Turkey’s Kurdish opera singer inspires Kurds by singing in native tongue
Pervin Chakar, one of the few Kurdish opera singers to be awarded various international prizes, is inspiring her Kurdish peers who want to establish a name for themselves in their mother tongue. Chakar, 39, is originally from Turkey’s southeastern province of Mardin, but she has been living in Baden-Baden, Germany, for the past four years, after spending 11 years in Perugia, Italy.
It was no easy choice for her to live thousands of miles away from her home country, where Kurdish identity, language, culture, and political activism are still criminalized.
Unsurprisingly, performing opera in Kurdish is still perceived as a revolutionary act in Turkey. Asked why she sings in Kurdish, Chakar responded that the greatest propaganda in the world is the use of one’s native language.
“The great German composer Johann Sebastian Bach said that wherever there is music, God is always at hand with his gracious presence. God is always with me. I feel really blessed when I give happiness to my audience through music,” she told Arab News.
Chakar released an opera album with the Bongiovanni record label in Italy, singing in Mysliveček’s “L’Olimpiade” as Megacle at the
Teatro Comunale in Bologna, Italy. She has two singles on digital platforms. One is the aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Handel’s opera “Rinaldo”; the other is the poem “Qimil,” written by assassinated Kurdish intellectual Musa Anter, composed by Chakar and played by harpist Tara Jaff to celebrate Anter’s 100th birthday.
Last year, Chakar was in Turkey for the 150th anniversary of the birth of Armenian composer Komitas Vartabed, for which she performed Armenian and Kurdish folk songs by Komitas at the Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall in Istanbul and in the southeastern province of Diyarbakir. Chakar began singing opera when she was 21 years old. She learned to play the cello at the Diyarbakir Fine Arts High School. She explained how building a career in opera is partly owing to chance. “I was singing folk songs when I was 14. I didn’t know anything about opera. I wrote some novels, and I won competitions in Turkey during my studies at the Anatolian High School of Fine Arts,” she said. “The competition committee in Ankara then organized a party where I sang the love song by Ludwig van Beethoven, ‘Ich liebe dich.’ The president of the writing competition was impressed by my voice and gave me a CD of Maria Callas after my performance.”