1.1 The Image or the Person?

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.

Ten years later, I was watching the first release of the Big Opera annual contest show in Russia at the end of 2011 (under the patronage of the late Soviet opera diva Elena Obrazstova), where the best young singers from the former Soviet republics were competing for a variety of Russian television prizes but primarily for their future international fame and for their pass to the European and global opera networks. In fact, the participants’ names were soon publicized in artistic programs of leading European opera houses.Footnote 1

Watching the Big Opera biannual shows, I was amazed to see the post-Soviet opera singers gaining their professional foothold overseas so rapidly every year.Footnote 2 It never happened in the time of my childhood or adolescence, when I was growing up in the Soviet Union, or even during the perestroika or the ‘wild nineties’, respectively precipitating or following the Soviet collapse. Never before had I thought about the operatic profession as an asset for successful and privileged migration. As long as Netrebko was making her footprints all over the world, global mass media were publicizing curious stories about her life, describing her as the first post-Soviet ‘diva-converted Cinderella’, the first post-Soviet Maria Callas, the protegee of the great Valeriy Gergiev, the ‘singing Audrey Hepburn’, the most athletic and sexy opera star in the world, and most recently the ‘singing captain Benson’ because of her striking visual resemblance with Olivia Benson, the protagonist of the popular TV show Special Victims Unit. The overabundance of these images publicly attached to Netrebko first made me think about how glamorous her life and the lives of her compatriot colleagues who become migrants must be. ‘You must be kidding! I still cannot find a decent job’, noted Zina, my new friend and soon-to-be informant, when we first met in 2016, ‘I graduated from the conservatory seven years ago and I am not coming even close to professionals like Netrebko’.

This banal yet disturbing encounter with an aspiring artist from Ukraine made me want to explore the lives and work of people like Zina and Netrebko, who have such different career- and migration- trajectories despite the same occupation and similar education. One resembles a star that is always shining the other is akin to a star that is beginning to faint. It was still the misfortunate other who had primarily captured my sociological imagination. The most amazing thing is that not many of us are familiar with problems that such migrant-artists may encounter overseas. Changing the global world, they often find themselves vulnerable when affected by its controversial forces.

Carrying the double burden of glamour and precarity on their migrant shoulders, migrant-artists from the former Soviet bloc are the focus of this book—to be more precise, the dynamics of their migrant agency and migrant networks that develop within the intersecting contexts of globalization and geopolitics.

1.2 Global Elite Migrants

Globalisation has resurged scholars’ interest in the phenomenon of global elite migrations. For a long time, this phenomenon remained significantly understudied in social sciences, even despite many studies on various elite professionals who engaged in global migrations during different historical epochs. Unfortunately, not enough attention was paid to the complexity of their life stories and social relations as perceived by these people themselves or to the dynamics of and interconnectivity between their decision-making and networking. As a result, scholars remain confused about who the global elite migrant actually is and how this category should be understood.

In the meantime, the phenomenon of global elite migrations has been gathering momentum, as illuminated by a rapidly increasing stream of various groups of elite-niched professionals who are 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, writers, filmmakers, actors and artists including orchestra conductors, musicians, ballet dancers and opera singers (Hanciles, 2013; Schinke, 2013; Albrethsen, 2015; Alfarone & Merlone, 2024; Johnston, 2021; Lenartowicz & Ciok, 2021; Isaakyan, 2022; Kim & Tak, 2024). Through their migration, transnational employment and integration, they continuously make a global impact by shaping public tastes, enriching world economics and interfering with global geopolitics. Although their migratory trajectories, motivations and diasporic art continuously drew the attention of historians, musicologists, geographers and occupational psychologist; it is only within the context of the post-1980 globalisation (expanding in the milieu of post-communist transformations) that these migrants have become more visible as a group involved in complex transnational relations.

Based on the literatures of globalization, transnationalism and professional elites (Lasch, 1996; Favell, 2008; Sassen, 2010; Kauppi & Madsen, 2014; Savage & Williams, 2008; Wedel, 2017; Kuus, 2021), ‘global elite migrants’ can be defined as elite professionals (equipped with exquisite professional skills such as knowledge of foreign languages and highest levels of professional finesse) who work across highly skilled niched occupations, and either preserve their elite professional and social status in the course of their global migrations or achieve it through their global migrations. They are highly educated, virtuoso skilled, multi-lingual and transnationally mobile professionals who work in a politically important niche and generate agglomerate economic and social remittances across borders—that is, on the global level and through their global circulation.

