Story of the Week: Russian Soprano Anna Netrebko Sues the Metropolitan Opera

Over the weekend, we learned that superstar soprano Anna Netrebko is suing New York’s Metropolitan Opera. This comes 17 months after the Met severed its ties with the Russian diva over her failure to denounce Russian President Vladimir Putin following his 2022 invasion of Ukraine — a war that is ongoing.

Story of the Week will examine Netrebko v. Met and whether the singer’s claims have any merit. I’ll also look at a broader question: Should you be fired for having the wrong politics? But first, for our readers unfamiliar with the marvelously dramatic world of opera…

Who is Anna Netrebko?

 She’s one of the most celebrated opera performers in the world. Netrebko began her career in the mid-’90s at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre under the guidance of conductor Valery Gergiev, a prominent supporter of Vladimir Putin (who was at the time a rising star in St. Petersburg politics). She made her Met debut in 2002 as Natasha in Prokofiev’s War and Peace, with Gergiev conducting. Reviewing for the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini praised her “clear, ample, cool Nordic voice,” while also dinging her acting and its “silent movie clichés.”

Her career continued to flourish over the following decade, with acclaimed performances in London, San Francisco, and (especially) Vienna. She also became a staple at the Met, returning frequently over the previous two decades for performances in Don Giovanni, Tosca, and Adriana Lecouvreur (just to name a few).

I was fortunate to review her bravura turn as Tatiana in the 2013 season opener Eugene Onegin, once again under Gergiev’s baton. I also distinctly remember the sound of loud boos emanating from the family circle as Gergiev took the podium, while LGBT rights activists outside protested the two famous Russian artists for their complicity in the Putin regime and its persecution of sexual minorities. The Met knew about Netrebko’s ties to Putin a decade ago, but it was only recently that it decided to break with her.

Netrebko’s career coincides almost exactly with Putin’s domination of Russian politics, and they have occasionally appeared together in public. He personally pinned the 2004 State Prize of the Russian Federation on the singer, and he laureled her again in 2008 when Netrebko was named “People’s Artist of Russia.” She appeared on a list of prominent supporters of Putin during his 2012 bid to retake the presidency (his ally, Dmitry Medvedev had been keeping the seat warm for the previous term). And during the 2014 Sochi Olympics, Netrebko performed the Olympic anthem (see video above).

As recently as 2021, Netrebko celebrated her 50^th birthday with a special concert at the Kremlin, although by then the hypochondriac president had retreated to his Covid bunker and was only able to offer congratulations from afar.

Russian tabloids have even floated the rumor that Putin and Netrebko have been romantically involved, an idea that Netrebko quashed in a 2011 interview with Newsweek with the caveat, “I’d have loved to have been, but when? We only met twice. Officially and briefly. But he’s a very attractive man. Such a strong, male energy.”

Most notoriously, Netrebko donated one million rubles ($19,000) to the Donetsk State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre, handing the check to separatist leader Oleg Tsarev while holding a rebel flag. This was shortly after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and amid its ongoing support for separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk. Such behavior has not endeared her to the Ukrainian government, which has placed Netrebko on its sanctions list.

Why did the Metropolitan Opera dismiss her?

 Matters came to a head in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine and attempted a full takeover of the country. The company demanded that Netrebko publicly repudiate the Russian president and his invasion as a condition of appearing on the Met stage. Netrebko refused, and by March 3 she was out, with General Manager Peter Gelb stating, “Anna is one of the greatest singers in Met history, but with Putin killing innocent victims in Ukraine, there was no way forward.”

On March 30, Netrebko issued a statement condemning the war in Ukraine and distancing herself from Putin (without expressly denouncing him). Not only was this not enough to win back her roles at the Met, but it led to a further cancellation of her performances in Russia, where she was seen as a traitor in nationalist circles.

In June 2022, Netrebko, with the assistance of her union, filed a grievance seeking $350,000 in compensation from the Met for lost performance fees. In February 2023, arbitrator Howard C. Edelman ordered the opera company to pay Netrebko $200,000 for canceled performances for which it was obligated to compensate the singer under the union’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA). He made no determination on whether performances that had been confirmed via e-mail but had no “standard principals contract” constituted a binding contract, as this matter was outside the scope of the CBA — so he awarded no money to Netrebko for those. He also imposed a penalty of $30,000 on this award for incendiary statements Netrebko made on Instagram, referring to her detractors as “human shits.” He wrote that while there was no doubt Netrebko was a supporter of Putin, aligning with the Russian president was “certainly not moral turpitude or worthy, in and of itself, of actionable misconduct.”

