, of Sonya Yoncheva and Asmik Grigoryan, a species that demands to be protected. Perhaps Netrebko needs to be embraced for what she does best, rather than what she signed.
On the other hand, she did herself so few favours in her glory years that no colleagues protested her dismissal. She is presently suing the Met for defamation and discrimination on grounds of national origin, hardly the best way to rehabilitate herself in the opera profession.
Where that leaves Covent Garden is damned if they let her sing, sued if they don’t. Between now and Tosca on September 11 objections will mount, demonstrators will shout and Mears will struggle to justify opening a season with so costly and unnecessary a distraction. Netrebko cannot be blamed for that. This is more to do with what our last fully-functioning opera house ought to be offering the nation in these deprived and demented times.
Norman Lebrecht is the editor of slippedisc.com