The conceptual focus of this definition is the dialectical unity between their professionalism and global mobility, which makes the outputs of their work globally important and visible. In fact, their politically important niched work makes them visible and capable of generating large volumes of remittances on the global level, and vice versa: the volume of their societal impact and the publicity of their images make their global work to appeal as extremely valid for the world. This can be illuminated by the production of mass cultural images of success by migrating musicians, actors and athletes (Besnier et al., 2018). Within their stream, there is a rapidly increasing—yet under-examined—flow of opera singers particularly from the post-communist bloc.

Today an increasing number of young people indeed pursue the transnational career of an opera singer and receive vocal education outside their countries of origin and circulate between various opera houses all over the world (Harrington, 2020; Shepard, 2010). Within this context of transnationally global mobility, Europe acts as a strong leader in the international operatic industry (ibid). For example, in 2017, there were 6795 opera shows in Germany; 1393 in Italy and 1163 in Austria—all engaging international cast (Gillis, 2017). These globally rotating artists make a large share of one million people among opera singers who are officially registered in the main opera database (Operabase, 2023). 50% of them are from the former Soviet bloc (ibid).

Multilingual and educated on the tertiary level of conservatory if not above (Shepard, 2010; Cygankvao, 2016), they may appear well networked and fully protected from employment insecurity. At the same time, limited data on opera singers who become migrants point to their continuous short-term contracts of varying income and length as an indicator of vulnerability (Harrington, 2020; Shepard, 2010). Unfortunately, processes that underpin their class formation (including the dynamics of their professionalism and networking) are under-researched: it is unclear to what extent and in what ways elite migrant-artists can preserve their professionalism post-migration and make independent decisions about their career and life while sustaining their network membership.

By ‘elite migrants’, I mean established and early-career professionals from elite occupations at origin who, becoming migrants, do not lose their elite professional status at destination. This is an important criterion for their definition because it allows to draw a distinction line between them and other migrants who may lose their elite status postmigration due to various circumstance and, therefore cease to be global elite migrants. I thus view the phenomenon of global elite migration as a category of ‘labor migration’.

Many studies indeed recognize the existence of migrating elite professionals who struggle to remain elite-level workers at destination, including ambitious architects, athletes and people of arts relocating either voluntarily (like dependent/family migrants) or forcefully (like refugees or political defectors) and find it difficult to secure employment equivalent to their elitist work at origin (Yeoh & Willis, 2005; Agergaard & Ronglan, 2015; Wagner et al., 2017; Borowiecki & Graddy, 2021; Giffin et al., 2023; Parzer, 2023; Salimi et al., 2024). Some of them manage to keep or regain their elite occupations while others start an entirely new career and enter another category of foreign workforce different from the ‘global elite migration’ stream. For example, I do not define artists or ballet dancers who are school teachers at destination as ‘global elite migrants’.

Respectively, by ‘elite migrant-artists’, I mean elite artists (or artists trained and employed as performers of high arts) who become migrants and, within the context of postmigration, preserve their elite professionalism through the employment in their artistic field. Their group includes migrating opera singers from the former Soviet bloc. The operatic profession they represent has always enjoyed the ‘national elite status’ in authoritarian, countries, and this cultural legacy is still imprinted in the logistics of its networks and in the work of artists’ agency.

1.3 Agency and Networks of Skilled Labor Migrants

The concepts of ‘migrant network’ and ‘migrant agency’ are central in this book. By definition, ‘Migrant agency’ refers to decisions and actions that migrants make to enable their migration and integration (Triandafyllidou, 2018). This includes how they envision and plan their own migration (and related activities), learn to deal with its challenges and restructure their life accordingly (Squire, 2017; Triandafyllidou, 2018). The agency of migrants invariably intersects with their lifestyle choices, and the agency specifically of labor migrants always crosses the road with the logistics of their transnational work (ibid). In other words, the work of migrant agency includes making decisions on where and how you would like to migrate and also on how you would like to live and work after you migrate.

Given that migrations and transnational lifestyles are largely enabled by social relations (Portes, 1995), the work of migrant agency must include thoughts and plans about network-building, with attention to such agentic activities as searching for new social ties and rekindling old contacts and dealing with network requirements (Triandafyllidou, 2018). Scholars recognize the nexus, or interconnectivity, between migrant agency and migrant network: migrants make changes to their lives that intersect with the network dynamics (Gulati & Srivastava, 2014; Lubbers et al., 2020). Networks can indeed influence migrants’ choices and vice versa: migrants, in their turn, can challenge and even reshape network rules too (ibid). It is important to remember that these overlapping processes take place within a specific transnational spatiality (Guarnizo, 1997; Faist, 2014; Lubbers et al., 2020). Largely shaped by geopolitical relations, migrants’ transnational social spaces—as well as their agency and networks—invariably bear imprints of regional and world geopolitics (Barrett & Vershinina, 2017; Welter et al., 2017; Ahl & Marlow, 2021).

