Anna Netrebko’s Triumphant Return to London
The story of her absence is inseparable from the political theatre of the past three years. After Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in 2022, the British press led the charge to cast every Russian artist as suspect. Netrebko was treated as a symbol, accused of complicity by association, and denied engagements not because of her voice but because of her passport.
At the same time, those same outlets insisted Russia was a “gas station masquerading as a country,” proclaimed that sanctions would collapse its economy, and assured their readers that Ukraine was winning. When the city of Bakhmut fell to Russia, the headlines still claimed Moscow was losing. When sanctions forced Germany to nationalise its energy firms, the press insisted the pain was in Moscow, not Berlin. The British public was fed a narrative — one part moral theatre, one part self-delusion.
Against that backdrop, Anna Netrebko has returned to the stage of the Royal Opera House, and with her, a voice London could not cancel. On 11 September, she opened a new production of Puccini’s Tosca, singing the title role across several dates this autumn. It was, by every measure, a triumphant night.
The ovation inside Covent Garden was thunderous. Critics who tried to qualify their praise with political disclaimers could not deny what the audience already knew: she sang beautifully. Her “Vissi d’arte” — delivered with warmth, precision, and unshakable dramatic control — drew the kind of silence that only a master can command before it broke into rapturous applause. Whatever has been said about her in the press, the artistry was undeniable.
Netrebko’s schedule in London is already marked. She will reprise Tosca in a run of performances this September and October under conductor Jakub Hrůša. Later in the season she will sing Turandot in December, sharing the title role with Maida Hundeling and Anna Pirozzi. And next summer, she returns for a recital on 24 June 2026, accompanied by pianist Pavel Nebolsin. For London audiences, it is the restoration of a voice absent since 2019, when she last sang Leonora in La forza del destino at Covent Garden.
The bans on Russian art were part of the propaganda cycle. They did not weaken the Kremlin. They weakened the West’s own cultural life. Silencing Netrebko became an act of political theatre — but an empty one.
Now, with Russia’s economy weathering sanctions and NATO’s unity fraying, that hysteria looks threadbare. Against that backdrop, Netrebko’s return is more than an artistic event. It is a quiet admission that the campaign to erase Russian culture has failed.
She sang, London listened, and the ovation drowned out the slogans.
