Soprano Anna Netrebko was among candidate Vladimir Putin’s 499 surrogates during Russia’s 2012 presidential election campaign, according to an official list released in February of that year. It was found in the same capacity in 2018 among its 258 agents.
In an attempt to avoid or reverse the cancellations to which she is subject on various Western stages, Russian soprano Anna Netrebko said on February 26 that she was not “a political person, […] a political expert” and then, on Wednesday, that she was “not allied to any leader of Russia”.
Documents from the Russian Central Election Commission, however, show unambiguously that Anna Netrebko was a duly registered proxy for candidate Vladimir Putin. According to Russian electoral law, a candidate is entitled to a maximum of 600 proxies. For the 2012 election, Vladimir Putin had 499, hand-picked and nominated by him or his party, including musicians Valery Gergiev, Denis Matsouïev, Yuri Temirkanov and Yuri Bashmet. For that of 2018, Putin had 258 proxies including Netrebko, Gergiev, Matsouïev and Bashmet.
These agents have the right to campaign for a candidate and to participate in debates on his behalf. They also have the right to appoint members of territorial electoral commissions, to be present at the meetings of electoral commissions and to appoint electoral observers, among others.
Credibility issue
Even if we tried to clear Anna Netrebko by considering that it would be less activism than a kind of honor that it would have been inappropriate to refuse – but let’s not forget then that she claims her residence in Austria, where she pays her taxes — why say on Wednesday “recognize and regret that [ses] past actions or statements could have been misinterpreted” without putting the cards on the table?
This last sentence may have referred to the soprano’s visit to Donetsk in 2015, after the annexation of Crimea by Russia, where she held the flag of the (not internationally recognized) republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, or much to the controversy sparked by the presentation of a check for one million rubles (approximately C$14,300) to pro-Russian Ukrainian leader Oleg Tsarev in 2014, an amount intended for the Donetsk Opera.
How will musical institutions react? In New York, nothing has changed so far. “We have read the publication [du 30 mars] of Anna, but we are not yet ready to change our position,” Peter Gelb, director of the Metropolitan Opera, told German news agency DPA. “If Anna demonstrates in the long term that she has seriously and completely distanced herself from Putin, I will be ready to discuss [d’un retour] “, he added.
Opposite speech at La Scala in Milan, where director Dominique Meyer assured the Homework Thursday that “the concert of May 27 is planned and it remains on the calendar”. Dominique Meyer, who separates the Netrebko case from that of Valery Gergiev, pleads for the “right to redemption” and notes that we “always tend to think that the artist must be exceptional in all areas”.
Our questions at the Philharmonie de Paris, where Anna Netrebko is to give her first concert on May 25, have remained unanswered for the time being.