Valery Gergiev I know is a night owl. Even if the others were already sleepy, he could talk non-stop until dawn. Once, in Rotterdam, he arranged for two young pianists to play a four-handed version of Stravinsky's "Ox of Spring", and when the afterglow was still vibrating in the window glass, he went to the dressing room of the two young men backstage to say hello, and then sat down at the stand-up piano and played the whole piece again from memory.
Valery Gergiev
Next we went to dinner, drank a bottle of vodka, and then took a walk around town, and he tried to convince me along the way that Prokofiev was more "important" than the overly praised Stravinsky. Much of his argument is the product of covetous Soviet propaganda— Prokofiev wrote his best work after returning to Russia in the mid-1930s, while his opponents were exhausted in the decadent Western countries. As for the story of Lena Prokofiev being sent to Siberia, her ex-husband is not to be mentioned. "He survived." Gergiev shrugged, and there was a certain cold satisfaction in his expression.
After walking to a remote suburb, I realized we had completely lost our way. "I knew how to cross the street in Rotterdam and come back from the hotel to the concert hall." As Gergiev said, he didn't care. When we returned, the sun had risen. "Do you have a fax for me?" He asked at the hotel reception. Rotterdam was his first job abroad. He didn't learn a little Dutch and infuriated the musicians by missing rehearsals, but he had a strong fan club that the city held the Gergiev Festival every fall until — well, you know how that ended.
I first met him in St. Petersburg, when he was re-enacting Fire Angel at the Mariinsky Theater, an opera long banned for its atonal music and indulgent depravity. Gergiev considered it a modernist masterpiece that could be compared to Warzek and Lulu. Before I got home, he sent a limousine to pick me up at his office and shut it up and talk until two o'clock in the morning. There were also two filmmakers waiting outside.
His energy, musicality, and incredible wit could not fail to impress, allowing opera and ballet to survive the shattered Russian Empire to this day. His sister La Lisa worked for him as a rehearsal piano accompanist. He also told me that when he was ready to have a baby, his mother would find him a bride in North Ossetia. Race aside, his family knew how to work in the Soviet system. An uncle who had designed tanks for Stalin sent Gergiev to the elusive Professor Ilya Musin at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory.
I first heard the name Vladimir Putin from Gergiev's mouth. Gergiev once deposited the income from the Mariinsky Theater in a Russian bank that, like many others in the 1990s, went bankrupt. Penniless, he turned to Putin, who was then the city's deputy mayor, to ensure that the theater would be able to pay its salary. After Putin became president, he gave Gergiev a national monopoly on turkey meat sales, making him a small oligarch with a private jet, and he is said to own a palace like Putin's in the Caucasus. Putin and Gergiev's friendship dates back a long time.
I first met him through a Finnish friend, the critic Seppo Heikinheimo, the finest critic of conducting art I know. Sebo started a music festival for Gergiev in central Finland, and he and I went together on a pleasant Sunday to find a place for Valery where he could build a country cottage for himself. There is also a sauna nearby that began in the 14th century. Gergiev and I, and his best friend all along, the pianist Dennis Mazuev, once spent a white night there. There was something immature about the two of them, some like Boy's Own (a teenage men's magazine that was popular in the Anglo-American 19th and early 20th centuries) and partly like Boyzone (Boy Zone, an Irish boy band). Mazuyev said he plans to build a concert hall for Gergiev in his Siberian hometown of Irkutsk as a stopover for his tour of China and Japan. Needless to say, Putin will pay.
There weren't many places to keep secrets in a Finnish sauna, so I learned more about Gergiev. Over the next few years he disputed something I had written, and then cut ties until he repaired it on a whim. After the 2004 massacre at the Beslan campus in North Ossetia, Gergiev called me and said he was going to change the repertoire of the concert with the Vienna Philharmonic that night to join Tchaikovsky's Symphony of Sorrows, a performance that many in the orchestra still cherish today. Although he grew up richer and more distant, the one dimension of human nature always occupied the most important position.
Our mutual friend Sepo suffered from depression at the time. One night, Sebo was standing on the balcony, trying to jump off, and when he was about to turn off his cell phone, he rang a phone from Gergiev and urged him to calm down. I saw Gergiev again after that at an actors' dinner in Covent Garden after the lackluster Verdi Macbeth performance. I waited for him to speak. He stared at me and said, "Sebo." "Our friend unfortunately completed another attempt of his.
Gergiev is nearly seventy years old today and is shut out of most countries of the world. I don't miss his conductor, because his concerts are often poorly rehearsed, wayward and perfunctory, showing contempt for the public and the music he claims to serve. Not long ago, Gergiev conducted in Moscow in the morning and took the stage at Carnegie Hall the same evening. You can do that with a private jet, maybe it's a bet with Mazuyev, but it's not an artist's act. Gergiev has long since been replaced by various concepts of power.
That being said, though. I don't like boycotts. I share these personal memories to show that among the banned artists, Gergiev is still a man of unique talent who may still have the ability to redeem himself through art, as well as his audience. In Valery Gergiev, whom I know, there is always something good. I hope he, and we, will find it again.