It has been also acknowledged that skilled labor migrants’ networks are structurally more complex (if compared with other migrant groups) because they interfere with their professional networks: in this case, the list of migrant network players includes people affiliated to migrant’s work, namely: employers, colleagues, former teachers, mentors, career advisors and workforce recruitment agents (Vertovec, 2002; Krissman, 2005; Sandoz, 2019). They may act together with other network actors such as family members, friends, local people, etc.—or independently from them (ibid). They can support the migrant’s transnational life and career either overtly by, for example, hiring him/her across borders or covertly by facilitating or obstructing his/her employment at destination. Therefore, the network of labor migrants encompasses the spatial segment of their employment that interweaves with the spatiality of their migration. Their migrant agency, consequently, involves identification of all these diverse actors and activization of ties with them.

Amidst the scholarship on the ‘agency-network’ nexus, there are under-researched issues. One such is the functioning of an ‘elite migrant’ network, especially the dynamic of its power relations. Specifically, it is not well understood to what extent decisions and actions of elite migrants can be constrained by their transnational networks, and how such migrants manage to deal with their network requirements.

This book explores, from the interpretive biographic perspective, the spatiality of elite migrant-artists’ transnational work, or their formation as a ‘global elite migrant’ class, with the purpose to understand the dynamics of their migrant agency and the power relations within their globally transnational networks. The main research question that directs this study is: To what extent are elite migrant-artists able to act as independent agents of their own life when dealing with the requirements of their global yet geopolitically situated networks?

To answer this, I further ask three interconnected questions:

  1. 1.

    How has their migrant agency developed in its intersections with their work? (In other words, how has it happened that they have become elite migrant-artists?)

  2. 2.

    How and with what consequences for their life and work do they build networking relations and sustain the requirements of their transnational networks?

  3. 3.

    To what extent do their migrant agency and network-building interfere with geopolitics?

1.4 The Case and the Method

Seeking the answers to these questions, I interviewed 60 opera singers from the former Soviet bloc who lived in Italy and also rotated throughout the globe in their transnational employment. These sixty opera singers are from the former Soviet republics, which after the Soviet collapse in 1991 became the Newly Independent States. Lasting for two-four hours, the interviews were conducted by me mainly in 2015–2020. At the moment of the interview, the informants were working or finishing their studies in Italy, while also circulating between Italy and other countries.

The selected seven republics have been known for supreme quality of operatic education and training (Frolova-Walker, 2006, 2016). This sending region is also associated with a new corridor of operatic migration and dynamic geopolitics affecting the global opera industry. From 1917 to the Soviet collapse, Soviet opera singers were excluded from global migrations, like the majority of artists living under the communist rule (ibid). The operatic career was viewed as elitist but far from transnationally mobile, thus resonating with the notion of the well-seated national elite (Shlapentokh, 2016). Mass post-Soviet migrations of opera singers only started in the early 2000s, with the advent of the global opera producer and conductor Valeriy Gergiev from St Petersburg (former Leningrad) and the consequent rising popularity of his co-national student and intern—the first post-Soviet Russian diva Anna Netrebko (Cygankvao, 2016).

The Italian context has been chosen because Italy is a historical cradle of the global operatic industry and migration of opera singers. It is also a top EU destination for artistic migration, making 30% of all migrant-artists in the EU (EUROSTAT, 2020). Among them, there is a rapidly increasing flow of opera singers from the post-communist bloc (Operabase, 2023).

These post-Soviet artists have been chosen by me as the archetype, or the emblematic case, of global elite migrations and transnational elite professionalism. As I explain in the next chapter, they embody all features of elite professionalism that can be found in other elite migrant groups such as body work, stage performance, vivid sensual/intellectual imaginary and visibility. At the same time, they also possess such rare skills as multilingualism and professional singing of the highest level—the specific human capital of their own that may not be found in other groups of global elite migrants. Borrowing their sensual appeal and a number of expressive techniques from pop art, they do not only create new hybrid forms of global art but primarily represent the artistic domain positioned at the very top of the ‘highs arts’ hierarchy.Footnote 3

Apart from that, their East-West mobility is associated with a unique corridor of global elite migrations from Eastern Europe. This is true that there have been many studies on the mobility of elite professionals of varied directionality. Many of them address the world migration of western elites, for example, the intra-EU mobility of transnational business executives (Favell, 2008) or the global mobility of US foreign news correspondents (Hannerz, 1996) in the milieu of the post-1980 globalization; the transatlantic migration of European and American artists in the earlier centuries (Wagner et al., 2017); and even the West-East mobility of European and American elite architects and engineers to the Soviet Union in the 1920s (Talesnik, 2018). There is also an increasing volume of studies that specifically look into the migration of elite professionals from the Global South that took place during various time shifts, including a most recent movement of African missionaries (Hanciles, 2013) and Chinese table-tennis players and elite coaches to Europe (Lenartowicz & Ciok, 2021) and the twentieth century’s relocation of Latin American filmmakers to the USA (Albrethsen, 2015).

