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.
Aristotle described tragedy (the original form of theater that the Florentine Camerata were attempting to recreate when opera was accidentally born) as a form meant to arouse “through pity and fear the purification [katharsis] of such emotions.” If there was solace to be found in that catharsis, it was a byproduct of that confrontation — not the art itself. The ancient tragedies allowed audiences to see life as it really was. The performance may be artificial, but it came out of very real emotional responses to conflict, mortality, and the corruption of power. These elements shaped the ancient world as much as they do today.
Ildar Abdrazakov sings Rossini’s “Hymn to Napoleon III”
With a post full of shimmering prose and emojis, Akhmetshina seems unwilling or unable to see life as it is. To say that culture should transcend politics is in itself a political position, and usually one that protects dominant power. She invokes UNESCO’s 1980 Recommendation concerning the Status of the Artist to a similar, inverted end, framing it as an immutable “universal principle” declaring that “artistic creation must be protected from political pressure.”
This is accurate only to a point. As the name would imply, the 1980 UNESCO publication is a recommendation, not a binding principle or law2. Political pressure is also just one element covered in this 12-page document (which focuses broadly on education, social security, employment, income, taxes, mobility, and freedom of expression), most directly in this point:
“Member States should ensure that all individuals, irrespective of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, economic status or birth, have the same opportunities to acquire and develop the skills necessary for the complete development and exercise of their artistic talents, to obtain employment, and to exercise their profession without discrimination.”
For Abdrazakov (whom, full disclosure, I worked for between 2013-2015), this wasn’t a case of discrimination. He wasn’t fired from Verona simply because he is Russian, or even because of his casual and private support for Putin, but rather because he and Putin are locked in a cycle of mutual endorsement. Last year alone, Abdrazakov supported Putin’s presidential reelection as a trusted representative, joined the Presidential Council for Culture and Arts, and took over leadership of the Sevastopol Opera and Ballet Theatre — a Russian-built arts center in occupied Crimea. Putin also sent congratulations to Abdrazakov for his international music festival and presented him with a National Award of the Russian Federation.
Abdrazakov has a right to take these positions and awards, as much as he has the right to support whomever he wishes to support in his country’s elections. But theaters — operating as they do within political and diplomatic realities — are also within their right to terminate his contracts in light of the support and positions he takes. That’s a form of consequence, not a symptom of cancel culture. Ildar fucked around and found out.
The day after Akhmetshina’s post, another statement started making the rounds, this time from pianist Anna Geniushene, a silver medalist in the 2022 Van Cliburn Competition who is featured on two recent recordings from Outhere Music. Geniushene begins by positioning classical music as a “citadel,” later adding that “Music belongs to everyone. Concert halls, like churches, are open to all who seek truth, calm, and the essence of life.”
With this in mind, Geniushene’s post eventually focuses on her main point of contention: the protests against the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in Paris (as well as a small protest outside of the concert hall when the IPO traveled on to Munich):
“What happened is outrageous. You walk on stage — perhaps far from home, in a country that has nothing to do with your birthplace — and yet you have to face hostility and hatred from the audience simply because you walked on stage and did what you have dedicated your life to. Because you have coloured passport. (Did I say it politely?)… Isn’t it a humiliation of the whole art?”
Across 16 Notes App slides, not once does Geniushene mention the one legitimate criticism to be had of the Paris protests — that flares were lit within a closed theater. This could have ended in a much different way and undermined the protesters’ own legitimate dissent. (Take it from someone who knew one of the victims of the Station Fire.)
But of course, the physical safety isn’t the point. It’s about the safety of art being allowed to stay severed from what’s going on outside the concert hall. It’s about art and music “not [being] places for political confrontation,” Geniushene writes. “If we start allowing crazy people to invade this space, if we accept that musicians must carry the burden of their governments, their histories, or their flags — we will lose something essential. We will lose one of the last remaining sanctuaries where people can still meet, listen and feel together.”
I think the only time this ideology has actually played out was on the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland. In every other concert hall, you can find at least some traces — if not a full palimpsest — of political confrontation.
“‘Tonight, as the chorus sang, ‘Oh, my country, so beautiful and so lost,’ I thought to myself that, if we kill the culture on which Italian history is built, then truly our country will also be beautiful and lost,” said Riccardo Muti during a 2011 performance of Verdi’s Nabucco in Rome — stopping right after “Va Pensiero” in order to deliver the impromptu speech and lead an encore of the chorus with audience participation. When Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi attended a later performance of the run, he was booed.
Pianist Maurizio Pollini may have said “music is one thing, interest in political ideas is another,” but his actions spoke louder: In December 1972, the day after Nixon launched Operation Linebacker II in Vietnam, the 29-year-old Pollini began a recital in Milan with a statement read on behalf of himself and a group of artists (including Claudio Abbado and Luigi Nono) condemning the military campaign and describing the attacks as “a unilateral suspension of peace negotiations in Vietnam.” He wasn’t able to continue with the recital because, as he later recalled, “when I got to the word ‘Vietnam,’ a sudden roar erupted in the hall, as if a fuse had been placed under every chair.”
Going back nearly two centuries, we can find similar events. At an 1830 performance of Auber’s La muette de Portici at the Théâtre la Monnaie in Brussels, a riot began after the opera’s hero sang “Aux armes!” that led to the start of the Belgian Revolution (and the formation of an independent Belgian kingdom).
The same circumstances that allow for the existence of art are the same that allow for protest — a freedom of expression (one that’s also held dear by UNESCO’s 1980 Status of the Artist). In the last several years we’ve seen countless protesters force their moral urgency into opera houses and concert halls. These acts — representing everything from ceasefires to climate action — become their own performances, ones that challenge the sanctity of aesthetic distance. In the case of an orchestra that Israeli officials have described as an ambassador for their political project, the logical fallacy of that distance should be clear.
The history of classical music is not one of peace or universality — it’s one of rupture, and one characterized by the porous and readily-breached border between art and politics. When artists today demand that their work hover above the conflicts around them, they’re not defending tradition or history; they’re abandoning it. If we take Akhmetshina’s words at face-value, fine: Art is a bridge. But it needs to bear the load of the world that built it.
Incidentally, “I believe in people” is one sentence that my GPT detector said was 72% likely to be AI-generated.
And if UNESCO possessed the enforcement power Akhmetshina implies, we’d likely have far fewer UNESCO heritage sites targeted by Russian and Israeli forces in the last few years.
This is magnificent, Olivia. Thank you