Maestros behaving badly

Many Russians will think highly of Valery Gergiev’s action in skipping out in mid-opera to conduct a Putin aria halfway across Moscow. Russian audiences are used to being kept waiting, and worse things happened under Stalin. Anyway, Gergiev has always done as he pleased.

That’s the general tone of feedback we are hearing after his interval defection to attend a call of the dictator. They are right: Gergiev has always been cavalier with his musical obligations, answering phones during rehearsal, arriving late for concerts and other offences against what the public has a right to expect from paid performers.

On this occasion, though, Gergiev has undermined his claim to be a champion of Russian art. Having brought back Mussorgsky’s opera Salambo from oblivion, he capriciously walked out on it – signalling to Russia and the world that a great composer’s work is not that important after all. And if the composer doesn’t amount to much, what then is the conductor’s function? Gergiev has disrespected not just the art of music, but the professional role on which his power has built.

Meanwhile in Chicago, Riccardo Muti was slagging off his successor (as he did at La Scala) among others. That’s Muti, say his apologists. But he went too far this time in claiming that one of the world’s best horn players could not follow his beat, and disclosing that he did his best to stop the artist getting tenure. That, too is Muti. He has a mean streak and he ought to be old and man enough to control it.

Gergiev and Muti are not the only offenders. But misconduct in office has consequences. It demeans and diminishes the status of a fragile artform. It poisons the well.  We don’t know exactly what the last two dinosaurs said to each other. It might have been ‘after you, Maestro.’

Vienna backstage photo by Todd Rosenberg, Vienna 2020, from CSO social media.