Munich to Gergiev: Not a penny more
NewsThe Mayor of Munich has responded to media questions about compensation for Valery Gergiev, who was sacked as music director of the Munich Philharmonic for his staunch support of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Mayor Dieter Reiter said Gergiev ‘won’t get any money and (his dismissal) didn’t cost us a penny.’
A spokesman added that Gergiev had not taken legal action against the city: ‘He probably doesn’t care, given his wealth.’
Gergiev, on tour in Russia with Richard Strauss’s Heldenleben, is looking east. He told Tass: ‘I have great personal connections, mainly artistic, to Japan, South Korea and the People’s Republic of China. I have been to Japan more than 100 times, to China fifty times. I believe there are great artists in China, in Korea and in Japan. And we collaborate with them. And this collaboration will never end.’
Fair enough. The west is not the centre of the universe.
Not any more but the west think they are!
Hopefully, in the near future, there will be no more war and the Mayor of Munich could invite Gergiev back as part of an appeasement campaign to restore that broken Germano-Russian relationship.
I mean in the sense of a Christian gesture of forgiveness – like the Queen stretching out her hand to the Germans in the 1950’s.
Yes, life is all about reconciliation and stretching out a hand of friendship, but then that and Christianity are considered old fashioned and irrelevant.
It is the U.K. that declared war on Germany….
Are the Japanese and Koreans going to be welcoming him?
Perhaps it’s the next invasion?
Certainly a friend of Putin is in no need of money, as long as he is able to remain alive, but I expected Gergiev to sue out of spite. The dismissal may well have been illegal.
All of these entertainment contracts have morals clauses and the entitiy can fire anyone under a contract for public positions which embarrass the entity. He can try to sue, but in Germany, he won’t get anywhere.
The wonder to me, actually, isn’t that Munich fired Gergiev, but that they hired him at all. His support for Putin and his “FU” concert in Tskhinvali were already well known, as well as his casual work approach with the LSO. But I guess at the point the Germans were still good with Nord Stream II and Gazprom.
I’ve seen Gergiev conduct in many places around the world, and he always gave good value. It would have been nice if he had walked away from Putin; he would have been lauded as a hero and not lacked for work.