Classical Music’s Iron Curtain

Two musicologists discuss national identity in the performing arts and the politics of blacklisting sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Russian soprano Anna Netrebko performs.
Institutions in the West have cancelled performances by Russian artists such as the soprano Anna Netrebko since the war in Ukraine began.Photograph by Christoph De Barry / AFP / Getty 

Earlier this month, New York’s Metropolitan Opera cut ties with Anna Netrebko, the Russian soprano, after she refused to comply with the Met’s demand that she criticize Vladimir Putin amid his invasion of Ukraine. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, expressed his support for the people of Ukraine, and stated, “While we believe strongly in the warm friendship and cultural exchange that has long existed between the artists and artistic institutions of Russia and the United States, we can no longer engage with artists or institutions that support Putin or are supported by him.” (In posts on social media, Netrebko criticized the invasion, but also said that forcing artists to “denounce their homeland is not right,” and has previously aligned herself with Putin.) Other institutions involved in classical music across North America and Europe have made similar decisions. The Montreal Symphony Orchestra recently scrapped appearances by the Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev, and Carnegie Hall and the Vienna Philharmonic have also cancelled performances by artists with ties to Russia.

To discuss this issue, and the politics that have always swirled around the world of classical music, I recently spoke by phone with two musicologists. Kira Thurman, an assistant professor of history and German at the University of Michigan, is the author of “Singing like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.” Emily Richmond Pollock is an associate professor of music at M.I.T. and the author of “Opera After the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how classical music was understood in Germany after the Second World War, the different ways that art and politics can mix, and the dangers of associating musical traditions with specific nationalities.

What have you each made of some of the controversies around classical-music performances since the Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Emily Richmond Pollock: I think one of the things that Kira and I have noticed, because we’ve been talking about it, is that some of the discussion of these issues has fallen into some old patterns of thinking that we as musicologists are alert to, and want to warn against, which includes reacting to these kinds of bans by insisting that music is apolitical, or that there’s something fundamentally and inherently apolitical about music, which is a really problematic and untrue statement, and a knee-jerk response.

Sorry, what do you mean?

Pollock: The reactions to people being banned and insisting, Oh, we’re not politicians, we’re artists, and therefore what we’re doing is not political—I think that musicologists are alert to that and raise an eyebrow and say, like, No, even if you think you’re not political, we’re all political actors.

Kira Thurman: It might be something like a Russian opera singer saying, you know, what I do has nothing to do with politics, or music has nothing to do with politics, as a form of protest against a ban, and other people agreeing with that.

Pollock: There is a really interesting question about how it came to be obvious that people’s nationality matters in music. That’s not, like, an inherent fact about the world, right? It’s something that emerged historically—that people’s ethnic and national identity is supposed to be very tied to who they are and how they express themselves as artists. And so I think we’re seeing versions of that, which is basically essentialism. The idea that artists are held, somehow, especially high artists, fine artists, performing artists, to a higher standard because of what the arts supposedly are, as opposed to somebody who just works in a “normal” industry, like someone who’s a software developer, or makes shoes, or something like that, is not asked to take a political stand in the same way that someone who’s in the high arts is.

And so that’s interesting, because that has to do with how the high arts, or the performing arts, are constructed in the social world and in the economy, as having some kind of greater good to offer. The ideal of music is something like the “Ode to Joy,” which supposedly offers some kind of universal-brotherhood narrative that is going to bring us all together as a people, la la la. And I feel like that also shows up in some of these discussions.

Thurman: This gets back to a question about why so many of our tensions, fights, etc., tend to center on classical music. And in part because of this idea that had been upheld since the nineteenth century, that at least classical music’s purpose is to edify, right, unlike pop music, unlike hip-hop, or other things that are commercial that are for making money. Classical music, in theory, is supposed to serve some sort of higher, almost transcendental purpose.

In terms of why this moment, and why this controversy, I think this gets back to understanding the social world of music, and why we’re seeing this happen perhaps more in classical music than elsewhere. Part of me is wondering if after the Cold War ends, in 1991, classical music became a way for artists and musicians from behind the Iron Curtain to gain access to international stages in a way that had not been possible, always, before the Cold War ended. I understand the suspicion here—I’m not saying I support the suspicion—of, you know, there is this idea somehow that there are so many Russian artists, so many Russian opera singers, so many Russian conductors, so many Russian pianists, so many Russian performers, right? And that it feels to some as if there’s this overabundance in the classical-music world, and that they dominate the classical-music world.

