The planners in charge of the BBC Proms are to be congratulated on possessing superb political foresight, or perhaps a great deal of luck. Either way, the BBC Proms has dodged this summer’s most explosive political-artistic bullet: whether to disinvite Venezuela’s famous (and government-financed) Il Sistema orchestras in protest against President Nicolás Maduro, who has declared himself the winner of the July presidential elections. Most observers argue the opposition candidate won. In a country whose most famous business today is music, every musician faces the dilemma of whether to renounce the autocratic ruler.

On 28 July, Venezuelans had their chance to decide their country’s fate. Based on exit polls, the opposition claim their candidate –  Edmundo González Urrutia –  won, and a number of Western countries also consider him the winner. But Maduro and his camp maintain, with scant evidence, that he’s the winner, and he’s determined to add to his eleven-year tenure as president.

What to do when a political candidate appears to have cheated the winner out of the victory? Venezuelans, including a few musicians, have taken to the streets to make their displeasure known. They’ve also done so outside the country, including in the United States, where the National Children’s Symphony of Venezuela is currently on tour. This phenomenal symphony orchestra is actually composed of children (the players are between ten and 17 years old), and it’s yet another remarkable outcome of Venezuela’s state-funded Il Sistema programme. The tour’s conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, similarly grew up in Il Sistema and is one of the world’s most celebrated maestri.

But during the US tour, Dudamel and the orchestra (and concert venues at which they’re playing) have faced protesters who argue that Dudamel and other Sistema musicians should speak out against the Maduro regime. ‘It’s morally unacceptable to continue offering preferential status, not to mention immunity from civic duty, to a privileged group within Venezuelan society, namely musicians,’ Gabriela Montero, a celebrated Venezuelan pianist, told me. ‘They and their families are subject to the same dire consequences of Maduro’s continued autocracy as any other professional class. What distinguishes Venezuelan musicians from other professionals is their continued presence on the world stage, which bestows upon them a responsibility to reveal the truth of the nation’s crisis to the international community, and not to conceal it through music’s hypnotic spell.’

So far, Dudamel, who is Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in addition to the Sistema’s flagship Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, and other leading Sistema musicians, have said little about the contested election. Indeed, for years, while Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez expanded their grip on power far beyond the confines of democratic rule, Dudamel declined to comment, arguing that he was simply a musician. But when, in 2017, Maduro’s government conducted a bloody crackdown of protesting Venezuelans that saw a violinist in an Il Sistema orchestra shot and killed, the celebrated maestro felt compelled to speak out. ‘It is time to listen to the people: Enough is enough,’ he said in a statement.

The government crackdown later subsided, but Maduro’s machinations to remain in power did not. Seven years later, Dudamel remains in his Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra post. As timing would have it, he’s conducting the National Children’s Symphony of Venezuela on its US tour during the very same days that Maduro is once again cheating democracy. Maduro’s victory claim has been roundly condemned by foreign governments, including Latin American ones. Only a few countries including Nicaragua, Cuba and Russia, have offered congratulations.

In Venezuela, Il Sistema continues to produce musical miracles while at the same time being funded by an unjust government. Dudamel and other Venezuelan musicians, indeed the whole Sistema, face the same dilemma as countless artists in autocracies and dictatorships: can you keep performing and keep silent about the ill-deeds of your government, or do you have the obligation to speak out? Wilhelm Furtwängler thought he could conduct and not concern himself with the actions of the Nazis.

But such an attitude is illusory, argues Montero, who has long been critical of Dudamel’s acquiescence. ‘There comes a time when we all must make the necessary sacrifices for the common good,’ she told me. ‘Musicians must fight alongside everyone else to reclaim democracy in Venezuela,’ she told me.

In his novel Mephisto, Klaus Mann chronicles the predicament of artists in the Third Reich. The protagonist, Hendrik Höfgen, rises to the heights of German theatre by making compromises with the authorities and by never speaking out. When, at last, he’s called out by the Nazis themselves, he exclaims: ‘But I’m just an actor!’