Danes se je še uradno začel najslavnejši glasbeni festival na svetu: Salzburške slavnostne igre. Festival se je sicer začel že 19. julija s tradicionalnim predtednom, Duhovno uverturo, ki je namenjena izvajanju duhovne glasbe. Značilnost same otvoritvene slovesnosti je bila prevelika politizacija trenutne situacije v svetu, zlasti pa v Evropi in vojni v Ukrajini, omenjeni so bili tudi strahotni zločini v nemškem taborišču Auschwitz, ki ga je vodil nacist Rudolf Höss.
Nina Hruščova, foto Land Salzburg/Neumayr Leopold
Salzburški festival bo v svojih 44 festivalskih dneh ponudil 172 umetniških dogodkov na petnajstih prizoriščih. Otvoritvena slovesnost je po tradiciji potekala v dvorani Skalne jahalne šole. Uradno pa ga je po priložnostnem koncertu Mozarteum orkestra iz Salzburga pod vodstvom dirigentke Elim Chan in treh nagovorih ter slavnostnem govoru ruske gostje Nine Hruščove odprl avstrijski predsednik Alexander Van der Bellen, ki se je Nini Hruščovi še posebej zahvalil in poudaril v njenem govoru vpliv ruske umetnosti, še posebej literature, na zahodno Evropo.
Kot prva je spregovorila dr. Kristina Hammer, predsednica Salzburškega festivala, sledil je govor dr. Wilfrieda Haslauerja, tretji govornik pa je bil vicekancler avstrijske zvezne vlade mag. Werner Kogler. (Kancler je verjetno odpotoval v Pariz na odprtje Olimpijskih iger).
Otvoritveno slovesnost je začela avstrijska himna, končali pa najprej salzburška deželna himna ter evropska himna z motivom iz slavne Beethovnove Devete simfonije.
V glasbenem programu smo poslušali dela Sergeja Prokofjeva, Maxa Brucha (solist na violončelu je bil Nicolas Altstaedt) in Alfreda Schnittkeja.
Alexander Van der Bellen, foto Land Salzburg/Neumayr Leopold
Prišlo je veliko gostov iz mnogih držav, po neuradnih informacijah tudi iz Slovenije na povabilo iz zvezne dunajske vlade. V Salzburgu naj bi bil minister za finance Klemen Boštjančič, ki si bo ogledal premiero Hofmannsthalove drame Slehernik in premiero Mozartove opere Don Giovanni.
Salzburg ima vedno popolno izgubo spomina, ko je treba javno spregovoriti o tem, s kakšnim gromozanskim navdušenjem so na festivalu sprejeli obisk samega Adolfa Hitlerja, kot seveda stoodstotno avstrijsko sodelovanje z nacisti in njihovimi zločinskimi okupatorskimi dejanji, na primer na slovenskem Štajerskem in Koroškem in po kapitulaciji Italije povsod, vse do Trsta, ki so ga kot mare nostrum želeli dobiti nazaj, kot so ga bili imeli v času Avstro – Ogrske monarhije.
Slovenci smo in vedno bomo občutljivi za vse, kar so nam tujci hudega prizadejali, a seveda sprejemamo tudi vse dobro, ne le v gospodarstvu, ampak še v kulturi, saj je slovenska povezana z avstrijsko tako rekoč od njenega samega začetka, če se spomnimo na slavnega prvega dunajskega škofa Jurija Slatkonjo, o katerem je pri Slovenski matici pravkar izšel zbornik razprav z lanskega mednarodnega znanstvena simpozija. Nasploh je Avstrija za Slovence najbolj turistična država, seveda vseskozi povezana s kulturo in umetnostjo. Podobno kot le še Italija.
S Salzburškimi slavnostnimi tedni pa so bili ves čas povezani mnogi slovenski glasbeniki, od Julija Betetta, ki je v Salzburgu nastopil že leta 1922, in Jožeta ali Josipa Gostiča, ki je prav v Salzburgu odpel vlogo Midasa na svetovni premeri Straussove opere Danajina ljubezen leta 1952, v isti operi pa je kakih 60 let kasneje nastopil tenorist Janez Lotrič, kot se ga spominjam. Največkrat pa sta na festivalu nastopila legendarni tenorist Anton Dermota – kot verjetno najboljši don Ottavio v Don Giovanniju vseh časov, in mezzosopranistka svetovne slave Marjana Lipovšek, ki je nastopila na mnogih pevskih recitalih, koncertih in v operi.