Amidst all these literatures, there has been no sociological study on the western migration experiences of opera singers from the former Soviet Union, which is not merely a geographical region but an important center in the global music industry and transnational elite networking. The case of opera singers from the former Soviet republics does not only add empirical data to the above-noted growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on elites and their mobility. This case points to the under-studied migration corridor that is specific for the (post-Soviet) global elite migrations and leads to see a specific geopolitical context around this under-researched phenomenon. In fact, no previous study has made an effort to critically analyze the post-Soviet elite migrant-artists as a distinct social group.

To enable an in-depth exploratory study of this under-researched group, I use the interpretive-biographic method. This method is often applied to exploratory studies (which seek to generate new empirical data and new theories) and to in-depth studies of social processes such as professional dynamics or human relations (Creswell, 2013). This method allows to see the informants’ individual and collective experiences and perceptions of migration, networking and career building from a dynamic and interactive perspective (Triandafyllidou et al., 2022). With its close attention to turning points, epiphanies (ibid; Denzin, 1989) and biographic re-composition such as ‘thematic biography’ (ibid; Creswell, 2013), the interpretive analysis of my biographic data leads toward an interpretive critical theory about elite migrant-artists’ constrained agency. As part of the overall interpretive critical analysis (ibid), my findings are connected to and interpreted through existing theories of migrant agency and networking, globalization of art, and post-Soviet geopolitics—as well as comparatively examined against each other.

For the purposes of confidentiality, my informants are referred under fictitious names and none of the details of their work, education or specific geographical affiliation that can identify them in any way is mentioned in this book. To protect their identities, none of the people I have interviewed appears in the text under their real name.

Nor am I using any data from private social media or any closed-access social media group. If I make a reference to a famous celebrity person [e.g.: Anna Netrebko, Dmitry Khvorostovskii, Hibla Gerzmava, Nino Machaidze, Maria Mudryak, etc.], this information has been obtained by me from open access sources, which are available to general public.

1.5 Toward the New Ways of Thinking

Globally, there has been a stereotypical thinking about the life of an elite migrant artist as de facto enjoyable and unproblematic. The media presentations of the diva Anna Netrebko and other migrating women-singers create the superficial visibility of an easily made elite career in global opera, with quick access to highly desired networks of fate and lucky chance. In fact, the global media presented Netrebko as a ‘provincial Cinderella’, determined to conquer the culturally renovated St Petersburg – a leading global opera center of the New Millenium. Cleaning the floors in the famous Mariinka Theater as a parttime job while mastering the art of singing, she catches the eye of the world famous orchestra conductor and the rising global opera patron Valeriy Gergiev, who immediately appreciates her talent and gives her the green light to the elite vocal training program, followed by her starry success at the Salzburg Festival ten years later. This narrative mimics the legendary Soviet ‘Cinderella’ movie of the 1930s, with Cinderella (played by the cult actress of that time Yanina Jaimo) singing at the Royal Ball and becoming noticed by both the king father and the prince.

A few years later (after 2015), the global community of opera lovers witnesses a competing and even more dramatic media story of the post-Soviet ‘refugee Cinderella’ from the conflict afflicted Caucasus, who lives in extreme poverty and precarity, comes up to Moscow, where she is trafficked as irregular migrant but miraculously escapes and becomes a global opera star. Her social transformation from refugee to diva makes the opera fandom accept the myth about the emancipatory power of this career twist. The success story is further added by the biography of a ‘prodigy child’ which shows the high-flying ascendance of a little girl from Kazakhstan to the heart of the global opera industry in Milan. Such media portrayals of elite migrant-artists discursively link the life of an international opera singer with the breathtaking style of cosmopolitanism and travels. It is true that before (post) Soviet people could not even imagine such an economic and lifestyle potential of this life choice.

To be honest, the path of an international opera singer was always historically perceived by the public as easy-going and free from fatigue. This is illuminated by the home towners of the young Enrico Caruso and Lucciano Pavarotti mocking at how those divos-in-the-making could engage in such a trivial occupation. It is the New Millennium digitalization of our society that has shown to everyone that being an opera singer can even become a source of gainful employment worldwide. Especially for those young people who have been dreaming about experiencing the world through global migrations, this line of thinking has created a strong stimulus for a change. Even the geopolitical situatedness of (post)authoritarian opera now speaks in favor of this positive assumption.

