War is always also a culture war. And it’s also raging in Germany at the moment. Soprano star Anna Netrebko has been uninvited at many opera houses (she had transferred money to the Donbass regions, appeared with separatist leaders and now declares she is “just an artist” and “knows nothing about politics”). Munich threw out the head of the Philharmonic, Valery Gergiev (he had supported Putin from the first anti-gay laws to the annexation of Crimea to his friendship with Assad). After being thrown out, he first conducted the triumphal march The Great Gate of Kyiv from Mussorgsky pictures of an exhibition in Russia. What an affront!
At the moment there is a lot to be read about artists from Russia being subjected to a “test of conscience”. Fortunately, this does not apply to Germany. It’s just that artists who have been close to Putin for a long time briefly explain that we are still talking about a common C major – Beethoven’s humanistic C major, which depicts the persecution of minorities, a war of aggression against self-determined countries and the categorically excludes the killing of civilians. It’s not about a “cancel culture” for everything Russian! So far in Germany, nobody has been invited out because of their origin, no Mussorgsky or Glinka has been taken off the schedule, on the contrary: ensembles in which Russians and Ukrainians work experience the unifying greatness of music.
For years, however, culture has been an often underestimated political factor for the Kremlin. Not only Russians are involved, but also Germans. For example, Hajo Frey, formerly director of the Bremen Theater and the Bruckner House in Linz, was then promoted to organizer of the Dresden Semper Opera Ball (after he had suffered musical losses in Bremen and had come under pressure in Linz for being close to Russia) by Putin and his cultural friend, the cellist Sergei Roldugin, as director to Sochi. Incidentally, two billion dollars were found in Panama shell companies at Roldugin. Since then, Hajo Frey has been organizing gentle cultural tourism to Sochi, inviting business leaders from the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, artists and federal politicians to his oasis of well-being on the Black Sea. In January, Elisabeth Motschmann (CDU) cheered the “bridge builder” Frey on Facebook.
It is these managers and artists who are now being questioned. And, yes: it is not enough to point the finger at Russia. Putin’s cultural network works precisely because of dependencies in the West. Starting with the artistic director of the Munich Philharmonic, Paul Müller, who always glossed over Gergiev’s misanthropy as a private matter, to the Champions League trailer sponsored by Gazprom, in which Gergiev and the pianist Denis Matsuev maltreat Tchaikovsky, to the Greek-Russian conductor Teodor Currentzis, who is not only head of the SWR Orchestra, but also has his ensemble Musicaeterna financed by the VTB Bank, over 60 percent of which is owned by the Russian state. The guest performances of the orchestra are often financed by Russian oligarchs, also in Western European music metropolises.
This is another reason why it is important to take a close look, especially these days: at Moscow, but also at Berlin, at Salzburg and Baden-Baden.