Olivia Giovetti

During the curtain call for the closing performance of Verdi’s Il trovatore at the Royal Opera House on 19 July, one of the cast, Danni Perry, took their bow holding a Palestinian flag. The moment, filmed by several people in the audience, went viral, with videos showing someone appearing from the wings and trying to wrest the flag from Perry’s hands.

Mussorgsky’s alcoholism caught up with him before he could finish Khovanshchina. At the time of his death in 1881 he had completed a piano score but hadn’t begun the orchestration. He was also still working out the final act, where, after Golitsyn is exiled and Khovansky is killed, the Old Believers opt for martyrdom by self-immolation in protest against the tsar.

When Verdi’s Nabucco was first performed in 1842, Milanese audiences were quick to see their own situation under Austrian occupation reflected in the plot, a loose adaptation of the Biblical story of the madness of Nebuchadnezzar and the plight of the exiled Judeans in Babylon.

Last Friday afternoon, shortly after the Palestinian writer and researcher Salman Abu Sitta had said that ‘the voice of the victim is silenced, denied, condemned and vilified,’ the German police cut the power to the Palästina-Kongress in Berlin.

Demonstrations by Jews critical of Israel have also been banned. In response to this, Iris Hefets, a board member of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, stood alone on Hermannplatz on 14 October, holding up a sign that said: ‘As a Jew and as an Israeli, stop the genocide in Gaza.’ She was taken into police custody.