Pollock: As an addendum, there is an interesting tension with the place of classical music in the United States. It connects to the inferiority complex that America sometimes has about not actually being European, but most of our repertoire that we play in our major symphony orchestras is from Europe. And so we both sort of fetishize and idealize really excellent musicians from abroad and kind of have our own kind of, Oh, but what about our homegrown soloists? There is tension there, and that’s about nationalism in the United States as much as anything. So, then, when we have certain artists who are really important to American institutions, like the way that Anna Netrebko has been a star at the Met every single season for nearly twenty years, that feels like a loss. She has bought a lot of cultural capital for the Met. Because, when I go and hear a Russian piece at the Met, the Russians who live in New York come out for that. And that’s something that the Met has capitalized on. There is a way in which the Met has really benefitted from the artistic influence of Russian artists over the past some-odd years. And, now that they’re giving it up, it’s also like they aren’t necessarily facing the truly complicated politics of who they hire and why they hire them, and how they program what they program, that has a lot to do with the Met’s identity as a company in the United States with lots and lots of ties to institutions in the U.K. and in Europe and in Russia. That’s a fact of the international classical-music ecosystem that I think we could pay a lot more attention to.

I want to go back to something you said about how people don’t think that art, or classical music, is political. I think, when people are talking about politicization in the context of Russia and Ukraine, it is not about some deep political meaning to art, and how art intersects with politics in all these ways, but simply whether someone should not be allowed to play music, or have their contract cancelled, because they won’t speak out on something going on in the world. And I do think there’s a distinction there.

Pollock: Yeah, I guess one way that musicologists tend to think about this, and I know that we’re a niche-y group, is the idea that the absence of politics or claiming that things are not political, or that they aren’t overly politicized, or whatever, is usually enshrining a default that’s pretty much fundamentally conservative. So saying I’m not going to take a stance is a stance in favor of whatever the status quo is. I’m not in favor of banning Russians from the stage. It’s too bad the way that things have happened over the past few weeks. But, as a historian, I’m also very reluctant to say that things would be better if we deny that these things have political valence, because they always have had political valence, and, the more we pay attention to it, the more we can understand about how art is made.

We know a lot about how classical music was used as a tool of soft power during the Cold War. And I know we’re not in the Cold War anymore, but we’re also still sort of post-Cold War, and the Cold War is still an important paradigm for how we think about the “East” and the “West” and stuff. If we know that Russian identity has been shored up by excellence in the fields of classical music and dance and opera, it’s still important to talk about that and to name it and to understand how that has worked for Russia’s status on the world stage. And maybe the answer is not “Ban them all!” But I also don’t think the answer is to talk about it like politics is not important or not a factor in how we do art.

Thurman: I think just pointing out that art is always made in a political system is important, and that even when we think about people saying they are trying to create art that is free from politics, and maybe this is me being an intersectional feminist, I immediately think, Well, who is making it, right? With what money? Race, gender, all of these things matter, these politics determine and shape who creates art, and how the art is understood and how it’s accepted or rejected.

Pollock: Institutions are really important in this. So the same way that Disney is being asked to denounce the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida, the Met is being asked to take a stand. So I would say that it’s not just a classical-music-specific thing, so much as the pressure that institutions are under right now with regard to current events and politics, and it’s manifesting maybe slightly differently in every sector, but, to see classical music as an industry, right, as opposed to a repertoire, or a canon, or this ineffable, beautiful thing that we all love, really helps to reframe these questions.

In the nineteen-forties and fifties, Hollywood was absolutely a politicized space, and a place of soft power for America coming out of the Second World War as the most powerful country on earth, and a giant part of the American image. It was also run by white men, which was political. So to say that Hollywood was apolitical would have been silly. At the same time, we can all recognize that what happened with McCarthyism in Hollywood was quite bad. And that when people would say that people were politicizing things by blacklisting people for taking political stances, that is a different type of politicization than all the other types of politicization that I just mentioned. I’m not saying that what’s going on now is equivalent. But I do think that it’s worth at least being concerned about, and it further worries me given that Russia is a country predominantly of white people and that if America were to find itself in another conflict with a country that was not full of white people, such as China, this stuff would get even worse.

Pollock: So I would like to come out against blacklists. [Laughs.] I would like to come out against the kinds of nationalism that make blacklisting seem like the appropriate solution to problems. But I just want to push back on you ever so slightly, to say that the way people normally get hired, fired, put into engagement, etc., are not neutral either. And it’s not purely a meritocracy. There are plenty of connections and nepotism and who knows who and who’s been where and identity stuff. So the idea that if only we could take politics out of this, you know, only the best people would get to sing, to me that is utopian. And so, yes, blacklists are bad, but also the system that we have for deciding who is white-listed is not exactly politically neutral, either.

