Music Unties
Classical musicians continue to insist that art has nothing to do with politics.
Last week, Verona’s Teatro Filarmonico removed bass Ildar Abdrazakov from its upcoming production of Don Giovanni after outcry from the cultural organization Liberi Oltre le Illusioni — outcry further amplified by Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation.
A few hours later, a few hundred miles away in Paris, the concert hall of the Philharmonie de Paris filled with smoke and shouting as demonstrators interrupted an Israel Philharmonic Orchestra concert, led by Lahav Shani and featuring pianist András Schiff. Video from the concert shows one activist holding a lit flare in the audience — a visible outcome after similar outcry and attempts to cancel the concert went unmet. One statement from the French performing-arts union CGT Spectacle said the concert “cannot take place without reminding the public that the leading representatives of the Israeli state are currently accused of crimes against humanity.” Four demonstrators were arrested.
It was seemingly in response to these two events that mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina posted a statement to Instagram last Saturday, which began:
“In these times it feels deeply wrong that artists constantly stand under pressure — because of politics, religion, nationality or simply because society needs somewhere to unload its frustration. Too often the easiest target becomes art. But our mission is the opposite of division. Even in the darkest times — we are here to bring people together.”
If this sounds familiar, well… running Akhmetshina’s entire statement through more than one AI detector suggested the invisible hand of a large language model.
But the ideas of soft-power universality and a collective human experience predate Chat GPT. In 2022, following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Anna Netrebko wrote on her own social media channels: “I am not a political person. I am not an expert in politics. I am an artist and my purpose is to unite across political divides.”
In 2017, preparing to sing at Donald Trump’s first inauguration, Jackie Evancho said she hoped her performance could “just kind of make everyone forget about rivals in politics for a second, and just think about America and the pretty song I’m singing. I hope I can bring people together.”
Only a few months ago, Lawrence Brownlee defended his decision to sing at a Kremlin-adjacent concert hall in Moscow, saying: “As an artist, I believe that my art is the most powerful way for me to create positive change in the world.…For me, the greatest power of music is that it can lift us above the divisive rhetoric of present-day politics, and remind us of what truly unifies us in our shared human experience.” (He later withdrew from the concert.)
The gesture is nearly always the same: art as a sanctified sphere beyond conflict; the concert hall as an airlock that separates the listener from the contaminated atmosphere of politics. Historian David Rothkopf once wrote that even Henry Kissinger (famed war criminal and onetime opera character) “would, of course, say that he was not political like Nixon.”
Perhaps even more tellingly, a moderator at September’s inaugural World Public Assembly — a peace-washing event held in Moscow and run by an organization with multiple ties to Vladimir Putin — said “we have a common language that transcends political differences. It is the language of art, beauty, memory, and friendship.”
Akhmetshina’s post moves within this same stream of reasoning. “I never supported violence of any kind,” reads another slide. “I stand for humanity.… Art, music, connection — this is what I believe in. I believe in people1.”
Art is therefore “supposed to be a safe place for everyone — a space where any human can come to feel, to breathe, to heal, to find peace inside themselves. Not a place where anyone is judged, attacked, or excluded.”
And further: “By cancelling artists… simply because of nationality, race, gender, identity, or politics — we are destroying the very bridge that art exists to build. We are breaking the places where people could still meet each other as humans.”
I’m willing to believe that Akhmetshina is sincere when she says that the climate within classical music today “hurts [her] heart,” when she says that she opposes violence, and when she claims the belief that art should be a safe space. The problem is that art has never existed for safety. The people making that argument are the same ones who think John Cage’s 4’33” is a piece where you’re supposed to enjoy the sounds of birds or people walking by in the hallway.