In fact, the 1930–1950s ‘great terror’ years of Joseph Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria sexually harassing and assaulting women singers have gone and what post-Soviet people can now see is the continuous support of high arts by the Castro dynasty in the communist Cuba since the 1950s and the promotion of opera by the Russian government in the New Millennium. This is added by the overabundance of training programs for ambitious international opera singers worldwide and their global media coverage.

While migration of opera singers from the post-Soviet bloc has been associated with social prestige and luxurious lifestyle, there are invisible indicators of possible precarity around this phenomenon, including complexity of global opera networks and migrant-artists’ vulnerability. This includes the presence of old Soviet geopolitical actors who have significantly contributed to the creation of global opera the way it is and who may have leverage in its networks.

Apart from that, the process of hiring and promoting opera singers across the globe has been always accomplished through the services of theatrical agents and brokers, which is a relatively new practice for the former Soviet republics, initiated in the 2000s. The overall invisibility and underutilization of official brokerage in the region are contributed by the public unawareness of its logistics. Priorly, the majority of recruitment practices in the Soviet Union and the early post-Soviet space of the “chaotic, wild 1990s” were conducted through informal and highly corrupt networks, which are still firmly in place as a bespoken part of local and national culture. Across the post-Soviet space, the habitual Soviet ‘economy of favors’ interweaves with the less familiar venues of civilized western brokerage, creating complex network rules for aspiring artists.

Yet these ‘precarity alert’ signs remain outside public imagination, which is mostly shaped by the vibrant imagery around global elite migrations in opera, while there have been no studies to explain the dynamic of this phenomenon. At the same time, the research of Akifeva et al. (2024) on Russian migrants to Australia and Spain recognizes that, while trained at origin as professional artists, some of them remain unemployed at destination and work as community volunteers.

Thinking about such controversies, I would like to ask to what extent opera singers from the post-Soviet bloc who become elite migrants are free to make choices about their life and work. ‘What kind of problems can they possibly have?’, I frequently hear even from my colleagues who are established migration scholars, ‘They are not like impoverished asylum seekers: they have everything one can wish for’.

As a surprise, my book dismantles this conventional wisdom by showing that elite migrant opera singers are, in fact, extremely oppressed by their transnational networks and that their migrant agency is fully constrained by various—more powerful—network actors. Their every professional and lifestyle choice is dictated by the network, and the most difficult challenge for them is not to get membership in an elite network but to be able to exit it in a timely manner, which is impossible in many cases. In other words, they live as if in a relational ‘black hole’ and feel extremely exhausted, or ‘stretched from various directions’, in their effort to survive through this pertinent, almost lifetime, existential condition. I must further admit that my colleagues were wrong even about the assumed unproblematic uniqueness of these people: in their attempts to match the network requirements, these elite artists do resemble asylum seekers and other—less skilled—migrant types, from whom they borrow their agentic tools and networking strategies to conquer the networking space of the global elite opera. Their visibly glamourous and unproblematic mobility is neither cosmopolitan nor privileged (or fully enjoyable) but network-dictated and structured along intricate yet quite pragmatic patterns of post-migration survival.

What makes the book especially timely is its focus on people who carry the Soviet cultural capital such as Great Russian Opera, which has survived the communist rule and has remained, for centuries, the second leading operatic tradition in the world after the Italian opera school. The interest in Soviet and Russian cultural values and heritage was given a new impetus by the 100th anniversary of the Soviet space in 2022. This is added by the current geopolitical context of the post-2022 events on the Ukrainian front, within which western mass media are now increasingly presenting Russia and Soviet legacy in negative colours.

The book thus studies the life stories of an under-researched, politically eminent social group that shapes the global culture by introducing (Russian) opera to the masses and, confronts the global pandemic crisis and interferes with geopolitics.

The most interesting thing is that all former Soviet republics have been tightly connected to Russia in their (post)Soviet art politics, even despite its imperialist relationship with them and rapidly and unpredictably escalating post-Soviet nationalisms. In spite of all this, there has been always a rich cultural exchange in the realm of opera between Russia and its (former) Soviet and socialist “colonies”, which is a hidden yet robust feature of the instable post-Soviet space. This collaboration was especially intensified by the advent of the Russian conductor Valeriy Gergiev, who became one of the godfathers of the global opera of the New Millennium.