Anton Dermota
Spominjam se tudi nastopov mezzosopranistke Bernarde Fink in sopranistke Nike Gorič, pa izvedbe skladb sodobnih slovenskih skladateljev, kot sta Nina Šenk in Vito Žuraj. V gledališkem programu je sodelovala Ljubljanska Drama SNG s predstavo Alamut Vladimirja Bartola, kot kostumograf Alan Hranitelj, kot režiserja Sebastijan Horvat in Mateja Koležnik.
Alexander Van der Bellen, foto Land Salzburg/Neumayr Leopold
Predno se je na odru pojavila slavnostna govornica, ruska politologinja Nina Hruščova, vnukinja nekdanjega ruskega predsednika Nikite Hruščova, ki je v spremstvu predsednika Tita nekoč obiskal tudi Velenje in Ljubljano, smo poslušali kar tri govore, ki pa so se pomena kulture in salzburškega festivala v umetniškem svetu komaj dotaknili.
Avgusta 1963 je voditelj Sovjetske zveze Nikita Hruščov v spremstvu predsednika Tita obiskal Velenje
Bolj odkrita je bila slavna Rusinja. Njen govor objavljam po tekstovni verziji, kot mi ga je poslav tiskovni urad SF in je bil natisnjeni v programski knjižici.
Nina Hruščova
Nina Hruščova, rojena leta 1964 v Moskvi in živeča v New Yorku, je strokovnjakinja za sodobno rusko zgodovino in politiko ter se je uveljavila kot prodorna analitičarka in kritičarka režima Vladimirja Putina. Kot pravnukinja nekdanjega voditelja sovjetske komunistične partije Nikite Hruščova ima tudi osebno biografsko povezavo z rusko politiko. Njeni komentarji se pojavljajo v večjih medijih, za katere opazuje razvoj in spremembe v ruski družbi iz različnih kulturnih perspektiv, razmišlja o vplivu literature na politiko in razpravlja o kompleksnih odnosih, ki oblikujejo Rusijo danes.
Nina Hruščova je desetletja analizirala Putinovo vedenje in nedosledne odzive Zahoda na Rusijo, pri čemer se ni izogibala neprijetnim ocenam in pripovedim. Kot kritičarka Putina, ki ga te razmere neposredno prizadenejo, postavlja ogledalo tako »najhujšim barbarom« kot opotekajočim se demokracijam,« pravi umetniški vodja Salzburškega festivala Markus Hinterhäuser, ki je na otvoritveni slovesnosti sedel poleg nje, »pri tem pa si prizadeva spoštljivo sodelovati z rusko kulturo.«
Objavljam uradno verzijo njenega celotnega napisanega teksta v angleščini, medtem ko ga je za sam govor nekoliko skrajšala
Nina Hruščova
Idealism of Art in Times of War and Peace
Dear Mr. President, dear Mr. Vice-Chancellor, dear Ministers, dear Governor, distinguished guests, ladies, and gentlemen. – It is my great honor to share some thoughts with you here today at the Salzburg Festival. From its illustrious beginnings in 1920, this festival has celebrated art, and particularly opera – one of the highest forms of art dramatizing the human condition. Just as its name, ‘opera’, suggests, art is a ‘work,’ a finite act of labor. Its effect is transcendent, shaping and influencing our politics and culture.
Early in this century, the government of Great Britain put forward a list of the ten most important emergency procedures for its defense in the event of a crisis. This list included saving the renowned Titian paintings housed at the National Gallery. Imagine if the Titian masterpieces we love – Noli me tangere (c.1514) or An Allegory of Prudence (c.1550–65) – suffered the same fate as the treasures of the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad after the American invasion in 2003, and were looted by thieves. If there are no similar measures in Austria, they might be merited in order to protect many of the cultural masterpieces held in its collections, not least the unequaled Bruegels in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
The Titian example disputes an often-heard claim that high art is dead, that the world has been overcome with triviality. True, in peace, we can afford to be busy and distracted with the minutiae of everyday life. The state of war changes that equation. Nations cherish their cultural individuality as much as they do their territory, natural resources, or financial institutions. Art becomes a battleground.
Last year, Ukrainian lawmakers adopted what they call an ‘anti-Pushkin’ law, named after the 19th-century Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, which has allowed for the annihilation of cultural heritage monuments related to Russian and Soviet history in Ukraine. Seen as symbols of imperial and totalitarian ideology, numerous works of art – including paintings, sculptures, and books by Russian artists – have been forbidden or destroyed.
