Valery Gergiev, Putin’s favourite conductor, friend, courtier and accomplice, is to appear at a publicly funded festival near Naples, a news item that has caused protests all over Italy.
Warding them off, Ivan Scalfarotto, a Left-wing senator, said: “I am firmly opposed to Vladimir Putin [and] I stand fully with Ukraine. But banning artists for political reasons is a dangerous mistake: Gergiev is coming to conduct, not to campaign. When we censor art, we risk becoming what we claim to oppose.”
This develops the argument put forth by the Kremlin every time another Putin pet finds himself ostracised in the West: “Art is above politics”. That’s rich, coming from that lot.
Nothing is ever above politics in evil regimes. Art, sport, science, you name it, are all used as conduits of their evil propaganda. When debating with Western visitors, the standard Soviet claim used to be that yes, you may have a higher standard of living. But our ballet is better than yours. All Soviets likely to have contacts with foreigners were briefed to say such things (spoken from personal experience).
Every victory won by Soviet athletes or chess players was trumpeted as a demonstration of Soviet superiority over a decadent West. Every Soviet musician winning a prize at an international competition was held up as proof of communist achievements.
In my youth, Soviet culture minister, Yekaterina Furtseva, always briefed young musicians about to depart for a competition in England, Belgium or France. The briefings inevitably started with a bang of her fist on the desk and a stern command: “I want the top three prizes! You are Soviet musicians!”
That fine tradition is alive and thriving in Putin’s Russia. He recruits musicians in the fine KGB style to carry – and legitimise – his message to the world. Those who succeed in such extra-musical exploits form his inner circle at the Kremlin.
Bashmet, Matsuyev, Berezovsky and a few others curry favour with the fascist regime by acting as its active mouthpieces, with or without musical instruments. And none of them is more hideous than Gergiev, the gangster musician in the service of a gangster regime.
He has been close to Putin since the 1990s, when Gergiev was making his mark as conductor in Petersburg, and Putin was the mafioso deputy mayor of the city. Since then, Gergiev has clung to Putin like a limpet, amassing power and riches for his trouble.
In those days he was a decent enough conductor, solid and technically competent, if hardly deserving of being touted as the world’s greatest. As Gergiev’s reputation grew, he began to collect artistic and administrative posts the way some people collect stamps.
Improbably, Putin appointed him as general director of both the Mariinsky Theatre in Petersburg and the Bolshoi in Moscow. The West followed suit: Gergiev acquired posts in Rotterdam, Munich, Milan and elsewhere, becoming perhaps the world’s busiest conductor.
All sorts of accolades and medals followed, mostly from Putin. But, a gangster himself, Vlad knows how to express his appreciation the gangster way: with money.
Money became Gergiev’s primary interest, something Putin encouraged. Early in his ascent, for example, he granted Gergiev a monopoly on marketing turkey meat in Russia, a concession worth millions.
Gergiev used his ill-gotten gains to set up a charitable foundation, supposedly to support struggling young musicians. However, it turned out that the only musician the foundation supported was Gergiev himself, and he was neither young nor struggling.
Neither was he any longer really a musician, someone serving music and devoted to his art. On the contrary, Gergiev’s perfunctory performances began to bespeak his utter contempt for both the music and the audience. He routinely skipped rehearsals, went through the motions at the podium, then rushed off to the next gig.
A friend of mine, a Dutch musician, told me that Gergiev once showed up an hour late for his concert at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, then conducted an embarrassing clunker and left in a huff. It turned out that he had played a matinee in Brussels earlier that day.
Since I have rather idealised notions about music, I was quite shocked. That little peccadillo, however, was nothing compared to Gergiev’s other coup. A few years ago, he conducted in Moscow in the morning and at New York’s Carnegie Hall the same night – a feat that would have been impossible if he didn’t own a private jet.
The plane, however, is a minor item of his possessions. Receiving inflated fees from Putin’s lieges and embezzling millions from his foundation, Gergiev has become a mini-oligarch. In Russia, that distinction presupposes unwavering loyalty to Putin in exchange for the latter’s permission to pilfer at will.
Recently published documents show that Gergiev has amassed a property empire worth hundreds of millions, and that’s just in Italy. For example, he owns one of the most spectacular palazzos on the Grand Canal in Venice.
That spelled an outstanding debt to Putin, and Gergiev has been working it off tirelessly. He has accepted the position of Putin’s personal ambassador, a sort of cultural attaché. That exalted post comes with a simple brief: vindicating, ideally glorifying, Putin’s fascism, lending it the weight of Gergiev’s reputation.
The conductor took up the role with the kind of dedication he nowadays denies to his conducting. Gergiev has been happily whitewashing Putin’s domestic repression and military aggression abroad.
He was enthusiastic about the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the criminal annexation of the Crimea in 2014. And of course the full-scale attack on the Ukraine in 2022 had no greater champion.
A backlash ensued. Gergiev was instantly dropped by leading cultural institutions including the Munich Philharmonic, Rotterdam Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Opera, Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, and BIS Records.
His engagement at La Scala was cut short by the mayor of Milan, but he was invited to get it back by condemning the assault on the Ukraine. Yet Putin’s poodle condemned nothing. On the contrary, Gergiev was issuing one thunderous panegyric for the criminal war after another.
The UK, Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries declared Gergiev persona non grata, while Canada imposed personal sanctions on him, alongside 43 other mouthpieces of genocide. That measure included the freezing of Gergiev’s assets, something the maestro must have found especially painful.
Yet Italy has now signalled her readiness to adopt a more tolerant approach to the glorification of mass atrocities committed by the Putin regime. I do hope other countries won’t take this as a precedent.
“Art is above politics”? Since when?
Just compare Gergiev’s situation with that of Wilhelm Furtwängler, de-Nazified after the war and barred from the podium for quite a while. Only please don’t compare them musically: Furtwängler was arguably the greatest conductor in history, and Gergiev is a pygmy standing next to a giant.
But after the Second World War, Furtwängler suffered prosecution for having continued to perform in Berlin throughout the war. Yet he never joined the Nazi party, he refused to give the Nazi salute or sign his letters Heil Hitler, he helped many Jewish musicians escape Germany, and he resisted attempts to Aryanize his orchestra and its programming.
Furtwängler was forced by the Nazis to sign a couple of documents about the seminal differences between Aryan and Jewish music, but other than that he served his art, not Hitler. I’m not going to immerse myself into the ethical mire surrounding the de-Nazification programme, and nor shall I try to vindicate Furtwängler unreservedly.
But if that musical colossus was judged culpable, the musical pygmy Gergiev ought to be summarily arrested the moment he sets foot on the soil of any civilised country. For once, I’d welcome the suspension of due process. Lock him up and throw away the key, would be my recommendation.