DRESDEN — At 59, Hans-Joachim Frey is a man always on the move. Until 2022, he served as the artistic director of the Dresden Semperoper Ball. Today, he directs concerts and balls across the globe, but with a particular fondness for autocratic Russia.
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This affinity has earned him the moniker “Putin’s favorite” within the classical music scene. Indeed, the Russian president has held the German organizer in high regard for years.
In 2021, Frey was granted Russian citizenship by presidential decree. Two years later, he received the Order of Friendship. By that time, Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine was well underway, and Western sanctions had been in place since 2014, following the annexation of Crimea.
Frey’s journey is that of a cultural manager who departed the German classical music scene to serve the Russian government, becoming an internationally connected figure disseminating Russian propaganda under the guise of art. His story intertwines loyalty and opportunism, illustrating how culture is weaponized by the Putin regime to exert influence in the West. What motivates Frey, and how deeply is he enmeshed in Putin’s system?
The Taschenbergpalais in Dresden holds significant meaning in Frey’s life. From this hotel, one can gaze upon the Semperoper, where Frey served as opera director until 2007. Later, he transformed the Opera Ball into a grand spectacle, inviting aristocrats, artists, and politicians of note.
In 2009, Vladimir Putin attended the Opera Ball, received a medal, and spent the night at the Taschenbergpalais. For Putin, it was a brief visit to the city where, as a KGB agent in the 1980s, he had witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall. For Frey, it was far more: on the night of the ball, Frey recalls, Putin invited him to his hotel suite, ostensibly to discuss his events. Did they strike a deal?
Sixteen years later, Frey is in high spirits. “This is the most exciting phase of my life right now,” he says, enthusiastically. He proudly recounts an event he attended in Rome: “Last year, the big peace gala at the Vatican was one of the most thrilling projects I’ve ever undertaken.”
The Vatican Plot
Peace? The Vatican? It all sounds rather enigmatic — and it is. Unnoticed by international media, a so-called “peace conference” took place in the Vatican in April 2024, focusing on Ukraine, Russia, and the West.
This and several other meetings were organized by Pierre Louvrier, a Belgian businessman with strong ties to Russia. The participant lists for these supposed peace conferences remain confidential, but one internationally recognized name has surfaced: Tulsi Gabbard, now serving as the head of national intelligence under Donald Trump.
In January, Gabbard acknowledged during a U.S. Senate hearing that she had attended a conference in Rome that summer. Despite extensive research by Die Zeit, the exact discussions behind the Vatican’s closed doors and the reasons for papal hierarchy’s support of this project remain unclear. One certainty, however, is that this conference preceded the U.S. government’s shift towards rapprochement with Russia on the Ukraine issue. Was this change in direction orchestrated there?
The lines between culture and behind-the-scenes diplomacy appeared to blur
At the opening conference in Rome in 2024, Frey was responsible solely for the musical program: a concert held in a church. Nevertheless, the cultural manager apparently gleaned insights into other happenings during the conference.
The lines between culture and behind-the-scenes diplomacy appeared to blur. “People from all over the world were there,” Frey recalls at the Taschenbergpalais, “including Americans, and we also brought some Russian guests. They began discussing a peace solution.”
“The Americans conveyed that they wanted to reintegrate the Russians to prevent them from becoming overly reliant on China. They also sought support for Donald Trump, but that wasn’t our focus,” claims Frey.
Frey shared photos of the event on Instagram. He is seen alongside Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis and Matthias Moosdorf, the then foreign policy spokesperson for the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag.
The concert audience featured right-wing populists from across Europe, such as Frédéric Chatillon, a friend and communications advisor to Marine Le Pen, and Andreas Palmlöv, an influencer who, backed by substantial funds and his own foundation, campaigns against the so-called “woke culture” in Sweden.
The Russian ambassador to the Vatican also made an appearance. Among the attendees were several entrepreneurs, well-acquainted with Frey, including the owner of one of Germany’s largest pig farms — not exactly the typical experts one would expect at an international peace conference.
“Thank you for the initiative and invitation,” Frey wrote in a post. And: “We were just playing music.”
This is how Frey portrays himself: as a benign “bridge builder,” an apolitical man of culture. He often emphasizes the unifying power of music. But he channels this power to serve authority: to cast Russia in a favorable light on the global stage.
Music and dictatorships
This is precisely why he holds value for Putin, according to musicologist Friedrich Geiger of the Munich University of Music and Theatre. As an expert on the role of music in dictatorships, Geiger has extensively studied Putin’s cultural policies.
He says that culture and classical music are far more than mere uplifting luxuries within the Putin regime. In the year of Crimea’s annexation, Putin issued a decree establishing the “foundations of state cultural policy,” defining culture as an “integral component of the national security strategy of the Russian Federation.”
Since then, the state’s objective has been to garner public support for the Russian cause by exporting classical music to the West. The apolitical aura of classical music serves merely as a façade. Cultural managers like Frey play a pivotal role in this strategy: they function simultaneously as organizers, disseminators, and covert ambassadors of the Russian agenda.
