A Belarusian opera singer who almost lost it all for publicly opposing his nation's authoritarian leader is rebuilding his life in the U.S. Ilya Silchukou lives in suburban Boston with his wife and three children and teaches music to middle school students while he tries to revive his singing career.
Opera singer Ilya Silchukou sits for a photograph at a park in a suburb of Boston, Tuesday, Oct. 4, 2022. Silchukou was a cultural icon in his native Belarus, the lead soloist at the State Opera Bolshoi who represented his nation at official government functions at home and abroad and performed at opera houses all over Europe.
When Lukashenko won a sixth term in office in 2020 in an election regarded by his opposition and the West as fraudulent, Silchukou joined Still, it wasn't until March 2021 when the police came after his wife, Tanya, and accused her of defrauding the nation's state-sponsored child support system and threatened her with two years in jail that he knew he had to get out. He took it as a thinly-veiled threat to break up their family.
The school has many students of Eastern European descent whose families have similar stories of fleeing oppression. For both, he put together a retrospective of some of his personal favorite pieces spanning his career from his first singing lessons to his time at the national opera, including “Papageno" from “The Magic Flute" and “Cavatina Figaro" from the “The Barber of Seville." He capped off the shows with what he called the “jewel of the concert,” a duet with his mezzo-soprano wife.
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