It’s often suggested, from different quarters, that Western classical music is losing a certain cultural salience, that it no longer connects to society at large in the ways it has in its prior history. This is of course not necessarily to say that classical music concerts are now less well attended, or attended with less enthusiasm. Audiences are still as engaged and vitally moved by classical music as they’re possible to be — such, at least, is the impression gained by a lifetime of classical music appreciation. But the cultural meaning of the music to which classical music audiences respond has almost certainly shifted in its larger signifying role and context. It still means something purely as music, but it doesn’t usually speak to the world, as a normative or political entity, in the ways it may once have done.

There have even been voices from inside the classical music world, as outside it, recommending discontinuing certain performance traditions. The celebrated German baritone Matthias Goerne, recently on tour in Australia with the great Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov, has suggested that some of the canonical operatic repertoire no longer speaks to the preoccupations of contemporary people, and should be retired. This is not just a question of historical changes of taste, which are more or less arbitrary, but of a deeper question around value — of whether some kinds of music, by virtue of their intrinsic qualities as well as their wider cultural positioning, are more valuable or meaningful than other kinds. Philosophically, this question is usually framed around that of ontological realism: of whether some things in our experience — such as in the domains of art, or knowledge, or religion, among others — just are of objectively more or less value, or whether we alone attribute such value, for other reasons, to them.

But there is an associated question, concerning whether or not there are more meaningful ways of framing the music we make, and present to the public, in particular social and political contexts. Music-making doesn’t happen in a vacuum — it lives in and with the people who compose and perform, and then receive, it, in a real place and situation. Goerne and Trifonov’s own final concert at Sydney’s City Recital Hall, on March 30^th this year, presented an opportunity to consider this at first hand.

Trifonov’s solo recital for the first half of the programme had originally been advertised, weeks before, as Schubert’s last piano sonata (no 21, D960) — a central, and profound, masterpiece of the piano repertoire. Well after tickets had gone on sale (I’d bought one myself) Trifonov decided to drop the Schubert for a lesser-known, comparatively slight work — Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album, op 39. Why Trifonov decided for this change, at a relatively late moment, is uncertain, but it had political connotations, even if unintended. It’s well known that some Australian, and international, audiences have been willing to boycott or even ban Russian musicians and performers more generally since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, including Trifonov himself, that year, in Montreal and Kansas, among other places. He had been perceived by different critics as not being sufficiently vocal in his denunciation of the Russian invasion. I won’t elaborate here on the moral value of these bluntly coercive kinds of intervention, but it remains the prerogative of audiences to decide how they choose to support or dis-endorse any given artist, or what that artist, ostensibly, represents.

But Trifonov’s decisions for his Australian concerts were telling — and the context is important. His performance with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the night before the City Recital Hall concert, had him playing an exclusively Russian repertoire (including the brief encore), in addition to the orchestra opening the concert with a rarely heard piece by the nineteenth-century Russian composer Lyadov. In Melbourne, Trifonov also performed, as a soloist, an all-Russian repertoire. There seems to be a fairly clear, if innocuous, will behind these programming choices to highlight a Russian and, within that domain, very conventional, repertoire: Rachmaninov, Lyadov, Tchaikovsky. Possibly Trifonov’s choices (and those of executive orchestral bodies) were on this occasion ingenuous: he simply wanted to play some beautiful, very accessible, even sentimentally childlike, music from his Russian homeland.

In the current context, however, this can be seen as naïve at best, provocative at worst. Watching Trifonov perform the Tchaikovsky work — the evocations of tolling bells, of grave Slavonic choruses and their modal harmonies, of the depths of the often-celebrated Russian soul — we were treated to a version of “pure music-making”, where the music can ostensibly speak, and exist, for itself, in a near-sacred, if secular, space of pure aesthetic artistry, divorced from the vagaries of the world outside — somewhere beyond the doors of the recital hall.

But unfortunately, this kind of artistic purism, if it was intended, is not altogether possible. As Trifonov superbly inhabited the purely musical voice of old Russia — the Russia from before the 1917 revolution, before Lenin and Stalin, before Yeltsin and perestroika and now Putin and the Ukrainian invasion — I had an impression of the immense pathos of the artistic undertaking on offer. The performance, exquisitely attentive to Tchaikovsky’s evocations of childhood, of the flat wintry expanse of the Russian taiga, however beautiful, could not have been more artistically pathetic: I could only think of the hundreds of thousands of dead Russians and Ukrainians on the battlefields of the Ukrainian plains. Perhaps even that registration of pathos was, at least implicitly, at the back of Trifonov’s intentions: Tchaikovsky’s evocations of antediluvian innocence could somehow show up how far we had all gone wrong, in our modern world. But that would be a charitable reading. There was certainly in Trifonov’s execution a musical perfection. But what it signified, beyond that, was a kind of vacancy that missed a deeper opportunity — one that often lies at the heart of the classical music enterprise.

This is because, quite simply, we understand the old Russia of artistic tradition, the one to which Trifonov remains faithful and asserts in his programming choices, as representing, in 2025, a lethal aggressor. It was Russia that invaded its sovereign neighbour in 2022, that has made forty-five thousand casualties of Ukrainian civilians, including thirteen-thousand dead.  More than two years ago up to five-hundred of these were children, and that number has only increased since then. Tchaikovsky’s children’s pieces were pathetic, in that association, in the extreme.

