Irina Isaakyan’s research while affiliated with University of Toronto and other places

In 2002, the world was astonished by the appearance of the new opera star Anna Netrebko at the Salzburg Opera Festival. She was young, incredibly talented and smashingly glamorous, almost akin to the legendary Maria Callas. She quickly became the face of the world new opera and also the face of the new Russia and of the post-Soviet space. Like a speeding rocket, she was granted, in 2006, the Austrian citizenship as the soloist of the Vienna State Opera. In a jiff, she became an Austrian citizen, without having undergone long bureaucratic procedures of naturalization in a country with the most restrictive citizenship schemes.

In 1960, the world of classic music was witnessing a very strong inter-galactic interaction between the two famous theaters: La Scala and Bolshoi were signing a previously unimaginable pact on the perennial exchange of opera singers and ballet dancers. As a result, a new star generation of Soviet singers and Italian dancers was trained in the herein established inter-galactic stellar nursery throughout the 1960–1980s (Schwartz, 1983). One of them was Maria Bieșu. Originally from a small Moldavian village, Bieșu had started her vocal career in the republic of Moldova before she was selected for the two-year internship in La Scala in 1965 (Vdovina, 1984). It was the turning point in her career, which began escalating upon her repatriation in 1967 and immediate promotion to lead dramatic soprano at Bolshoi. Nostalgic for Italy and feeling sad about the inability to live there, Bieșu was, nevertheless, happy with her Soviet career, rejecting many emigration offers from the West (ibid; Rusakova, 2012). Although her stardom was decades before the era of global elite migrations, she could have indeed become a migrant, seeking political asylum and joining the émigré dissent, if she had wished so. As a star of the Bolshoi, she frequently participated in its tours to Europe and America throughout the 1970–80s, yet always returning to Moscow without a moment of hesitation. In one of her post-Soviet interviews to the press, she noted that she would have never left the Soviet Union for any other country (ibid). As she further explained, the reason for her patriotism had been not her fear of the KGB but the rich symbolism of the Bolshoi, embodying her grand social mobility from peasant to national opera supergiant: “My homeland was always the Soviet Union”, she proudly concluded (ibid).

I cannot live without opera: I always wanted to be an opera star, like Maria Callas or Anna Netrebko, to sing in best theaters and to live in different countries’. This is the de jour statement that I have heard from all my informants. All of them admit longing since childhood to become a global opera star, thus creating the narrative aura of mysticism and magic around their (pre)adolescent ‘elite career desire’. Such statements as ‘I knew I was destined to be an international opera star’ and ‘I always had a gut feeling it was my destiny to sing on best world opera stages’ provoke me to explore how trajectories of their elite migrant networking interact with the flow of their ‘starry’ artistic careers.

Astronomers argue that stars do not exist in isolation: they become part of galaxies, which are further grouped into intergalactic clusters. So do migrants. ‘People migrate in networks’, notes Alejandro Portes (1995). Therefore, they should learn to obtain membership in their networks and to deal with its requirements (ibid). In application to high-skill and elite migrants, the unanswered question is how they manage to sustain their network membership on a daily basis. Seeking to answer it, this chapter studies the dynamics of global elite migrants’ networks, looking into the most challenging experiences that my informants had while navigating global opera networks and into agentic strategies they used to overcome those barriers. Synthesizing theories of ‘migrant network’ and ‘cultural production’ with the testimonies of my informants, I explore their most unpleasant networking problems and associated coping strategies.

It was argued Chap. 1 that the constrained agency of elite migrant-artists has been an under-researched area. This means that there are, in fact, many unanswered provocative questions about the life and work of global elite migrants. While they belong to the category of informants whom scholars view as ‘challenging’. They are highly visible, dependent on their networks and, therefore extremely vulnerable because of their potential exposure to the public and also because of severe network sanctions. They are both privileged and vulnerable. And as noted by the famous French novelist of the nineteenth century Honoré de Balzac, it is not easy to describe in one word ‘the splendor and miseries’ of someone so controversial. Therefore, the question that I would like to ask in this chapter is what would be the best way to study the lives of global elite migrants and the ontogenesis of their migrant agency with the purpose to make their voices heard and their ‘splendors and miseries’ visible. What would be the best way to think about them as professionals, migrants and real people, with all their social skills, ambitions, moments of success but also fears and insecurity? The answer is interpretive biography. Here in this chapter, I, therefore, introduce the method of interpretive biography, explain its nuances and analytical procedures, and justify its application to my case.

