Pervin Chakar (born Pervin Çakar, in Mardin, 1981) is a Kurdish opera singer from Turkey. Having been trained as a singer in Turkey and Italy, she currently resides in Germany.
Chakar was born into a Kurdish family from Mardin, Turkey, in 1981 and attended the fine arts high school in Diyarbakır, where she also took cello lessons.[1] During her studies at the Anatolian High School, she took up writing and with one of her stories she participated in a competition in Ankara.[1] At the competitions party she was singing the song Ich Liebe Dich (I love you) by Ludwig van Beethoven, which has impressed one of the jurors to the extent he gave her a CD of the opera singer Maria Callas.[1] Listening to Callas inspired her to pursue a career as a soprano.[1] She graduated with a bachelor's degree from the Gazi University in Ankara in 2003,[2] becoming a singing teacher.[3] She decided to follow up on her studies in Italy in 2004[1] when an Italian opera manager invited her to enroll into the Conservatorio F. Morlacchi in Perugia[4] from where she graduated with a master's degree.[5]
During her eleven-year stay in Italy she performed for the first time at the Rosetum in Milan in 2006.[6] Later she sang as Rosina in The Barber of Seville, Titania in the A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare or Megacles in the L'Olympiade by Josef Mysliveček.[6] She has sung in several languages of the ancient Mesopotamia such as Armenian, Kurdish, Zazaki[4] and performed Kurdish folksongs from the Ottoman Armenian composer Komitas Vartabend for his 150th anniversary in the Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall in Istanbul.[7] Since 2016 she lives in Baden-Baden, Germany.[8]
She has only in 2011 decided to learn the Kurdish language, after having been confronted with news on the Roboski airstrike in which several Kurdish villagers were killed and mistaken for militants of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).[9] Onwards she learned songs from Kurdish singers and became a strong supporter of performing in the Kurdish language[9][10] also having composed a melody to the Kurdish poem Qimil by Musa Anter.[9][8]
In 2022, Çakar claimed that her concert at Mardin Artuklu University, which opened the first Kurdish course in Turkey,[11] was canceled because there were Kurdish songs in her repertoire.[12][13][14] A former lawmaker of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) Abdurrahman Kurt attempted to weigh with the University's rector, but was not able to change their mind.[12] The Turkish daily Yeni Safak claimed that the reason given for the cancellation was the fact that she wanted to go on a stage that was free of charge, while trying to sell tickets for a price.[15] Students that went to the 'Spring Festival' organized by the same university posted videos of artists singing in Kurdish, contradicting her claim.[15]
