She has not yet taken the stage, but upcoming performances by Russian soprano Anna Netrebko at Britain’s Royal Opera House have drawn angry criticism from Kyiv and prompted protests in London as Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine rages on.
Netrebko is set to sing the lead role in Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca on four nights this month starting on September 11. The dual citizen of Russia and Austria is also due to perform in Turandot at the same venue in December and give a solo performance in the winter.
At issue are Netrebko’s ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and her past actions in connection with Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine, where its full-scale invasion in 2022 came after it seized Crimea and started a war in the Donbas in 2014.
In a statement issued weeks into the full-scale invasion, Netrebko condemned the war against Ukraine and sought to distance herself from Putin but stopped short of criticizing him directly.
Critics in Ukraine and abroad say the Royal Ballet and Opera is making a mistake by inviting her onstage as millions suffer in Ukraine. They accuse her of championing Russia’s efforts to seize much of eastern and southern Ukraine, recalling her posing with a leader of anti-Kyiv forces in the Donetsk region and holding a separatist flag in 2014.
Netrebko endorsed Putin in Russia’s 2012 presidential election, has received state awards, and has met the Russian leader many times. Ukraine put her on its sanctions list in 2023.
“[We] remember that, for decades, this singer stood alongside Vladimir Putin, the man responsible for the deaths of thousands of Ukrainian children, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, the former commander of Ukraine’s military and now its ambassador to the United Kingdom, wrote in a September 7 opinion article in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid.
“Her voice on stage drowns out the real cries — the cries from destroyed maternity hospitals in Mariupol, schools in Kharkiv, kindergartens in Kramatorsk,” Zaluzhniy wrote, referring to the fact that Russian attacks have frequently struck civilians in cities and towns across Ukraine with deadly effect.
“Artists like Netrebko are the Kremlin’s ‘soft power,’ an instrument to make the world see Russia not as an aggressor, but as a country of ‘great traditions,'” Zaluzhniy wrote.
A letter signed by a wide range of Ukrainian, British, US, and other public figures and published in The Guardian on August 14 made similar arguments.
“It is…with great pain that we witness the Royal Opera House inviting Anna Netrebko –- a longtime symbol of cultural propaganda for a regime that is responsible for serious war crimes –- to return to its stage in title roles,” said the letter, which had more than 50 signatories.
Hundreds of people protested outside the Royal Opera House in London on September 7, calling for the cancellation of the performances.
“We have always been clear that Russian nationality does not equate to alignment of association with the current Kremlin regime,” a spokesperson for the Royal Opera House told the AFP news agency in April, shortly after Netrebko’s performances were announced.
“Anna has made clear statements condemning Putin’s war in Ukraine and has not returned to Russia since 2022,” the spokesperson added.
The Royal Opera’s music director, Czech conductor Jakub Hrusa, said he had invited Netrebko to London because the opera house should be “connected to the best singers.”
“She condemned the war, and I have no reason not to take her statement seriously,” Hrusa told The Times earlier this year.
In a Facebook post on March 30, 2022, five weeks into the full-scale invasion, Netrebko, wrote, “I expressly condemn the war against Ukraine and my thoughts are with the victims of this war and their families.”
She said that she was “not a member of any political party nor am I allied with any leader of Russia,” that she had met Putin “only a handful of times,” and that these meetings were “most notably on the occasion of receiving awards” and at the Sochi Olympics opening ceremony in 2012.
“I have otherwise never received any financial support from the Russian government, and live and am a tax resident in Austria,” Netrebko wrote. She has lived in Vienna since 2006.
Previously, after protests, the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and the Metropolitan Opera in New York terminated their performance agreements with Netrebko after the invasion, as did opera houses in Taiwan and Prague in 2023. Others, including La Scala in Milan, went ahead with performances in 2023 after initially cancelling some of her appearances the previous year.
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