Italy’s culture minister wades into debate over Valery Gergiev.
Italy faces growing calls to cancel a concert led by a Russian conductor and close Putin ally who has been shunned in the West since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Valery Gergiev, the music director of the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, is set to conduct a concert on 27 July as part of a cultural festival at the Royal Palace of Caserta near Naples.
Yulia Navalnaya
Politicians and activists began protesting earlier this month against the return of Gergiev however the political debate made fresh headlines on Tuesday following the intervention of Yulia Navalnaya, widow of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Urging Italian authorities to prevent the 72-year-old Gergiev from conducting in Caserta, Navalnaya described the conductor as a “conscious and active accomplice of Putin’s regime”.
“As Putin’s cultural ambassador, Valery Gergiev implements Russia’s soft power policy” – Navalnaya wrote in an op-ed for Italian newspaper La Repubblica – “One of his current goals is to normalise the war and Putin’s regime”.
Navalny, the most prominent critic of the Putin regime, died on 16 February 2024 in an Arctic prison camp where he had been serving 19 years on extremism charges which were widely viewed as politically motivated.
Minister Giuli
Italy’s culture minister Alessandro Giuli also waded into the debate on Tuesday, saying: “Art is free and cannot be censored. Propaganda, however, even if done with talent, is something else.”
In a statement, the minister said the concert risked turning “a high-level but objectively controversial and divisive musical event into a sounding board for Russian propaganda”, a prospect he said “would be deplorable”.
However, Vincenzo De Luca, the centre-left governor of the southern Campania region which organised the Un’Estate da RE festival, has defended Gergiev’s participation in the concert.
“We stand in solidarity with the Ukrainian people; we have welcomed thousands of Ukrainian citizens to our territory; we have demonstrated our solidarity” – De Luca told reporters – “But we do not intend to accept a logic of exclusion or interruption of dialogue, because this does not help peace. It only serves to fuel rivers of hatred.”
Gergiev and Italy
Gergiev, who was recently appointed general director of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, reportedly owns several highly valuable properties in Italy, notably in Venice.
In February 2022, he was dropped by La Scala in Milan after refusing to answer a public ultimatum issued by the city’s mayor Beppe Sala, who heads the theatre board.
At the time the conductor was asked to make a choice: condemn the Ukraine invasion or don’t come back to La Scala. Gergiev chose to remain silent.
Photo credit: Alexey Smyshlyaev / Shutterstock.com.
