To hear more audio stories from publications such as The New York Times, Download Audm for iPhone or Android.
ULM, Germany — It was his most important performance in 29 years. There were no costumes, no stage, no orchestra pit. Instead, one pianist crouched in anticipation of her instrument. For the audience, a handful of doctors and nurses watched from a cool white hospital lobby.
Sergiy Ivanchuk — with bandages on his face and trembling legs under his pants — began to speak hesitantly. But as his deep baritone was retained, his confidence grew. By the time he finished singing the Ukrainian folk song, his song soared with the passion of a man resurrected from the dead, enjoying his regenerated voice.
“For three months I thought I was going to die,” he told the assembled crowd. “And now I can sing again.”
Not long ago, Ivanchuk believed he was on his deathbed, his lungs punctured by bullets and his body stuck in a tangle of tubes.
On March 10, aspiring opera singer Ivanchuk was shot dead by Russian forces while working with humanitarian volunteers helping civilians flee the besieged Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
I remember thinking that even if I survived somehow, the era of singing would surely be over.
But a series of chance encounters, a devoted doctor, and a mother’s love all led to an unexpected performance in a German military hospital this summer, when Mr. Ivanchuk turned tragedy into a longtime dream of being an opera star. I got the chance to turn the dam into an opportunity to save it. .
“So many different situations had to happen,” said Ivanchuk, who suspected that science and his own psyche were the only factors in his recovery. “There is something there. God or an angel saved me. There is something there.”
In 2020, while studying opera in Italy, Ivanchuk had big ambitions to perform at the Metropolitan Theater in New York and La Scala in Milan.
Then the pandemic closed borders around the world. His music school was closed and Mr. Ivanchuk was stranded in Ukraine, suffering from severe depression.
Two years later, when the world began to reopen, Russia invaded and Ivanchuk found himself trapped in Ukraine once again. Men of fighting age were forbidden to leave the country.
His dreams were fading fast — an opera singer should finish his training by his early 30s. No one could predict when the war would end.
However, like many of his compatriots, Mr. Ivanchuk wanted to join the battle. Rather than being on the front lines, “that doesn’t help,” he joked, he used his 30-year-old blue Lada sedan to fly to a combat-ridden area in eastern Ukraine, hours away from his location. expelled civilians from the city of Kharkov. His hometown, Poltava, where he grew up in a musical family.
It was a harsh daily life. Every morning at 6 o’clock he would drive to Kharkiv, loading medicine and food for those still inside. Every night he picked up residents fleeing the siege. They couldn’t afford a taxi. He started again after sleeping at home with his parents for a few hours.
His mother, Olena Ivanchuk, waited for his return every night in quiet agony. But on the morning of March 10, his mother had to speak. As she dusted herself off, she noticed that all of her family’s religious icons had fallen off the table.
“He frowned when I told him,” she said. She “told him for the first time in her life, ‘Son, I’m afraid you won’t come back this time.'”
Anyway he left for Kharkov.
That night, Ivanchuk and the passengers packed Lada with suitcases and pets. It was pitch black when they left town. In the darkness, a bullet suddenly passed by.
In a frightening game of cat-and-mouse, Mr. Ivanchuk sprinted to the protection of a Ukrainian military checkpoint. However, the Russian army soon found its traces. 30 bullets hit the car. Five people attacked Mr. Ivanchuk.
“I felt all the bullets. First they hit one leg, then another. Then I saw my fingers destroyed,” he said. I felt bullets in my side and back.”
There were four people and two cats in the car. But only Ivanchuk was shot.
He probably wouldn’t have survived if it wasn’t for one of his passengers, the doctor Victoria Fostrina. It rolled up and prevented the collapse of the lungs.
“At first, I saved them,” he said. “But in the end they saved me.”
Somehow, he managed to drive the car to a Ukrainian military checkpoint before he collapsed.
The war started three weeks ago. Ivanchuk has already rescued 100 people. Afterwards, feeling that he lost consciousness in the hospital, he prayed to God and prepared to die.
