The Tony Award-winning American composer. It was transmitted live into cinemas in the fall as part of the Met's groundbreaking Live in HD program, including in Germany via Leonine, our German theatrical distribution partner, and it will be broadcast by Arte in the not too distant future, as well as by public television in prime time in America. Although our new government is threatening to defund PBS as I speak. While current political events may seem overwhelming, the arts and the media in the free world have always borne witness and provided hope for civilization. And now is the time for public and private media outlets and arts producers to resist the forces of authoritarian extremism by doing more to stimulate free thinking and democracy.
My career in the performing arts and media spans six decades, beginning right here in Berlin in the early 80s when, as a 30-year-old adviser to Herbert von Karajan, I negotiated his new deal with ZDF when he had decided to part company with his longtime partner, producer Unitel. A few years later, when my production company, Camy Video, was making documentary films and television programs in co-production with the major European networks and Asian networks like NHK and PBS, we made a film about Karajan entitled 'Karajan in Salzburg.' It was the only film about Karajan made in his lifetime over which he didn't have editorial control. Although it was challenging to make an accurate film about a subject who had allegedly joined the Nazi party out of enthusiasm in his youth, since I didn't want to rupture my working relationship with Karajan once the film was completed, we chose to shoot the film entirely in the present with no historical footage, as Karajan marshaled his way through one summer's edition of the Salzburg Festival with a courtly but iron fist. I hoped that events would prove revealing. Every day we filmed inside the Festspielhaus as Karajan rehearsed and performed a new production of Don Giovanni that he imperiously directed as well as conducted. One afternoon we filmed Karajan being presented with a golden tuning fork, the prize in an Austrian record magazine, presented to him by its fawning editor who interviewed him as well. Here's a brief excerpt from that scene.
If you sigh of relief, since Karajan had offered the viewer a window into his psyche. Interestingly, when I screened the completed film for Karajan in his editing room, which was a basement bunker concealed underneath his stately gabled home in Anif, formerly consecrated land belonging to the local archdiocese, Karajan said, 'You portray me as a man about to die,' since he was mostly concerned about how frail he looked on camera. The only scene that made him chuckle was the one I just played for you. Some years later, when I was the president of the Sony Classical record label, I was having dinner with Karajan's widow, Eliette, who had once been a fashion model as well as his muse, but on that evening had perhaps had one too many glasses of wine. As we left the Hotel Fraker, even though it was pouring rain, Eliette insisted that we walked to Karajan's grave, which was on the grounds of a nearby church. With a theatrical flourish, Eliette collapsed at the grave and lingered for several minutes in the soaking rain while silently communing with her dear departed husband. When she finally rose, she said to me, 'Herbert has a message for you: sell more of his DVDs.'
I was also in Berlin in 1989 to document the coronation of Karajan's successor, the Italian conductor Claudio Abbado, with the wall being torn down as the backdrop to our filming.
Obviously didn't work out the way the citizens of Hong Kong had hoped for. A decade earlier, in 1986, I was a 33-year-old manager of Vladimir Horowitz, arguably the greatest pianist in history and perhaps its most neurotic. I brought him to Moscow in official recognition of the pending détente negotiated by Gorbachev and Reagan. Horowitz's concert was presented live and in its entirety as a news special on CBS in the United States and throughout Europe on BBC, ZDF, and other national broadcasters as well. Getting Horowitz to agree to return to his motherland for the first time since he escaped in 1925 was extremely challenging, since many of his phobias had to be addressed to his satisfaction. Obsessed with his diet, Horowitz insisted on eating the exact same menu for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for years at a time, and at that time his nightly meals included fresh Dover sole and asparagus, two items decidedly not available during the Cold War in Moscow. Unfazed by this culinary challenge, Secretary of State George Shultz and the American ambassador to Russia, Arthur Hartman, enlisted the aid of our allies. The Italian ambassador promised to secure the fresh asparagus, and the British ambassador arranged for fresh Dover sole to be air couriered from London. Thus the first Dover sole airlift to Moscow was born. One month before the Horowitzes were supposed to arrive with an entourage that included his chef, his piano tuner, his piano which was a custom action Steinway, as well as myself, disaster struck. The pianist Vladimir Feltsman, one of the Jewish refuseniks who were endlessly waiting for their exit papers, was about to begin a recital in the salon of Spaso House, which is the ambassador's residence, when it was discovered that the strings of his piano had been cut. In the audience was the New York Times bureau chief, who filed a front-page article about what clearly had been an act of KGB sabotage. Horowitz read the article and immediately threatened to cancel his visit. It was only when Reagan himself had a letter hand-delivered on White House stationery to Horowitz guaranteeing his safety and the safety of his piano that the tour was back on. In fact, Horowitz's piano traveled to Moscow guarded by US Marines. The concert was a mesmerizing event, with Horowitz delivering a performance of a lifetime. We placed two of the cameras upstage of Horowitz so that the audience of Russians hearing him for the first time in their lives would themselves be the visual backdrop. Here is Horowitz playing one of his signature encores, the Träumerei from Schumann's Kinderszenen.
