One year after the petrifying outbreak of COVID-19 threatened “her safe arm” — how Kosovo soprano Arta Jashari refers to her father — she is now trying to make sense of the most hectic months of her life and a mission she had never expected to have to undertake.
Talking to Exit News, Jashari says that the pandemic has made people more appreciative of the small, yet essential dynamics that make up our lives.
“We went back to our human fundamentals, we started taking care of ourselves, be more responsible towards others, and realize you can save others by taking care of yourself,” she says.
In June 2020, Jashari’s father was infected with COVID-19. Her father already suffered from a slew of other health issues, and given that Kosovo—like most of the world—was completely unprepared to deal with the pandemic, the challenge seemed insurmountable to the family at first.
But Arta steeled herself and decided to take action. First, she took her mother to a safer place; secondly, she found herself a set of protective clothing and looked after her father every day, following all the steps suggested by doctors.
She recalls that the most important thing for her at the time was information, and talks about the many people, from all around the world, who offered her help in many ways.
“This is the most valuable thing in life when someone offers you help without even knowing you,” she says.
“That information was essential for my father’s health. Every minute was different, depending on information, connections, and the doctors’ help,” she adds.
After her father recovered, and after seeing the struggle from up close, she continued to help everyone who reached out to her. Sometimes she received around 300 messages per day from people who needed information.
But, six months into the pandemic, she lost someone very dear to her. The memory still brings her to tears.
“Axha Ismet”, as she called her first neighbor who, together with his wife, cooked healthy lunches from his garden every day for two months while her father was ill.
“I had no time to cook lunch. I knew it was very important to eat [well] when infected. Our neighbors, Hamide and her husband, Ismet, every day put a meal in a plastic bag and hanged it over our house’s fence,” she recalls, adding she still has some plates they gave to her and that now she will keep forever.
Six months after her father’s recovery, she received a distressed call from Hamide, telling her in a panic that her husband was sick. Despite all the doctors’ efforts, he lost the battle.
“Now, the situation was completely different from the time when my father was in the hospital. Doctors were tired. Uncle’s Ismet condition was far worse. My father did not need oxygen, while now I had to learn to do other things, starting from how to change the water of the oxygen pump,” she said.
All she could do was to try and find things to talk about with him that would make him feel better emotionally so the oxygen saturation could increase.
“I could see that when I talked about his son’s kids, the saturation went up, so I kept talking about them. Once it went from 67 to 88, only by talking about [his nephews],” she recalls.
The very first time he was able to use a phone again, he sent a message to Arta, which would also be the last one she ever received from him.
“You are Mother Teresa to me. You are the first person I am writing to, I feel a bit better and I have started eating,” reads the message. Now, she will cherish it forever.
She found it very emotionally draining, dealing with hospitals and infected people after losing Ismet, but she did not stop.
Arta’s commitment to helping others, including nurses, put Kosovo’s name in the spotlight, as her story was shared across major media outlets worldwide.
“The greatest gift for me was that, when the whole world needed to hear stories about humanity and care, they read ‘Kosovo’ in many serious worldwide media,” she says.
However, she does not agree that her dedication is seen as “heroic,” as many have described it.
“It is not a heroic act to take care of your parent, it is a duty. My dad had only me, and of course, I was there. I was told that they had never seen a braver daughter fighting for her parent’s life as I did,” she explains.
She finds all of this incredibly moving, as she has always wanted to represent her country in such a way, “as its people truly are.”
“Solidarity has historically been a characteristic of Kosovo Albanians, and now this fact is known through my story in the Washington Post and many others, including the Hindustan Times or in Brazilian media. I received an emotional message from Atlanta, telling me that the whole page of a physical copy of a newspaper had [my] story with Kosovo in its headline,” she says.
Coming from a place where classic music as a profession is a path unknown to the majority of people, the pandemic brought another special, albeit unexpected, gift for Arta.
“The traditional audience we have knows who I am and what I do, but a huge number of people who aren’t involved with classic music had not heard about me. And now, suddenly, I hear people in the street saying ‘oh that’s the soprano’. This is very important for me,” she says.
As all activities were canceled, Arta decided to use her professional training productively and creatively.
Using her language skills, as someone who speaks six languages, she translated several famous operas into Albanian and shared them on Wikipedia, including “Tosca”, “Carmen”, “Rigoletto”, “Anna Bolena.” She hopes students in the arts across Kosovo will be able to make good use of them.
Being a Soprano in Kosovo
Arta Jashari has a Bachelor’s degree in Singing from the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia where she transferred to from the University of Prishtina through a Basileus Erasmus Mundus scholarship program.
She also has a Masters’s degree in Opera and Performance from the University of Arts in Berlin, in Germany.
She came back from Berlin hoping to contribute to coming generations, however, Opera and Performance is not part of Kosovo’s curriculum yet.
“We do not have the institution of the Opera, nor even a proper hall where we could give our contribution based on the educations we have received,” she says.
The Kosovo Philharmonic, to which Arta belongs, performs mainly in the same hall where trade fairs take place. They also perform in churches or sometimes in hotels halls which are made for conferences.
“Despite all these difficulties, I am very proud of our traditional audience which keeps getting bigger and bigger,” Arta observes.
In fact, she is very proud of the audience of the Kosovo Philharmonic.
“I have seen audiences in Europe, many families who inherited opera culture, while in Kosovo there are many young people that come to our concerts because they are hungry for art,” she says.
Before every performance, Arta and her orchestra and choir colleagues have no space to be alone and concentrate on their performance, as there are no proper changing rooms in the spaces the Philharmonic uses for their concerts.
“It is always so hectic, but we are used to that,” she mentions, smiling.
“The very first time we had our own space when we performed was in Skopje. We had a table, a mirror, a proper corner for our dresses, a piano where we could do a final vocal check,” she recalls.
The fondest performance for Arta Jashari so far remains a concert with the Kosovo Philharmonic, held in 2019 in the main square of Kosovo’s capital under a Japanese conductor, Toshio Yanagisawa.
“It was my first concert after I returned to Kosovo. I had a very difficult solo and there were around 2,000 people who came for us. It was the best feeling I have ever had, to be part of a giant orchestra and choir with musicians from Albania who joined us, with a much-respected conductor, performing in front of the flag of my country,” she recalls, voice full of emotion.
She had her first recital concert on May 18, where many people she had met for the first during her “pandemic journey,” came out to support her.
If Kosovo established a proper Opera institution, according to Arta Jashari, all artists living abroad—who are “leading in the world of opera art”—would come back.
“I believe that we could have a very powerful [Opera],” she says, full of hope that something like that may happen soon.
