Leave Netrebko Alone!

 The New York Times ran a piece today about Anna Netrebko's return to the American opera for the first time since Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Predictably, the same individuals who sought to blacklist her from the stage earlier—due to her alleged affinities with Putin and her inadequate condemnation of the war—are criticizing the Palm Beach Opera's decision to host her. I cannot agree with them. 

It's always struck me that there is something distinctly distasteful about the campaign to ban Netrebko from performing in the United States. Now, I detest Putin and his war as much as anyone—and I honestly don't know enough about Netrebko's previous comments on the subject to defend them. But her manager makes a good point in the article that she hasn't returned to Russia since the start of the war. 

Either way, there is something Neo-McCarthyite about holding Netrebko responsible for a war she has almost nothing to do with. It's hard to escape the inference she is being targeted solely due to her nationality. The Met Opera may retort, "No, it's not because she's Russian; it's because she refuses to full-throatedly condemn the war." But were any non-Russian performers held to that same standard? 

I strongly suspect that it was only Netrebko and other Russian performers who were asked to take a loyalty oath on this subject (for that is what it effectively amounts to). They are thereby being held to a different standard than others—which can only be described as discrimination. It is all too reminiscent of the foreign lecturers and performers who were banned from the country in prior Red Scares. 

Of course, I—just like the Met leadership—would prefer it if Netrebko were the sort of moral hero who broke with the orthodoxies of her home country and proclaimed the rights of the people of Ukraine. But not everyone has it in them to be a moral hero. Some people prefer to keep their heads down, especially when it comes to the actions of their own home government. And even non-heroes have rights. 

I'm reminded of Robert Lowell's line in his poem "Florence"—"to have known, to have loved/ Too many Davids and Judiths"—monster-slayers, in other words. Moral heroes of the sort the Met leadership asks Netrebko to be, for the privilege of singing opera. Lowell asked us to think, though, not only of the Judiths of the world, but of the Holoferneses too. "My heart bleeds for the monsters," he cries. 

Indeed. "Pity the monsters," says Lowell. Pity the people who kept their heads down. Pity the people who say "I don't like what Putin is doing, but in my context, the world I inhabit, it's not safe to speak out." We can't know that we would do any differently—or show any more courage—if we were in their position. And if we start to practice unfair discrimination against them, we become the monsters ourselves. 

And so I say— let Netrebko sing! In uttering this plea I am only making explicit the subtext of a poem I wrote last year on the subject, which compared Netrebko to a character she once portrayed in the opera: a French actress who was adored and idolized in her life, yet cast from the city gates in death for practicing an "unclean" profession. 

It seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that the McCarthy-style blacklisting of Netrebko reflects the same sort of hypocrisy with which the French elite once treated their icon (as Voltaire so aptly encapsulated in his own poem on the subject). As I wrote at the time: 

Thus time may change the masks but not the face

Injustice and hypocrisy remain;

And they who loudest sang the muse’s praise

Still prove the ones to cast her to the wolves.