Summarily canceling the cultural artifacts of another nation or ethnic group is not a viable policy in my view. But under the present circumstances no Russian should dare to tell Ukrainians how to address their past or construct their future. Still, I am not alone in questioning such an approach, nor am I the first. I would like to quote George F. Kennan, one of the greatest American diplomats. Speaking at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955, at the height of the Cold War, he insisted:
[I]n the creation of beauty and in the great monumental works of the intellect, and there alone, human beings have been able to find an unfailing bridge between nations, even in the darkest moments of political bitterness and chauvinism and exclusiveness.
That is, in times of crisis, the power of art skyrockets. Why?
Art is prophetic. Culture never lies about politics. Politics may not yet have formulated its agenda, but art has already revealed it. One prime example is Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb – its characters remarkably similar to those in the George W. Bush administration during their War on Terror in the early 2000s. Today, with increasing nuclear saber-rattling coming from Russia and others, it is worthwhile rewatching.
In 2006, the Russian author Vladimir Sorokin wrote a short novel, Day of the Oprichnik. In this book, the Russian czardom is back and government henchmen are in charge. At the time, we dismissed it as pure fiction. Today, it reads as reality. In the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s recent fifth-term presidential inauguration – the Kremlin brimming with imperial gold – independent thinking is violently punished. All is no longer a dystopian absurdity as Sorokin described it; it is now the everyday life of contemporary Russia. During my time in the Soviet Union, we read George Orwell’s dystopias as fiction. Yet, today, Orwell has become a manual for survival. In a bookstore in St Petersburg last year, I noted a prominent window display of his novel 1984. ‘We have to remember which world we are living in,’ the shopkeeper commented.
In 1947, Kennan famously wrote in Foreign Affairs about what he called ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct.’ If we look at the sources of Russian conduct today, we can see that a lot of it was explained by the 19th-century author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In an 1873 letter to the future Emperor Alexander III, Dostoyevsky wrote, ‘Great nations who have manifested […] their great powers – [those] that have brought […] if only a single ray of light into the world – succeeded because they have remained […] presumptuously independent.’ Hence, Putin claims that Russia is a ‘sovereign civilization’ and therefore acts as it must. If Putin were a better pupil, he would have understood that Dostoyevsky’s call for national independence was not so much a desire for power, but a conviction that each country’s unique contribution adds value to the world of nations. Instead, the Russian president insists he follows an imperial legacy he believed was set forward by many great artists in the past. This inherent connection between politics and culture is so profound, as I once explained: ‘Refusing to engage with Russian culture will not force Putin to withdraw his forces from Ukraine, but it cuts off a potential source of information about his objectives and motivations.’
Art is liberating. The late Russian dissident philosopher Andrei Sinyavsky (known under his pseudonym Abram Tertz) spent most of the 1960s in a Soviet labor camp for writing critiques of the communist state. In his memoir A Voice from the Chorus (1974), Sinyavsky described a prisoner’s love for art:
[L]istening to a Beethoven record – the sort of modest thing we do on Sundays as earnestly as free people going to concerts […] because here things in short supply or hard to get are all the more appreciated and valued as a result […] things […] once common […] have suddenly become precious […]
Art matters more in unfreedom. Before the collapse of communism at the end of the 1980s, the late American writer Philip Roth observed the difference between being a novelist in the free West versus being a novelist behind the censoring Iron Curtain. ‘In Eastern Europe nothing is permitted but everything matters; with us, everything is permitted but nothing matters.’ Indeed, people in Russia, the center of the communist empire behind the Iron Curtain, saw culture differently than people in the West. Culture was our liberty. It was an escape – a spiritual if not physical freedom denied by the Soviet system. Not to appreciate art was a luxury we could not afford.
The famed Polish journalist Adam Michnik, one of the leaders of the anti-authoritarian Solidarity movement in the 1980s, studied Russian in prison in order to read Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in their native tongue. He described this reading as one of the greatest experiences of his life. These writers allowed him an escape into their imagined worlds, but they also influenced and shaped his understanding of how better to fight his socialist captors. In 1985, Michnik wrote Letter from the Gdańsk Prison, explaining how repression will lead the tyrannical governments into a blind alley of destruction. And it did – the Iron Curtain fell a few years later.
Now history in the east of Europe is repeating itself. One of this year’s sellout Festival events is a reading of Alexey Navalny’s Letters from Prison. His letters, like Michnik’s, are literary evidence of life in captivity. Navalny is akin to the political prisoners of generations before him who depicted humanity’s condition under oppression and crisis.
In his 1862 The House of the Dead Dostoyevsky described his experience of living in a Siberian labor camp for five years as punishment for his association with a political group opposing Czar Nicholas I. In 1962’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote of his own experiences in Joseph Stalin’s Gulag, where he spent almost ten years. Then there was the 1967 Journey into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg, who detailed her efforts to persevere during the 1930s in the Magadan prison camp, not far from the Arctic Circle. These works are evidence of how art not only documents oppression but, in searching for the meaning of existence, offers a path to survival. They show us how to endure without losing one’s humanity, while also bettering humanity in the process.