However, since February 2022, opera singers from the post-Soviet bloc have been suddenly re-positioned in-between the two conflicting existential conditions. Having built a large part of their human capital [e.g.: vocal/artistic technique, professional ethics and contacts] in Russia and having easily transferred it to their global employment, they are now facing the challenge of making unusual geopolitical alliances or choosing between their historical and personal ties with Russia and the geopolitical solidarity with the global opera industry. The book findings thus reflect on a complex architecture of belonging and of what Akifeva et al. (2023) call ‘unbelonging’—the spatiality that brings together the global, the (post)Soviet and the Russian as experienced and lived through by my informants.

Looking into these provocative lived experiences, the book uses the interpretive-biographic methodology, a powerful—yet significantly under-utilized—research approach. From the methodological point of view, the book offers a distinct sociological metaphor of ‘astrogation’, which can be used as a novel analytical framework to study global elite migrants in the future. Borrowing a number of heuristic devices from the scholarship of transnationalism, (post)Soviet space and astronomy, I illuminate in this book that the global elite migrants’ race for their celestial career (the work of their agency) resembles an intergalactic journey and that they themselves are akin to a spacecraft astrogating in the open space toward well-known or unknown zones where stars are expected to be created. While elite migrant networks (compared to celestial galaxies) that enable this journey can either turn the astrogating elite migrant into an international star or make him/her extremely vulnerable, with the outcome not always possible to predict at the start of their migration.

1.6 The Structure of the Book

The book has the following structure. Chapter 2 is mostly a theoretical chapter that presents the overview of the main theories underpinning my research. At the moment, there is limited knowledge about how the social group of global elite migrants should be understood, while scholars remain confused by existing rather ambivalent concepts such as ‘transnational elite class’, ‘elite mobility’, ‘privileged nationals’ and ‘freewheel movement’ in reference with skilled yet extremely diverse migrant populations. That is why, it is important that the book should open with the discussion of main theoretical concepts and heuristic devices that I further use to analyse my data. This mostly theoretical chapter systematises existing scholarship on global elite migrations and offers the first working definition of this phenomenon, also articulating its differences from other categories of transnationally skilled labour such as transnational elite and high-skill migrants. Borrowing theoretical resources from the competing schools of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism and also using examples from my own fieldwork, I illuminate the uniqueness of global elite migrants in the light of their such distinct features as mobility, permanence, migrant agency and networking. I explain how global elite migrants are positioned in-between the rhetoric of globalization and national resurgence and stress the importance of exploring their agency and networks. While noting various sub-groups within the ‘global elite migrant’ social group [e.g.: transnational athletes, artists and businessmen], the chapter argues that transnational opera singers are an iconic type in this migration stream and that their agency and networks should be explored more in-depth.

The argument that is raised in this chapter about global elite migrations as a new research area in social science 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. Therefore, the question that I ask in Chap. 3 is what would be the best way to study the formation of global elite migrants that would make their voices heard and their ‘splendor and miseries’ visible. Explaining the methodological background of my research, this chapter invites the reader to reconsider ways to think abouts this social group, given that they are both migrants and real people, with ambitions, moments of success but also fears and insecurity. Here in this chapter, I, therefore, introduce the method of interpretive biography, explaining its nuances and analytical procedures, and justifying its application to my case. The chapter opens with the introduction of my case, comprised of sixty informants who are opera singers from the former Soviet bloc and global elite migrants. I elaborate the methodological design of my study, giving information on the informants, on my access to them, on the procedures of their recruitment and on the dynamics of our rapport. Providing the justification for the application of this method, I argue in this chapter that the best tool for understanding migrants’ networks and agency is the story about their lived experience. I show the intrinsic links between this method and the concepts of ‘migrant agency’ and ‘migrant network’, which are central in this book. I explain my own quite complex ‘researcher’ positionality in this study and the procedures of gaining the informants’ trust, which helped me to enable their story-telling.

I also elaborate the specific techniques through which their provocative life stories are analysed—the interpretive-biographic techniques of ‘turning point-’ and ‘epiphany-’ analyses. I explain the importance of looking into the most critical moments in the lives of my informants (known in methodological literatures as ‘turning points’) and the lessons they have learned about themselves from these experiences, or their ‘mini-theories’ about their own life (known as ‘epiphanies’) (Denzin, 1989; Isaakyan et al., 2022). These lessons refer to the work of their migrant agency and their network membership. To give my findings more analytical rigor and to explore the lived experiences of my informants more in-depth, I use my sociological imagination and apply the sociological metaphor of ‘astrogation’, which is introduced in the last section of this chapter. I compare their agency with the process of ‘astrogation’ and their complex networks with ‘celestial galaxies’ that they will be conquering in the next chapters of this book.

