The best and house-filling soprano Anna Netrebko will be eliminated from all events that are subsidized. Conductor Valery Gergiev, who was active throughout the West until the Russian intervention in Ukraine, was immediately fired worldwide.
Of course, both artists were also regularly active in their homeland and were honored, praised and honored there by the political leaders. The President of the Russian Federation gained sympathizers by attending events where Netrebko or Gergiev, or even both, performed, and the Russian state also paid its artists – perhaps not as much as they are paid in the West. The Western media – led by those in America – insisted on banning them from performing, as well as all other artists, athletes and even the elimination of Russian music and literature from the past to the present day. Everyone is asked to give a clear and firm condemnation of the country in which they and their family live, the country that started the war against Ukraine.
For perfectly understandable reasons, nobody who lives, has lived and will live in the country in the future does this. No one supports Russian intervention in Ukraine and no one opposes it. Never and nobody has ever demanded a political opinion from an artist or athlete in a democratic country.
Now a German journalist is trying to gain recognition by trying to get the brilliant Greek conductor Teodor Currentzis, who lives in Russia and works worldwide, to be banned from performing because he has not made any political statements against the country in which he studied as a foreigner and works very successfully. None of this will affect or even shorten the war in Ukraine. On the contrary, as long as the states in the EU, led and pressured by the United States, continue to give arms to Ukraine through NATO, the war will be prolonged. The sanctions harm us no less than those against whom they are directed.
The USA would like and are putting pressure on us to buy their gas, which is much more expensive and produced in an environmentally harmful way. When the USA invaded North Vietnam years ago and killed the people there with banned poison gas, Western Europe reacted just as little as when they triggered the Afghan and Iraq wars.
Only a speedy agreement with Putin’s Russia, without pressure and persecution from either side, can put an end to the suffering in Ukraine. Only common sense tells us that.
Ioan Dutch was director of the Vienna State Opera.
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