The language in this sentence is telling, as it almost certainly references the Met’s code of conduct, which would have been used by the company’s lawyers to defend its “with cause” dismissal of Netrebko. Most American workers will be familiar with such codes of conduct, which are often broad in scope, vaguely worded, and part of a worrying trend of employers attempting to govern the off-the-clock behavior of employees (more on this later).

What’s this new lawsuit about, and does Netrebko have a chance of winning again?

 On August 4, Netrebko’s lawyers filed Netrebko v. Metropolitan Opera Association, Inc. with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The lawsuit names both the Met and Gelb as defendants. It seeks at least $360,000 in compensation for lost performances (the ones in discussion for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 seasons, both of which the arbitrator declined to recognize). It seeks unspecified monetary damages for emotional distress brought on by defamation. The suit also accuses the Met and Gelb of discriminating against Netrebko for being Russian.

From a legal perspective, the chances of this lawsuit succeeding are slim: Defamation is very difficult to prove in an American court. And while e-mails surely exist confirming Netrebko’s casting in four future operas (Tosca, Pique Dame, Manon Lescaut, and Macbeth), there are no formal contracts. The case will largely hinge on whether a jury can be convinced that the correspondence between the Met and Netrebko’s manager, and the dates placed on “hold” in their respective calendars, constitute a binding agreement.

I’m also not sure what Netrebko is hoping to accomplish with this lawsuit. She’s unlikely to receive the award she’s seeking, and she has likely foreclosed on the possibility of ever again appearing on the Met stage. The legal fees alone will be enough to convince the Met (and perhaps other opera companies) to steer clear of any future exposure to Hurricane Anna, a talented soprano, but by no means the only one on earth.

But was it fair for the Met to expect Netrebko to denounce Putin? 

No one should be forced to espouse a political position with which they disagree, no matter how much their employer is convinced that its own position is on the right side of history. The Met’s dismissal of Netrebko seems to be part of a larger movement in which management exerts ever more control over the lives of workers through lengthy codes of conduct that are highly subject to interpretation and easily weaponized against otherwise competent employees who fall out of favor. Anyone who cares about workers’ rights should be alarmed by this trend. We sell our labor to employers, but we don’t sell our souls.

Granted, Netrebko’s difficult position partly springs from her own careerism. As American performing arts organizations shrivel and beg for government intervention, it’s worth remembering the price of such largesse, especially when the government is as authoritarian as the one in Russia. Being a favorite of the ruling regime is a good career move when the government provides the lion’s share of arts funding. Although the lawsuit claims that Netrebko “never received any financial support from the Russian government” — something that is hard to accept coming from someone who has regularly appeared at state-funded theaters.

Netrebko’s position is not without precedent in the classical music world. Legendary conductor Herbert von Karajan joined the Nazi Party not once, but twice in the 1930s. Yet he was largely forgiven in the postwar years, recognized not as a Nazi zealot, but as a young artist trying to get ahead under difficult political circumstances — less a fascist than an opportunist. And that card-carrying Nazi was invited to conduct at the Met, making his debut with Die Walküre in 1967 in a performance that Times critic Harold Schonberg described as “eccentric.”

Are we more enlightened about such matters in the 21^st century, more likely to call out complicity and expect artists to do better? Maybe. But I’m sure Gelb and company are aware that Netrebko still has family in Russia, and it’s not beyond Putin’s gangster regime to punish by proxy. The lawsuit admits that Netrebko’s name appeared twice on Putin’s list of prominent supporters but claims, “She did not believe she could reject the request,” which sounds like something out of The Godfather. Expecting Netrebko to take a principled stand against the Kremlin is cowardly in its own way: It asks her to sacrifice a lot while the organization basks in its own righteousness.

I write this as someone who very much wants to see Putin’s forces defeated and humiliated in Ukraine, an event that will hopefully jumpstart a process of imperial disintegration that began in 1991. But we’re never going to defeat Russian fascism by adopting our own illiberal and coercive culture in the United States. It’s true that nobody has the right to perform on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, but we shouldn’t normalize a situation in which our employers have the last word over our political speech.