In 1901, the great Enrico Caruso was visiting his native town of Naples in the South of Italy. Talking to his father’s old friend about his professional achievements, Caruso proudly noted that he had become an international star employed by the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala and Mariinsky Theater. To his greatest shock, the response he heard was, ‘All this is very well – but seriously speaking, what do you do for living?’

On 22 November 2017, the world of opera was shell-shocked by the death of the supergiant star Dmitry Hvorostovsky, a famous Russian baritone who died of cancer. His death was not a surprise because he had been terminally ill for a long time. However, the fact of his ‘sudden non-being’ in the world of opera appeared as a shock to all who loved it. My informants were no exception. Most of them had been lucky to attend his performances in Europe and to hear his unrivalled charming voice. ‘It feels like he is still here, still alive’, noted Zosya, ‘I think artists like him never die. They continue to shine even post mortem. Their glory is immortal. Will I ever reach this kind of fame and eternity?’ I did not respond to this question, which I guess was rhetorical—or maybe not. Maybe Zosya truly wanted to hear what a sociologist might think about her career potential. I softly switched the topic because I did not want to disappoint her. To be honest, I did not believe in her futuristic starry career, although miracles can, of course, happen. The reason I am so skeptical about Zosya’s future is that she and her idol Hvorostovsky are the two extra-polar types of global elite migrant.

Today more than ever before, we are witnessing complex trajectories of global elite migrations as illuminated by a rapidly increasing stream of elite niched professionals trying to develop their elitist careers abroad. Building their second home at destination, global elite migrants sustain the transnational and highly visible nature of their politically eminent work through their global employment. Their list consists of migrating business executives, athletes, fashion models, actors and artists including ballet dancers and opera singers. Through their migration, transnational employment and integration, they continuously make a global impact by shaping public tastes and values and enriching the world economics.

For more than twenty years, the Russian opera diva Anna Netrebko was leading an iconic transnational life, working in most prestigious theaters all over the world and living between her three luxurious homes in St Petersburg, Vienna and New York. In all her social media, she was advertising this lifestyle as highly enjoyable and enriching. She was stressing how much at home she was feeling both in the West and in Russia, advocating a cultural mix of Russian and European dressing styles and life habits (Mattison, 2005; LIFE, 2022). She became an embodiment of the mass media fairytale about a transnationally (and even supra-nationally) integrated cosmopolitan with the Cinderella roots, who lives as if above the state while also in every state of her professional membership (Smirnova, 2022). And when the global world started to break apart in the milieu of the post-2022 geopolitics, Netrebko firmly declared that she would stay above the politics, still hoping to be integrated in every national culture as she always used to be (Netrebko, 2022). To her great surprise, this cosmopolitan membership was suddenly interrupted by the political loyalty requirement at both ends. And Netrebko found herself sidelined first in the global opera industry because of her political neutrality, and then in Russian culture because of her attempt to restore the disrupted European career (KP.RU, 2023). This example shows how easily super giant stars can be thrown down from the sky, and leads us to look into a rather tragic story of their integration. Netrebko’s de-idolization was perceived by my informants as ‘the end of something’—not exactly the end of their careers but the end of something that had been keeping their work and lives together: they were ‘perplexed and disoriented by the loss of something precious that was running away’ from them. They clearly saw their ‘own lives getting out of control’ until they started to see that this ‘pivotal something’ was actually their integration.

p>Today marriage-migration remains the dominant form of naturalization in Italy and Greece, even for women from such high-income countries as the USA. Pilot studies of intra-OECD female migrants to Southern Europe show that the majority of them marry local men, consider their matrimony a mistake, and feel isolated. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive knowledge about dynamics of their socio-cultural integration or expat nationalism (although scholarship generally acknowledges a strong relationship between these two processes). Based on narrative-biographic interviews with 60 Anglophone female expatriates married to Italian and Greek men, our study explores the women's negotiation of culture within the context of their Italian and Greek families, and looks at emerging challenges for their integration. We show that these women are nationalistic and culturally stringent actors, who often find it extremely difficult fully to learn and integrate to the new cultures of Southern Europe.</p