Oleg Bryjak, 54, German opera singer of Ukrainian origin, was among 150 victims of Airbus A320 crash on March 24. He and his duo partner Maria Rader were returning after performing in Barcelona.
The Germanwings plane has crashed in southern
France on its way from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. None of the 144 passengers and six crew members survived.
Opera Theater in Dusseldorf
was the first to announce the singer’s death.
“We have lost a great performer and a great
person in Oleg Bryjak. We are stricken,” Christoph Meyer, director of the
Deutsche Oper am Rhein, said in a post on the theater’s Facebook page.
Bryjak is well-known in Germany as a performer of
Richard Wagner compositions. According to Bryjak’s website, his repertoire
included more than 30 operas. He has performed in Berlin,
Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Munich, Paris, Tokyo, Vienna and Zurich.
Oleg Bryjak sings in a German opera.
Bryjak’s father was a Ukrainian. In Soviet time he was sentenced to spend 25 years in the labor camp Gulag as political criminal. Bryjak was born in 1960, while his father was serving his time.
His father encouraged him to go to music school in Karaganda, Russia.
In 1987 Bryjak performed in a premiere showing of “Prince
Igor” (“Kniaz Ihor”) opera in Lviv Opera Theater. He had a bass voice, but
was retrained to bass-baritone, according to Yaroslav Zhuravel, the deputy head
of Lviv Opera Theater, who remembered Bryjak’s performance.
Zhuravel has recalled that after the Lviv premiere Bryjak spent several years in Lviv, performing in a church choir, but because of asmall salary he was forced to move abroad
in 1991. Five years later he joined the Dusseldorf Opera House.
Besides musician career, Bryjak was the first deacon
of Orthodox Church in German city Krefeld. He conducted
services in Ukrainian and German languages.
In August 2014, he was interviewed by German international
broadcaster Deutsche Welle, and spoke of his attitude to the war in the east
of Ukraine. It was breaking his heart, he said. But as an “international person” who grew up among different nationalities, he was finding it hard to separate Ukraine and
Russia, “because many Ukrainians live in Russia and vice versa.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuliana Romanyshyn can be reached at [email protected].
