Conduct unbecoming

“A wave of anti-Russian hysteria is sweeping the West,” complains Brendan O’Neill of The Spectator, and in some ways he is right.

For example, some Dutch concert venues are cancelling performances of works by Russian composers who all predate Putin by a century or so. That’s indeed hysterical, and a nuanced argument could well be made against such overreaction.

My nuanced argument would revolve around my wife Penelope who is a concert pianist. One of her programmes for this season includes Prokofiev’s Third Sonata, and she’ll be damned if she removes it. In fact, having at times found myself (deservedly!) on the receiving end of her wrath, I don’t envy any concert organiser who’d dare make such a suggestion.

Prokofiev died in 1953, when little Vova Putin was a babe in arms (not to be confused with an armed barbarian). Hence it would be hard, though clearly not impossible, to blame the composer for the thermobaric bombs murdering Ukrainian civilians.

There is an issue of individual guilt and collective responsibility to consider as well. Anyone who believes in free will should hesitate to blame a large group en masse, irrespective of individual culpability.

And I bet many Russians abhor Putin’s crimes as much as I do. However, all bets are off at wartime. Much as we may deplore it, collateral damage is unavoidable.

A pilot bombing an armament factory might regret the deaths of hundreds of workers, many of them apolitical or even oppositional. But he will still push the ‘bombs away’ button with a sense of righteousness.

These days one hears more bromides about the war than can be found at John Bell & Croydon, London’s largest pharmacy. One of them is that most Russians are decent people who have nothing to do with Putin and his crimes.

That’s lazy, crepuscular thinking, with a heavy dose of ignorance thrown in for good measure. Even forgetting for a moment de Maistre’s adage about every nation getting the government it deserves, most Russians definitely deserve Putin.

Throughout his kleptofascist KGB reign, Putin has received wide domestic support. Even accounting for the profusion of stuffed ballot boxes, Putin has also enjoyed solid electoral support as well.

Bemoaning the treatment of most cultured Russians would have a more solid basis. Without running a poll, I’d venture a reasonably educated guess that much of the Russian intelligentsia is opposed to Putin. Yet even there I’d refrain from saying ‘most’.

Anyway, this is a possible subject for discussion. But not when it’s discussed with O’Neill’s refreshing ignorance and intellectual paucity.

He bases his argument on the plight of the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev, “one of the greatest in the world by all accounts”. Following Putin’s attack on the Ukraine, Gergiev has lost all his numerous jobs in the West, which O’Neill thinks is just awful.

Music, writes O’Neill, is apolitical, and an artist’s political views shouldn’t matter. Really? Music may be apolitical, but the way it’s used by despots certainly isn’t.

Since O’Neill clearly knows nothing about music, he probably has never heard any of the names I’m about to drop: Furtwängler, Mengelberg, Strauss, Gieseking, Cortot, Schwarzkopf. These are some of the great musicians who were denazified after the war, with their careers blighted or even destroyed.

When accounts are settled after a major cataclysm, some basic precepts of fairness often fall by the wayside. Thus Furtwängler was treated more harshly than Karajan, even though the former was much less culpable than the latter.

Furtwängler (for me, the greatest conductor who has ever lived) was no Nazi, but his signature did adorn a few articles about German music being superior to the Jewish kind. He had a point, in that German music is superior to any other, but those articles weren’t really about music. Yet at the same time Furtwängler did his best to save Jewish members of his orchestra.

Karajan, by contrast, was a Nazi through and through. He joined the Nazi party twice, first in his native Austria, then in Germany. When at his concerts he espied Hitler in the government box, Karajan arranged the public in the shape of the swastika to please the great man.

Was that apolitical? No? Then let me assure you that music is used for political purposes in Putin’s Russia as much as it was in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s USSR.

Putin has an inner circle of sycophantic court musicians, such as Bashmet, Matsuev, Spivakov – and Gergiev. In fact, Gergiev’s name belongs at the top of that list.

In his eagerness to play lickspittle to monsters, Gergiev has outdone not only Furtwängler but even Karajan. That testifies to his loyalty: he and Putin have been close friends since the early ‘90s, when Putin served as KGB overseer to Petersburg’s mayor Sobchak, and Gergiev was beginning to make his bones on the concert circuit.

Gergiev has delivered openly propagandistic concerts in Ossetia and Syria, dedicating his performances to Putin’s conquests, while publicly praising the dictator for his capacity to instil fear. He has endorsed with genuine enthusiasm the annexation of the Crimea, along with every oppressive practice in Russia.

In 2014 Gergiev added his signature to the letter enthusing about Putin’s first foray into the Ukraine. We, said the signatories, “firmly declare our support for the position of the president of the Russian Federation”.

As a result of his devotion to Putin, Gergiev has acquired inordinate political power in Russian culture. Hardly any cultural event, to say nothing of musical ones, happens without his – which is to say Putin’s – endorsement.

His rewards far exceed those even extremely successful musicians can expect. According to Corriere della Sera, Gergiev’s property holdings in Italy alone are worth £150 million, and that’s but a drop in the ocean of his wealth. He is an oligarch of music, dealing in timber, oil and God knows what else.

That leaves little time to devote to music, other than conducting facile mockeries of sublime compositions. “One of the greatest in the world by all accounts”? No musician in the world, nor any serious music lover, would be able to suppress a derisory smile reading that.

In his prime, Gergiev was a good jobbing conductor, nothing much better than that. But his prime is long since past. He has become a musical money-grabbing ‘oligarch’ who would happily conduct a marching band, as long as the cheque didn’t bounce.

Even if he were indeed one of the world’s greatest, Gergiev’s performances would still be dreadful, considering that he hardly ever rehearses. He typically blows into town an hour before the concert, then spends the next hour and a half in his room talking to various financial consultants.

When the public begins to slow-calp, Gergiev generously agrees to climb the podium, where he spends the next hour or so going through the motions. He then collects his fee and hops on the plane to fly to the next venue.

Now he has been dumped by everybody, whinges O’Neill, including his management team, which nonetheless described him as “the greatest conductor alive and an extraordinary human being with a profound sense of decency”.

If this is the account O’Neill goes by, he clearly doesn’t understand the role of impresarios in today’s musical world. Such chaps are as likely to say that their client is a genius as a used car salesman is to swear that “she’s not gonna give you any trouble at all”.

“McCarthyism is an overused word, I know,” writes O’Neill. “But really, what other word will do to describe the sacking of a conductor for refusing to publicly denounce the leader of Russia?”

May I suggest ‘long overdue justice’? Or ‘good riddance to bad rubbish’?

And yes, McCarthyism is indeed an overused word. But those who overuse it are invariably as bad at thinking and writing as Gergiev is at conducting. Brendan O’Neill is a case in point: the blighter doesn’t even know not to split his infinitives.

I’d like to conclude by shouting “Let’s go, Brendan!” My American readers will understand this is no compliment. The rest of you, just take my word for it.