Art is idealistic. Through some sort of alchemy, a work of art – such as a painting or a sculpture; a symphony or an opera; a novel or a poem – can reflect the best in us. In Russia, hurt is perennial and existential – bad for living, but good for creating masterpieces. And this truth is universal. Through the centuries, examples abound, including Ludwig van Beethoven, Vincent van Gogh, Sergey Prokofiev, Dmitry Shostakovich, James Baldwin, and Jamaica Kincaid. The best art grows out of pain in all contexts and on all continents.
Appropriately and bravely – given the current trend of rejecting works of art simply for being created by Russians – the Salzburg Festival features not one but two operatic Dostoyevsky productions: the very tortured The Idiot and The Gambler. This year’s opera program highlights a line from The Idiot: ‘Compassion is the only law of mankind.’ In the same novel, Dostoyevsky writes an equally apropos and idealistic line: ‘The world will be saved by beauty.’
Art is hopeful. Moreover, it is optimistic. Art saves the world, every day, in every century, and every generation. Art is what is left of us when we are gone. Though the Old Testament poses that ‘Nothing under the sun is truly new’, we nevertheless toil hopelessly to overcome the most frustrating and most life-affirming quality of creativity – its incompletion. As long as people live, they will keep striving for their unsurpassed masterpiece, manifesting the indomitable, creative human spirit and hence ensuring the survival of humanity.
Take Vladimir Nabokov, a 20th-century Russian writer who became an American classic author. He rewrote every piece of tragic Russian literature – including works by Anton Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky – in a happier key. Russian narratives are all about unjust societies in which people live readying themselves for death, so Nabokov freed classical Russian characters by giving them a new life where suffering was no longer the norm. Remember the famous opening of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ In Ada (1969), Nabokov turns this upside down, ‘All happy families are more or less dissimilar, all unhappy ones are more or less alike.’ Azar Nafisi, an Iranian teacher of literature, published a memoir entitled Reading Lolita in Tehran in 2003 upon moving to America. In reference to Nabokov’s most famous novel, she described the lessons of liberty that one can only learn from art.
These Russian examples are instructive due to the country’s geopolitical schizophrenia – it is at once European and not. Its imperial, dictatorial, opaque, Byzantine political structure is outdated and ossified. Yet, culturally, Russia is largely an offspring of Western European models multiplied by spirit, suffering, and size. Pushkin’s writing was an amalgamation of Russian themes and French poetic techniques. Nikolai Gogol, a Russian writer of Ukrainian origin, composed satirical masterpieces, such as his 1840s Dead Souls and Petersburg Tales, that were a singular transformation of the stories by German Romantics such as E.T.A. Hoffmann on Russian soil. Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) was composed half in French. In these works lie insights into the universal human condition – not just the Russian one.
Art is rebellious. Art cannot prevent tyranny or war, but it debunks them every time. Even when most people in Russia feel they cannot fight against despotism, Russian art is never neutral. It fights, always – for a better society, better humanity, and better beauty.
If the Kremlin leaders had learnt the lessons art has taught about past dictatorships, dictatorships would not have repeated in Russia so often. But rulers are poor students. They don’t appreciate culture – otherwise Stalin and Putin would not have canceled masterpieces and imprisoned artists. I spoke about Ukraine rejecting Russian art, but the Kremlin is even more at war with the country’s cultural figures because they do not support Putin’s bellicose policies. Despots only love kulturka or ‘culture-abridged’ that references their own greatness. The best of Russian art is the antithesis of kulturka. Connected to the universal experiences of injustice, it proves that oppression and confrontation invariably fail.
In the 1930s, Anna Akhmatova angered Stalin by writing Requiem, a prophetic poem about her and her contemporaries’ resolve to outlast the dictator’s rule. Several decades later, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (1973) had a greater role in collapsing communism than most politicians of the late Soviet era. In the 21st century, Russian artists continue the tradition of calling out totalitarian cruelty. In her 2001 novel The Kukotsky Enigma, Lyudmila Ulitskaya explored the brutal effect of Stalinism on women and family life. More recently, in her 2013 oral history account Secondhand Time, the Belorussian-born, Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich described the unhealing scars of ordinary Russians as a result of authoritarianism following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Looking at the Kremlin today, one wonders – how could they not know how this story ends? Art, in its transcendence, shows us the way.
Thank you.
Nina Hruščova
Marijan Zlobec