The foreword for Frey’s book
But in Frey’s case, the message is hardly hidden. In 2018, four years after the annexation of Crimea, Frey published a book with the pointed title Learning to Love Russia. As musicologist Geiger notes in an essay, it blends “the glorification of Putin” with “clichés about the ‘Russian soul’ and music as its purest expression.” In 2021, the book came out in Russia too — with a foreword written by Vladimir Putin himself.
Until Russia invaded Ukraine, Frey’s career in Putin’s service was steadily on the rise. He became an advisor to the prestigious Bolshoi Theater and artistic director of the Sirius Foundation in Sochi, one of the largest cultural institutions in Russia.
Frey says he personally negotiated the contract with Putin back in 2017. In Dresden, where Frey was still running the Semperoper Ball at the time, his involvement with Russia raised eyebrows, but for a while it didn’t do him much harm.
That changed in 2022, when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine and public pressure mounted for him to distance himself. Frey had to make a choice. “The decision for Russia had already been made for me long before,” he says now, looking back.
He shows no hesitation accepting Kremlin money
So what made him sign on with Russia in the first place? In his book, he describes a meeting with Putin. “My mood,” he writes, “oscillated between elation and deep humility.” He felt “unimagined opportunities” opening up in that moment. So what is he really after — money, influence? And how deeply does he believe in the Russian cause?
Does he hear much about the war in Ukraine while in Moscow? “Not really.”
In fact, Frey shows no hesitation in accepting Kremlin money, as confirmed by entries in a Russian public database. In 2017, the 59-year-old launched a foundation called Art Bridge — Bridge of Art. Through this organization, he puts on opera balls in places like St. Petersburg and Dubai.
According to reporting by Die Zeit, several of these events have received support from Putin’s Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives. The Tchaikovsky Festival, for example, got nearly €220,000 in 2023. A year later, the figure had already climbed to €360,000. The Kremlin also provided more than €300,000 in funding for the 2023 St. Petersburg Opera Ball, with the stated aim of “promoting traditional spiritual and moral values through the cultural and creative industries.”
At the Taschenbergpalais, Frey talks about his jobs and new projects, and waxes lyrical about his life in Moscow. When the conversation turns to the war, he uses the Kremlin’s phrasing: “the special operation.” Now that he spends most of his life living in Russia, does he come across news of the war? “Not at all in daily life.”
Kitschy Russian propaganda
Anyone trying to understand Frey’s attachment to Putin among his old colleagues often hits a wall. Some say flat-out that they want nothing more to do with him. “The Frey chapter is closed for us,” says Gerhard Müller, chairman of the Dresden Semperoper Ball association. “He was always fascinated by power,” says someone close to Frey’s former circle who asked to remain anonymous. Frey, this person adds, has always been drawn to powerful people and enjoys wielding power himself.
The events Frey stages for Putin are mostly elaborate propaganda pageants. At a ball held in St. Petersburg in 2024, for example, money was raised for “the new regions of Russia” — a reference to the Ukrainian territories under occupation. In Frey’s staging, Russia has already won its war of aggression.
This is how one earns favor not just in the Kremlin. Frey has frequently met with Boris Rotenberg, a sanctioned oligarch who built an enormous fortune thanks to Putin. The billionaire serves as an advisor to Frey’s Art Bridge Foundation.
He moves in those elite German circles that have close ties to Russia.
Frey also sits on the board of a Russian insurance firm, where other members include Viktor Komogorov, a former deputy director of the FSB. Then there’s Sergei Roldugin, a childhood friend of Putin who has performed as a cellist at Frey’s events at the Brucknerhaus in Austria. Roldugin is suspected of helping move some of Putin’s private wealth into offshore accounts. When asked about this, Frey says he has no knowledge of it.
Frey still keeps a foothold in Germany as well. A Dresden-based company, Opernball Dresden GmbH, is registered in his name. The balls Frey hosts in Russia are advertised on its website.
He moves in those elite German circles that have close ties to Russia. One is the cellist and AfD politician Matthias Moosdorf: Frey’s foundation has “supported” several of Moosdorf’s concerts in Russia, and Moosdorf also attended the so-called peace conference in Rome in April 2024.
Then there’s musician Justus Frantz, who continued performing in Russia despite the war. A now-deleted Facebook photo shows Frey at a private music salon in Frantz’s apartment in 2023. Seated nearby are guests like former leftist MP Sahra Wagenknecht and Alexander von Bismarck. The latter attracted attention in 2023 by decorating a decommissioned tank, displayed as an art installation in front of the Russian embassy, with 2,000 red roses. According to him, it was a gesture meant to encourage dialogue with Russia.
Billionaire benefactors, propaganda galas for an autocrat, a board seat at a Russian insurance firm — what does any of this have to do with the German Basic Law’s definition of culture? That law declares “art and science, research and teaching” to be free.
But Frey, as he himself admits, has chosen Russia, and with it, autocracy. What artistic freedom looks like there can be seen in the fate of Russian ballet star Vladimir Shklyarov. In 2022, Shklyarov spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine. Two years later, at the age of 39, he fell from the balcony of his St. Petersburg apartment under murky circumstances.
How did Frey feel when he heard the news of the dancer’s death? “Nothing at all,” he says. He has not looked into the case. Whether Frey’s indifference is genuine or just a performance is hard to say. And maybe that’s the only way forward for someone who has thrown in their lot with Russia’s version of power.
