Covent Garden are damned if she sings, sued if she don’t

From my op-ed today in The Telegraph, under the headline ‘Why is the Royal Opera House allowing a Russian singer back on stage?’

… Are we victimising an important artist for her country’s crimes, a single mother who is raising a neurodiverse child and needs the validation of her talent just to put bread on the table and maintain self-belief. It is hard not to feel some sympathy for Anna Netrebko who, for all her faults, has been an epic interpreter of Italian operas great and gruesome. When I last saw her at La Scala in Andrea Chenier, she was a force of nature that held the house in an iron grip. When she exited stage left, the tension dropped with her. Such magnetism is in the class of Callas and Sutherland, of Sonya Yoncheva and Asmik Grigoryan, a species that demands to be protected. Perhaps Netrebko needs to be embraced for what she does best, rather than what she once signed.

On the other hand, she did herself so few favours in her glory years that no colleagues protested her dismissal. She is presently suing the Met for defamation and discrimination on grounds of national origin, hardly the best way to rehabilitate herself in the opera profession.

Where that leaves Covent Garden is damned if they let her sing, sued if they don’t. Between now and Tosca on September 11 objections will mount, demonstrators will shout and Oliver Mears will struggle to justify opening a season with so costly and unnecessary a distraction. Netrebko cannot be blamed for that. This is to do with what our last fully-functioning opera house ought to be offering the nation in these deprived and demented times.

Read the full article here.

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