Under different circumstances, classical piano fans in the Greater Toronto Area by now might be raving about a unique performance they’d seen and heard of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2. They might have joined the thousands of concert-goers who’ve witnessed her brilliance on the piano keys at such venues as Carnegie Hall and Royal Albert Hall. They might have been able to say they saw the once child prodigy now internationally celebrated concert pianist Valentina Lisitsa. Instead, she took advantage of her celebrity to offer her pro-Russian view of Ukrainian politics.
“The new school year begins in Odessa with teachers forced to wear tribal dress, a truly European custom,” she tweeted (in 2014) in an apparent slam at the cultural dress of her native Ukraine.
In case you didn’t know, Lisitsa was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1973, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. A Russian of Polish descent, she originally aspired to become a professional chess player, but instead was encouraged to play piano and, as a gifted child, attended the Kiev Conservatory. As an adult, she and her husband Alexei Kuznetsoff moved to the U.S., where in the 1990s she contemplated a translator’s job with the CIA.
But in 2007 she posted videos on YouTube of herself playing some Chopin etudes that captured the world’s ears and eyes. That’s when she took advantage of her notoriety and used social media to tweet out her support of last year’s Russian aggression against Ukraine and her distaste for the West’s coverage of it.
“That’s what happens when media ‘gets’ their news out of a … uh sphincter,” she tweeted via her Twitter handle NedoUkrainka.
Thanks to such loose-lipped comments on YouTube and a number of equally offensive finger fumbles on Twitter, Lisitsa, now 41, scuppered her two sold-out concerts in Toronto and several other public appearances this past week. Under pressure from some members of the public and his board of directors, Jeff Melanson, the TSO’s chief executive officer, cancelled the iconic pianist’s performances.
“Our priority must remain on being a stage for the world’s great works of music,” Melanson told the Toronto Star, “and not for opinions that some believe to be deeply offensive.”
Clearly, Lisitsa’s rants on social media are one extreme on the barometer of bad taste. At the other, are common everyday people – people such as you and I – who use Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr, Tagged and Vine in hopes that their home videos, philosophical attitudes or 140-character takes on current events will catch somebody’s fancy and, as they say, go viral. The problem, I think, is that most of those who elbow their way onto the social media escalator to presumed fame, do so (like climbing Mt. Everest) just because it’s there.
They criticise, spout off and slander just to fill the space. But most of the time – beyond the epithets – they have nothing to say. Worst of all, they tear something to shreds verbally or assassinate someone’s character in complete anonymity. They haven’t the fortitude to attach their names to their beliefs. To me, that’s the social media equivalent of terrorism from behind a bandana.
I’m afraid, in the end, that the worst offenders of misguided misspeaking on social media are celebrities. A couple of weeks ago, you may recall, TV’s Daily Show announced that comedian Trevor Noah would take over the hosting job when Jon Stewart retired. Of course, the producers made a great deal of Noah’s South African background and of his mixed-race heritage (half Jewish mother and Swiss father); for that matter, a lot of Noah’s successful content is race related. However, when media watchers took a closer look at some of his tweets, from a few years ago, the humour seemed to escape everybody.
“Almost bumped a Jewish kid crossing the road,” Noah tweeted in 2009, according to Salon magazine. “He didn’t look b4 crossing, but I still would have felt bad in my German car.”
Presumably, we live in a much more liberated society than once was the case. Indeed, in Trevor Noah’s home country of South Africa, the concept of apartheid (separation of the whites and blacks for centuries) might never have allowed any African black man to speak his mind that way. Still, I have to wonder why social media users – concert pianists and comedians included – believe the world should pay riveting attention to their rants, the same way audiences faithfully line up to buy tickets to their piano concerts or regularly stay up late to laugh at their gags on the Daily Show. I don’t know where the line of good taste or common sense for all this social media blather gets drawn. Clearly, social-media users – proud of their medium’s freedom from regulation – don’t want to install any rules, else they be accused of muzzling free speech.
But I have to ask: Why should a sense of decorum be expected in every hemisphere except the blogosphere?