To introduce the reader to the reality of transnational opera career as an unexploited terra of socio-anthropological knowledge and an area with which broader sociological audiences may not be familiar, Chap. 4 continues the interpretive sociological line of thinking that was initiated in the previous chapter. In Chap. 4, I elaborate nuances of the metaphorical imagination underpinning my research. Through my interview data and theoretical resources borrowed from the academic areas of migrant agency and astronomy, I compare the work of agency of global elite migrants with a cosmic navigation, or ‘astrogation’. I sociologically imagine the career of international opera singer, who is the archetype of global elite migrant, as the life cycle of a celestial body (to further explore in the following chapter how the agency-network nexus may develop during each phase of this cycle). I elaborate the main components of the suggested interpretive-metaphorical framework of ‘astrogation’, namely: ‘galaxy’, ‘stellar nursery’, ‘black hole’ and ‘star formation’ (the ‘galaxy’ metaphor signifying the ‘elite migrant network’).

Starting with the natal point in the formation of my informants’ almost simultaneous interests in the operatic career and international migration, this chapter illuminates through what stages their migrant agency, or decision-making on migration and networking, was shaping in its interactions with their (transnational) work. To illuminate the ontogenesis of their migrant agency and, consequently of their formation as global elite migrants in the making, I explore in this chapter how they were envisioning and preparing for their future work and migration with the purpose to become a ‘star’ and not yet knowing whether they would shine or fell down from the global opera sky.

The chapter aims to provide a brief overview of the spatiality of the global opera industry in its relation to migrant agency and its work through the career life cycle of my informants on their way toward the global elite migration. Further borrowing heuristic devices from astronomy, I also argue in this chapter that the race for global elite career, which underpins and structures elite migrant agency, resembles an intergalactic journey and that migrant agency is akin to the spacecraft navigated in the open space (or astrogated, as astronomers would say) toward well-known or unknown zones (networks) where stars are expected to be created and sustained. While these elite migrant networks, which enable or disable this journey can either trap the astrogating elite migrant in their black holes or turn him/her into an international star, with the outcome not always possible to predict at the beginning of migration. These metaphorical devices will be used throughout the book to enable the further analysis of my findings.

Chapter 5 situates my informants at the point of their current employment, where they are positioned now, and starts the discussion about their transnational work. Looking specifically into such an important requirement of global elite networks as global mobility that goes hand in hand with short-term employment, this chapter examines the informants’ agentic strategies to deal with this network obligation and thus to reconcile themselves with what the network expects. Thinking about the challenges of this agentic dilemma for the informants, the chapter notes that ordinary people often measure career success with permanent contracts and long-term residence, refusing to believe in the wellbeing of global elite migrants. The chapter further argues that, in spite of all stereotypes, more and more aspiring opera singers persistently dream about this kind of ‘insecure’ career and audaciously leave their habitual places for temporary jobs scattered all around the world. Here I explore the rootedness of global elite migrations and elite artistic careers in both mobility and temporariness as one of the most paradoxical features operatic migrations. I illuminate that these existential conditions are not always associated with risk and uncertainty but with elite status in the first place. Globally migrating opera singers who live and work in such conditions proudly believe that they have excellent careers and call themselves the ‘in-career professionals’.

This paradox further points to the triangular relationship between (1) geographical mobility, (2) temporariness of employment and legal status, and (3) permanence of overall lifestyle (in terms of attachment to a specific place where migrants can build a new home). Being mobile, temporary yet permanent is the existential triangle underpinning the overall logistics of global elite migrations and transnational operatic career. Exploring the phenomenon of ‘being in global operatic career’, this chapter looks into the main employment conditions (as set by global elite networks) that frame global elite migrations as a distinct ‘migrant labor’ category. Namely, it highlights the role of theater tiers and short-term employment contracts, and the way they may shape migrating singers’ employment trajectories and social status through the intersecting principles of temporariness, mobility and permanence. To begin with, the chapter introduces the concept of ‘temporariness management’ and offers a taxonomy of global opera houses and employment contracts for opera singers. Represented by influential network actors, these institutions of power make a significant segment within the spatiality of networking. By examining the informants’ employment offer packages, I further look into where in the global operatic industry my most ‘career successful’ informants are now placed. I then illuminate how they approach their temporariness and convert it into a desirable mode of transnational elitist employment.

Chapter 6 illuminates that at the center of my informants’ professionalism and transnational decision-making and networking is the power of their ‘homeland gravity’, which is often discussed in migration studies in reference with the person’s attachment to the place of origin or upbringing and the way it is negotiated before, after and/or throughout migration. In this chapter, I explore how the homeland gravity may be experienced by my informants, who have actually become the migrants. The chapter opens with an overview of how their ambitions and migratory decisions were influenced by and grounded in the history of opera with attention to the establishment of national operatic schools such as the Soviet opera enterprise.