I think we should also be clear that in these cases we are largely talking about citizens of Russia. Calling for Americans to have to say something because of their ethnic background, or where their parents were born, or even where they were born, if they’re citizens of America, would seem another level of problematic.

Pollock: Yes. The pressure on all of us to speak out on certain current events or on things that are happening in the world is a very interesting cultural phenomenon that goes beyond Ukraine, and there’s an aspect of it that has to do with social media, and there’s an aspect of it with the idea we see that corporations and institutions are not politically neutral, that we are trying to force them somehow to take positions, where otherwise perhaps they would be inclined not to take any positions, because that’s obviously easier.

But I would also say that the idea of moral complicity that we’re seeing with this and trying to make shades—this conductor supports Putin, so he’s a bad guy; this other kid just plays piano well, so he’s a victim of this—those kinds of distinctions that are being made, in terms of complicity and culpability, are also very familiar to me as a scholar of de-Nazification. So this idea that you can determine, based on some number of factors, exactly how in bed with the government someone is, and how much to hold them responsible for, is not a question without historical precedent. And what we know from de-Nazification is that it was super messy, and it didn’t make any sense. And it came across in different ways.

Thurman: This perhaps takes us into a different direction and opens up a big Pandora’s box, but this is actually reminding me of conversations in Holocaust studies actually about that. Yes, there’s the perpetrator. Yes, there’s a victim. But there are also categories that go between that, right, including the bystander, for example. And I’m thinking a lot about how we move beyond the categories of perpetrator and victim.

Do you two think that there is something about classical music that lends itself to the idea that style and politics are connected in some way? I’m curious if you think there’s something about the way it’s performed or the art itself that is responsible for people having that idea.

Thurman: That’s so interesting to think about. So some genres, for example, in the nineteen-twenties, thirties, and forties, some genres in Germany, like jazz, were so tied to the Black diaspora, were so tied to the transatlantic twenties, things like that. And so the perception was that it was so tied to progressivism, because, in order to listen to it, that meant you had to accept or be willing to accept the fact that Black people could create music, right? So some genres like jazz, in other words, aesthetically and politically could become intertwined in that way, or just have that perception or appearance.

Pollock: It’s also how it interacts with social spaces. So, in order to go hear jazz, you have to go to a place where it’s being played, and those social spaces might have a certain demographic that they’re catering to, and other people that would be less comfortable or less welcome, which might be some of the people with more conservative ideas. Maybe that’s not universal, right? And so in classical music, by contrast, you know, classical music has been enshrined in these institutions that are big and civic, and subsidized, and official, and élite. And so that association sometimes means that classical music has a kind of conservatism. In some places, it could also be very democratic, if it’s a big enough hall, and you have cheap enough tickets, which means you could actually have a slightly more open environment. But, you know, if you go to the opera, and everybody’s very dressed up, or if everybody is from a certain social class, or seems to be or is projecting being part of a social class, then choosing to be in those spaces and to care about those things might be also a way of projecting your social status. That’s like a Pierre Bourdieu idea of the economy of prestige, or how your artistic taste overlaps with your social milieu.

Classical music often travels internationally in a way that a novel or film doesn’t. It feels more akin to athletics in the sense that, like, people actually go and perform things, right? And I wonder how that changes the reception and whether it accounts for the outsized impact that this current crisis is having on classical music.

Thurman: There’s a really great book by a musicologist named Christopher Small called “Musicking.” It gets exactly to your point, I think, which is that his big argument is that there is no such thing as music, there is no such thing as a musical work or a musical object. The only thing that exists are the performers who do it. So music is entirely dependent always on the performers to perform it. And then Small goes even further and argues that the music is entirely performers. Like, there is no objective musical work. It’s just whatever the performer does.

Pollock: There are also a lot of researchers working now on the idea of classical music as networks, and as transnational networks. A lot of early musicology was very nationalistic, and so you were actually studying the products of the country you were in because you were trying to show how great your culture was. That’s kind of nineteenth-century-musicology thinking. We’ve come a long way from there. But, even now, when you pick up a book, and it’s about, you know, French music in the nineteen-twenties, or Italian opera in the nineteenth century, things are still sometimes by default really national. And so there’s been a really fruitful counter-narrative, which is to emphasize the way that music and people, and also scores or recordings, can be transnational, can go across borders and travel all around the world. And then people meet, and then there are relationships that are naturally international relationships. And there’s a politics to that, too, right? There are people that work now on soft power and how music and diplomacy interact. That’s not quite us, but those people are our friends!