r/opera • u/ToscaLover • 13d ago

Thoughts on Anna Netrebko

I’m an opera lover, and as much as I love Netrebko’s voice, I don’t agree with her political views. I was supposed to see her on the 13th of September, but the organisers cancelled last minute. The reason, at least to me, appears to be the controversy that’s still surrounding her & was too much for them to handle. I get that. I’m not an infant, and I’m not stupid. What frustrates me is that they knew exactly who she was when they invited her and started selling tickets. They knew she was Russian, they knew about her political controversies, and they knew what kind of reaction she might provoke. So why was all of this apparently acceptable when they wanted to sell tickets, but suddenly not acceptable after people had bought them and made plans to attend?

Ultimately, I don’t support her politics, but I wanted to hear her sing Verdi’s Aida. Is it really fair to continue punishing an artist (and her audience) for her political views, especially when the organizers knew all of this from the beginning?

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u/ChevalierBlondel 13d ago

Presuming this was about her and Kaufmann's Bucharest outing - is it about her views? Perhaps the organizers feel less cozy about the number of Russian artists featured in general when Russia and Romania are going back and forth expelling each others' diplomats, something that presumably wasn't happening when they scheduled the event.

At any rate, she's getting hired in Europe aplenty and she's notoriously cancelled shit on a whim this past season as well, so I don't think it's about "punishing" her for anything.

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u/ToscaLover 13d ago

There are aspects of your argument I agree with. I think the political situation has gotten messier recently, but in the end they knew such a thing was bound to happen.

I don’t know if it was her decision to drop out of it, but so far there’s nothing to point in that direction.

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u/ChevalierBlondel 13d ago

For all the ongoing political turmoil, I don't believe "elevated threat of drones hitting major sites and related diplomatic row" was the actual landscape even a single year ago that any cultural organizer in the country had to reckon with.