“I thought, ‘You’re only 29 and you’re about to die,'” he said, recalling his thoughts. “‘I could have lived longer. But I tried to help people, so that might be a good thing.'”
After looking for Mr. Ivanchuk for almost two days, his mother found him in a Kharkov hospital. She held back tears and smiled into her unconscious son’s room.
“I said, ‘Son, open your eyes.’ I said to him: ‘One hundred percent, you will survive. You will survive. I did.”
Ivanchuk remembers smiling when he woke up. But he couldn’t speak. A tube was coming out of his mouth. His body was in pain and he could communicate with just the twist of his one finger.
Ivanchuk remembered her son crying from the pain of the initial surgery. Later, his tears came from his realization that he might never perform again.
But fate intervened again.
Ivanchuk’s story went viral on social media, and a prominent Ukrainian opera singer recommended surgery to the country’s talented surgeons. His lungs and liver began to heal.
His recovery has begun, but a dark battle still lies ahead, and he almost loses.
For weeks he lay among the shell-shocked young soldiers. They sometimes jumped out of bed at night, threw imaginary grenades, and yelled at their comrades to hide.
Mr. Ivanchuk became paranoid about Russian spies lurking behind every door. And he grappled with the idea that saving people had cost him his dreams.
“It was a marathon of pain and psychological distress,” he said.
He faced these thoughts thanks to what he learned from his past struggles with depression. His psychotherapy during the pandemic taught him to see his thoughts as brain chemistry rather than his inner self. And he began to accept that faith alone could not heal him.
With his goal locked in his hospital room, Ivanchuk and his mother celebrated each small step toward recovery. Living his day-to-day life and forgetting his great ambitions, he is surprised to find himself happier than before the attack.
“I thought I couldn’t be happy without my dreams. But now I know that happiness is just living.”
Once stable enough to travel, Mr. Ivanchuk was sent to Ulm, Germany, for advanced surgery at a German military hospital.
As a musician, he wanted to restore as much dexterity as possible to his amputated finger. Since childhood, he played the bandura, a Ukrainian stringed instrument.
He didn’t think about opera until one evening during his third week in Ulm, when he started singing in the shower. He chose Valentin’s aria from “Faust” and was surprised to hear his old voice.
Ivanchuk soon realized that not only was his dream still possible, but with a completely unexpected twist on a nearly fatal injury, he was well placed to pursue it. rice field.
If not for the attack, he would have remained in Ukraine. Moreover, he landed in Germany, the best place in the world for budding opera singers. Thanks to subsidies for the arts, there are over 80 of his full-time opera houses in Germany.
By late June, he was well enough to perform for hospital staff.
First, he sang “Ave Maria” for its spirituality. Then an aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute honoring his German caretaker. The third song is Ukrainian and is “My Own Mother”, a tribute to the woman who dedicated his survival.
She cried when he started to speak. “I never thought he could sing that loud,” she said. “It’s because he put his heart into it.”
He was discharged that night.
“He was very positive and didn’t complain about his situation at all,” Benedikt Friemert, M.D., the hospital’s chief orthopedic surgeon, described the patient’s recovery. “It’s quite the opposite. He was sure he did the right thing. He was unlucky and got hurt, but he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get better so I can do what’s important to me.’ I mean, sing. “
With a slight limp, missing fingers and body littered with bullet fragments, Ivanchuk still faces a difficult road ahead. He has even more physical therapy.
He now rents an apartment in Ulm with his mother and has started taking lessons from Ukrainian opera singer Marina Zubko. local theaterOne day they hope to sing together there.
“He has a beautiful voice,” she said, when she first met her student after a performance in her hometown when a heavily bandaged man threw flowers at her feet.
All she wants is for Ivanchuk to spend a year recovering with her help and use his talent and story to complete his training in a prestigious program in Europe or the United States.
He dreams of the Met and La Scala again. “I think in five years he will be able to stand on that stage,” Ivanchuk said. “As long as no one shoots me”