It was challenging but also thrilling, and he was always ready to offer me his own homespun advice regarding acoustics. He once told me, 'If the check is good, the acoustics are good.' Towards the end of his life, after I had worked for him for 12 years, he said to me, 'I've known you so long, you were like a member of our family. From now on, instead of calling me Mr. Horowitz, I would like you to call me Maestro.'
In 1991, I produced a film about Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya. It was a portrait of their heroism in the face of Soviet persecution. Ten years earlier, they had stood up to Brezhnev, sheltering Alexander Solzhenitsyn in their dacha outside of Moscow, even though it meant sacrificing both of their careers as Russia's leading cellist and soprano. Facing global criticism for his mistreatment of them, Brezhnev chose to exile them all rather than sending them to the gulag. Our film followed their triumphant return during perestroika, a time when things were looking up for a less polarized world.
Putin's ruthless attack on Ukraine on February 24th, 2022, put an end to the possibility of cultural exchange with the government of Russia for the Met, at least so long as Putin is in power. No longer a Cold War, but a real one. From the beginning of the invasion, the Met has taken action to support Ukraine, first by immediately cutting ties with Putin-supported artistic institutions and his artistic cronies. Within several days of the invasion, the Met performed the Ukrainian national anthem to start the second half of our season. A few weeks later, we performed a special concert for Ukraine featuring some of opera's most beloved stars that was broadcast live on Ukrainian public radio. While the Met was acting with decisiveness against the Putin regime, we never stopped honoring great Russian art or the innocent Russian artists who are hostages to Putin's war. On the very day that Putin was denouncing the West for allegedly cancelling Russian art, we opened a run of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin with a cast of Russian singers. As I said at the time, our goal was to cancel Putin, not Pushkin.
Immediately following the invasion, my wife, the conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, was scheduled to be guest conducting in Odessa, but with her concerts postponed because of the war, she joined me in London where I was at the time, while we watched in horror as the brutal invasion and bombardment continued to unfold. Seeing the endless river of refugees forced to flee their homeland, Keri-Lynn was stirred to raise her baton in defense of her ancestral homeland. It was her inspiration to form the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, and it was my duty to see it through. We wanted to demonstrate the power of music in the time of war and to raise the morale of the Ukrainian artistic community and its embattled citizens. We wanted to show Putin that Ukrainian culture thrives in spite of his efforts to destroy it. I'm proud to have helped her dream become a reality. Together with the Polish National Opera and in partnership with the governments of Ukraine and Poland, the Met has provided the infrastructure to support the creation of the orchestra, whose members hail from cities across Ukraine, as well as recently arrived refugees and members of the Ukrainian musical diaspora of Europe. In its first tour in the summer of 2022, the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra was performing at Lincoln Center's Damrosch Park in a program that included the 'Abscheulicher!' aria from Beethoven's opera Fidelio. As my wife lifted her baton, the great Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska sang the recitative and aria that we deliberately programmed as a message to Putin. In English, the words of the recitative are: 'Monster, what are you plotting? What cruelty, what cruelty do you have in store? The cry of pity, the voice of humanity, can nothing move your savage heart?' The aria that follows is a message of hope: 'A rainbow illuminates my path, light my way. No matter how long the journey, I do not falter, my step is sure. A voice within me urges me on. My strength lies in faithful love.' The concert concluded with Yuri Shevchenko's string arrangement of the Ukrainian national anthem. The invasion. Keri-Lynn will lead the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra in a performance of the Ukrainian language version of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony in