As Pressure Grows On Arts Orgs To Drop Fossil Money, Salzburg Fest Has New Sponsor - Gazprom
In July, the opera director Peter Sellars gave a stark speech about climate change to open the Salzburg Festival in Austria, one of classical music’s most glittering events. “We are today facing leadership across the world,” he said, “that is willing to sacrifice the next generation and the generations after that.” People everywhere, he added, had to “shift out of bad habit energies and make basic, common-sense changes in our lives.”
That night, he unveiled his new production of “Idomeneo,” which turned Mozart’s opera into a climate change parable and featured a dancer from Kiribati, an island nation threatened by rising sea levels. Less than three months later, on Oct. 3, Helga Rabl-Stadler, the festival’s president, traveled to St. Petersburg to sign a new sponsorship deal with Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, and OMV, an Austrian oil and gas firm. The companies will each pay 200,000 euros (about $220,000) toward staging a Russian opera at next year’s festival.
Ms. Rabl-Stadler said in an email that she did not think there was a conflict between the deal and Mr. Sellars’s speech. “I believe we cannot find sustainable solutions for the future against, but only together with, the major companies in this field,” she wrote.
But the deal disappointed some politicians and activists at a time of growing concern about climate change. And it was made amid intensifying pressure on European arts institutions to sever ties with oil and gas companies. Last year, several Dutch museums ended partnerships with the oil company Shell. (Activists claimed victory, while the museums said they had reached the planned end of contracts.) This month, the National Theater in London followed suit. In September, activists in Paris made handprints in molasses on the Louvre’s glass pyramid to protest the museum’s funding from the oil and gas company Total.
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