To illuminate the historical connection between operatic networks and geopolitics, I refer to the most famous and nationally symbolic Soviet conservatories that continue to attract people like my informants even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus to remain quite robust network actors. The chapter shows that the Soviet legacy can be now found everywhere within the post-Soviet opera space, which fosters internal migrations of global elite migrants, their transnational activities and the transnational reshaping of their networks. This fluid and multifaceted space has become the natal point in the networking of my informants and a key element in the geopolitically shifting patterns of their transnational employment.

The center of gravity, whose power my informants continuously perceive throughout their transnational work, is connected to what scholars of migration studies conceptualize as ‘return’, ‘home visits’ and ‘home transnationalism’. The chapter shows the complexities of such trajectories and the portability (polymorphism) of the informants ‘home’, looking into such its spaces as home town, country of origin and the former Soviet region as the portable and interactive natal points in the transnational spatiality of my informants’ networking. The chapter scrutinizes the informants’ relationship with the former Soviet bloc and the legacy of Soviet opera, from which they borrow their resources for professionalism and transnational networking.

The chapter also argues that their ‘home visit’ trajectories are, however, subjected to political pressures and, therefore, open-ended; which, in its turn, makes the overall networking process unfinished too. These home visits are not always desired by the informants. The undesired non-intentional gravitation may take place when the opera singer is faced with the network obligation for forceful return, which may be the case for opera migrants some Middle Asian republics. The gravitation of their transnationalism thus connects to the geopolitics of their countries of origin. It can be also responsive to various crisis situations in the (post)pandemic milieu. The chapter briefly discusses how their transnational work and the center of homeland gravity have become affected by the post-2022 geopolitics, and how their migrant agency responds to this re-routing, which is imposed by their transnational networks.

Sustaining the network pressure and dealing with it on a daily as is the most pivotal question in migration studies, which becomes especially acute in relation to transnational artists like my informants. Chapter 7 studies the dynamics of global elite migrants’ networks, namely, such aspects of the ‘agency-network’ nexus as the ‘access-exit’ dichotomy and the contrast between the most desired and the most undesired segments of elite network. I look into the most challenging experiences that my informants had while navigating their 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 networking problems and associated coping strategies. To understand how the informants were confronting the challenges of networking, I start with an overview of literatures on migrant networks. This allows me to highlight their main features such as brokerage and other relations that migrants in general and my informants in particular have had with their networks. A close attention is paid to the concept of ‘astrogation’ in reference to the networking of global elite migrants such as my informants.

The analysis of the chapter findings illuminates the work of the informants’ migrant agency in relation to the most desired and undesired networking spaces they respectively sought to enter and to exit, which are conceptualized in astronomy as ‘white holes’ and ‘black holes’ respectively. The discussion proceeds to strategies of astrogation that my informants applied to secure their access to or exit from such places. In this connection, I explore the role of sexuality as a factor affecting their astrogation and elaborate such networking mechanism as ‘sexuality navigation’, while also spotting gender differences in my informants’ experiences of dealing with their elite migrant networks.

Chapter 8 argues that integration into a local community becomes the main resource impacting the informants’ astrogation and networking. It is the main resource that their migrant agency should use. However, it does not do it to the fullest. I show such different yet overlapping domains of their integration as: their professional integration, everyday integration, fandom integration and re-integration. Their professional integration relates to their communication with and acceptance by their professional musicians’ communities at destination as well as negotiation of their transnational employment. They everyday integration refers to their roles as spouses, parents, neighbors and friends within their local communities in Italy. Their fandom integration is a specific space of integration that shows how they develop their public intimacy with their fans all around the world. And their re-integration means their integration into their back-home communities during their home visits. While thinking about their integration, I stress their connection with national identity and impact of political structures upon their integration. On the one hand, integration resources that they can find in local communities are among the most powerful tools for securing professional network membership. For example, I show how they can use these resources to build/restore their professional networking and to build alternative careers beyond opera and how the use of these resources relates to the different phases of their ‘celestial’ careers, which were described in Chap. 4. Although these resources remain the most under-utilized. On the other hand, structures of power such as new international relations (or shifting geopolitics), racial and sexist prejudice back home, and various socio-cultural biases at destination significantly impact upon all four types of integration and cause their national identity crisis. The analysis conducted in this chapter captures the informants as weakly integrated: what they do to adjust to their local communities is only the tip of the iceberg, while the majority of integration issues remain unresolved and adversely impact upon their careers.

Chapter 9 (which is the final chapter in this book) summarizes the main findings in relation to elite migrant-artists’ networking and work of agency, the relationship between their agency, networking and integration, and their vulnerability as migrants, elite professionals and ordinary people.