Warsaw that Arte will stream live and will also be seen in Ukraine, in Poland, and on PBS in the United States, providing PBS still exists by then. In Karajan's version of the Ninth, Schiller's 'Ode to Joy' is sung in Ukrainian, and 'Joy, Freude' is changed to 'Glory, Slava,' the Ukrainian rallying cry for victory. The inspiration for this change in words came from none other than Leonard Bernstein, who changed 'Freude' to 'Freiheit' (Freedom) when he led a performance of the Beethoven Ninth in Berlin to celebrate the wall coming down in 1989. Today, rather than stamping out Ukrainian culture, Putin's infamous invasion has fanned the flames of Ukrainian freedom, no matter how daunting the prospects may seem. Here is a brief excerpt of the proud Ukrainian version of the 'Ode to Joy.' Art is the art of being a breakwater in the face of the enemy. Last year, the Met announced its commission of Ukrainian composer Maxim Kolomiiets, currently residing in Berlin, to write an opera about the brave Ukrainian mothers who, against all odds, went behind enemy lines to save their children who had been kidnapped by Putin and his henchwoman Maria Lvova-Belova, who along with Putin has been accused of war crimes. We plan to present the opera in Warsaw in the fall of 2026, at the Met in 2027. We're also planning a public workshop for this fall. After 18 years of running the Met and a lifetime of experience in classical music and opera, I think it's clear that the solution to sustaining opera is through artistic reinvention, both with new operas by living composers and reimagined productions of classics that can resonate with audiences of today. Those of us who know and love opera know the potential of its appeal is anything but an outdated art form. As an amalgam of virtually all the performing and visual arts, opera has the singular power to reveal the essence of our humanity, and it's my duty to connect opera with as many people as possible. In 1931, when the United States was still in the throes of the Depression, the Met was making use of electronic media with its radio broadcasts to help in its fight for financial solvency and a wide reputation. Today, not much has changed. We're fighting harder than ever for post-pandemic financial solvency and a wider public, but we have new tools at our disposal, from social media platforms to the continuing success of The Met: Live in HD, our series of live performance transmissions into movie theaters and performing arts centers around the world. Since our return from the pandemic, the cinema audience is coming back more slowly than at the opera house, but we're still uniting hundreds of thousands of opera fans eight times this season as we transmit our 1 PM matinee performances live as far south as the southernmost reaches of Argentina and Uruguay, to as far north as the Arctic Circle, where audiences in Tromsø, Norway faithfully gather. We're seen live from the West Coast to as far east as Jerusalem, and on a time-delayed basis in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, where the time difference is too great. Our transmissions are being seen on every continent except Antarctica. To serve our global audience, we utilize six different satellites that carry signals encoded with subtitles in eight different languages. More than 30 million people have seen the Met in movie theaters so far. During the early days of the pandemic, when cinemas and performing arts companies shut down and people sheltered in their homes, the Met provided artistic relief with nightly free streams of previously recorded operas on our website. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world joined us every day. The pandemic inspired us to create the At-Home Gala, in which, using Skype, mobile phones, and laptops, we connected locked-down opera singers in their homes around the globe in a performance that raised the hope of artists and art lovers everywhere. 'Welcome to the Met at Home. We're attempting the first ever virtual opera gala. Music and art cannot be silent. From around the world, including eight time zones, I'm very, very happy to have you guys here in my home in... My from my home now, Rene over to Blue New Jersey. All of the singers will be accompanied live.'
To think of himself as a soldier of music. My wife and the members of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra are today's soldiers of music, and all of you who support the continuation of the arts in the media in these dangerous times are soldiers of music too. Thank you very much.