We cannot be expected to overlook this clear and present fact in the sepia-toned ahistoricism of music, suspended in a bottle of aesthetic timelessness, or — still more — ontological separation from the context of its performance. It’s crucial here to recognise that no-one believes that Tchaikovsky or any other great Russian art of the past has anything to do with Putin’s Russia, let alone being somehow symbolically culpable for its military invasion: that would also be historically absurd. It is simply that cultural representation has become highly loaded as a result of the war — something that Trifonov well knows as a contemporary Russian and a prominent proponent of Russian culture.

As I listened to Trifonov’s flawless performance, I thought of another Russia to which he might well have given voice, and remained faithful — thereby explicitly sustaining a profundity commensurate with the aesthetic beauty of his performance. I thought of the many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of great Russian artists and musicians who perished under the various phases of Russian autocracy and totalitarianism — and of those who barely subsist today in Putin’s authoritarian regime. I thought of the artistically demanding works of Soviet and post-Soviet composers, such as Sofia Gubaidulina, who died just two weeks before Trifonov’s Sydney performance, at the age of ninety-three, having lived through the post-Stalinist “rehabilitation” of neglected and culturally persecuted artists. In 1973, Gubaidulina was attacked and almost strangled in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow; her friends came to believe that her attacker was a KGB agent.

What made Trifonov’s performance artistically, if not musically, impotent was that it didn’t grasp the full depths of its cultural moment. Had he chosen to replace the musical sublimity of Schubert not with the comparative slightness of Tchaikovsky’s Children’s Album miniatures — beautiful in themselves — but with something more challenging but potentially more rewarding, for example by the just-deceased Gubaidulina, Trifonov’s Sydney performance would have been not just musically exquisite but artistically triumphant. We were offered, instead, a naïve bromide — a form of artistic kitsch: from a charmingly innocuous statement about innocence, Tchaikovsky’s music had become a falsely innocent statement about wishful-thinking, an unreal and saccharine view of the world. This is a kind of kitsch that, almost by default, informs large swathes of classical musical production unable to convert artistic concerns, internal to its own aesthetic domain, into larger and more salient social, cultural and political ones. The pathos comes in the fact that it ultimately serves neither the public, the art form, the individual work of art, or even the performer, which are all diminished as a result.

Contemporary musical art can of course be relevant — as much as anything we make for our own cultural consumption can be. But its context, and the connotations and implications that surround it, are crucial.  Trifonov is of course a remarkable musician, one of the most gifted of our time, but it’s only until art combines with an understanding of artistic statement in an extra-musical sense, that music reaches greatness: it is, after all, itself a historical phenomenon. Wilhelm Furtwängler, still regarded as one of the greatest symphonic and operatic conductors of the twentieth century, at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic in the early 1940s believed he could with moral impunity perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to celebrate the Führer’s birthday, because the greatness of the music transcended the political moment. Furtwängler was by his own account emphatically not a Nazi, and his life may indeed have been in danger, had he refused to comply with Goebbels’ expectations; but the only thing that could have ensured his artistic and moral integrity would have been to refuse to perform under Nazi auspices at all. However, appealing to a transcendent notion of artistic purity, Furtwängler appeared to believe that, ultimately, great music exists outside of any of its historical instantiations.

I’m not claiming a moral equivalence between Furtwängler’s transgression as a sin of commission and Trifonov’s perhaps naïve appeal to a musical exceptionalism often taken for granted (as it was in March in Sydney) — the two cases are worlds apart, in gravity if not in principle: they each rely on the same notion of the immunity of music to its fully historical constitution.

In Sydney this past March, Trifonov wanted to tell us that Russian music was still to be admired, that it preserves a beautiful musical tradition of global importance — that, even, in a purely musical sense, it transcends that world. And those things are not untrue, in theory. But the point can’t be made successfully while Russia is the aggressor in war. Trifonov needed to find a Russia that endures, not as an autocratic tyranny, but as a laudable victim — one which includes, in a mark of transnational solidarity, all of the oppressed, Ukrainian and Russian included. If not, music does indeed become culturally subordinate, or irrelevant, and perhaps, at most, degraded, as it was during Furtwängler’s Berlin performance.

Beethoven himself would have been disgusted to be performed in celebration of the birth of the Führer. It was he, after all, who famously, emphatically, erased the dedication of his Eroica Symphony to Napoleon, after he’d learned that the French liberator had crowned himself Emperor. Putin, like Trump or Xi Jinping among other major leaders, is the would-be Napoleon of our time. We should do everything in our power to resist the abuse of power.

Music, as much as any other form of human expression, aesthetic and moral, has a mode and means of resistance it fails to engage only at its own peril. It needs to find a way, literally and figuratively, to undermine the rule of Putin, if it doesn’t want to find itself caught irrevocably inside Putin’s realm. As the war thunders on in Ukraine, and the number of the dead grows daily, the least we can do is to refuse all possible complicity.