Lena Kovačević, What Remains After the Applause

Yet it is precisely by following this apparently simple declaration that the first interesting contradiction in her personality begins to emerge: those who become a source of light for others can eventually feel that they are no longer entitled to darkness of their own. Lena knows this. She admits that such generosity can become exhausting, and identifies her family as the place where she does not have to be “the elegant artist”, the strong, reassuring, composed woman. There, she can simply be. And it is significant that the idea she returns to in describing that freedom is one of safety: not being loved because she lights up a room, but being loved even when she has no light left to give.

Perhaps this is the most discreet key through which to read everything else. Lena does not seem to seek a life without shadows; rather, she appears to have learned very early not to regard darkness as a defeat. At twenty, she was living in Amsterdam and every Sunday would walk through the Red Light District on her way to the Orthodox church where she conducted the choir. One need only linger over that image for a moment to realise how much it already contains of the woman she would become: body and spirit, desire and prayer, human frailty and transcendence separated by only a few streets. She herself says that the experience taught her that the sacred and the fragile walk hand in hand. Faith, in Lena’s view, should not build walls against the imperfections of the world; it should teach us to look beyond the surface, even into what we call darkness, searching there for the human being and whatever light remains within them. There is something profoundly mature in that thought, because it neither excuses darkness nor romanticises it. It simply refuses to believe that a human being can ever be reduced entirely to their worst place. It is a faith that does not separate, but looks. And perhaps her music, too, begins with that way of seeing.

There is also, in her story, a door that might have opened onto another life. A Dutch government scholarship could have taken her to the Manhattan School of Music in New York. Instead, she returned to Belgrade to prepare for that next chapter, and during that summer both a musical project and the man who would become her husband entered her life. The trajectory changed. Asked about the lives we do not live, Lena does not try to erase them, and this may be one of the most honest things she says. We can be profoundly grateful for the life we have, she believes, and still remain curious about the doors that closed behind us. Curiosity about what we did not become does not diminish our love for what we are; it is simply proof that we are alive. It is a far more sophisticated understanding of choice than the one we usually employ to reassure ourselves. We tend to turn every happy decision into evidence that all the alternatives would have been wrong. Lena does not need to do that. She can love her life without condemning the young woman who, somewhere in her imagination, may have reached New York. Maturity may be exactly this: not having to kill our possible lives in order to remain faithful to the real one.

Then her mother enters her words, and something changes. The language becomes more essential, as it often does when pain has truly been lived through and no longer needs to be dramatised. Lena says that music became a refuge after her loss, but she does not make the mistake of attributing miraculous powers to it. Singing could suspend the pain for a few hours, perhaps postpone the moment when she would have to look at it directly, but grief — as she says with almost definitive simplicity — always claims its time. When the music stops, absence returns. And here lies one of the interview’s most intimate confessions: singing did not allow her to avoid the emptiness; it gave her enough strength to reach the moment when she would finally have to sit in the dark and miss her mother simply as a daughter.

An artist can transform pain into something beautiful and, for that very reason, risk transforming it before she has fully allowed herself to feel it. Sublimation, psychoanalysis would say, can save us while at the same time protecting us from the naked experience of loss. Lena seems to have crossed both shores: first the music that made grief bearable, then the silence that no longer allowed her to hide from it.

And yet her mother is not confined to the past. Lena finds her again while making coffee, in a joke, in that peculiar kind of optimism that appears when circumstances are at their bleakest. It is in those moments that she feels the boundary between them become less distinct. What she most hopes to retain from her mother is not a physical trait or a talent, but what she calls her stubborn love of life: a joy capable of surviving even the darkest hours. And perhaps this is where we begin to understand where at least part of the light Lena brings into a room comes from. It is not naive brightness, nor the cultivated image of a relentlessly positive artist. It may be an inheritance. A form of continuity that passes not through possessions, but through character.

There are people who, after death, gradually cease to exist only as memories and become gestures, reflexes, ways of meeting life. Lena seems to have transformed her mother’s absence into a presence that is less visible and perhaps more profound. In her answer, death can interrupt a life, but it cannot necessarily interrupt the movement of love from one generation to the next.

Loss also changed the way she looks at her father. Lena offers a sentence with the weight of things understood only after they have been paid for: losing a parent is the moment when you officially outgrow childhood. Since her mother’s death, her relationship with her father has become filled with a sharper tenderness and a new awareness of time. He remains an anchor, but grief has taught her how quickly an entire world can change. It may be one of the cruellest and most beautiful laws of adult love: we begin to understand the value of presence precisely when we stop assuming it is permanent. And this awareness of impermanence seems to run through the way Lena protects the family she has created. Her husband and children are deliberately kept away from much of the public gaze. Not because love should be hidden, but because she believes some things lose something when they are endlessly explained, photographed and offered up for consumption. “The most beautiful things in life,” she observes, are often those a camera cannot capture and an interview cannot explain. For her, there is a part of happiness that must remain without an audience, lived fully and silently within the territory of the heart. This is not merely privacy. It is almost a sacred understanding of intimacy. The sacred, after all, is not always what we display with the greatest solemnity; sometimes it is precisely what we choose to remove from the gaze of others.

The same hierarchy of values emerges when Lena speaks of her sons, Vuk and Teodor. If one day they were to forget the concerts, the albums and the professional achievements, she says she would be entirely at peace. What she would want them to remember instead is the sound of her laughter, the depth of her love for them and the certainty that they were the centre of her universe; above all, she would want them to carry with them the memory of a home that felt safe, warm and full of joy. Then, almost as if lowering her voice, she admits that every mother carries a quiet guilt. Hers concerns those moments when her mind was elsewhere, scattered among too many things, when she would have liked to be perfectly present but was simply human. It is here that the public woman moves furthest away from the polished image of perfection. Lena seems to understand that the opposite of absence is not perfection, but presence; and that perhaps children do not need a mother without mistakes, only one whose strongest echo in the memory of home is the sound of laughter.

Professionally, too, her story is shaped by the same demand for authenticity. She chose music that did not necessarily correspond to what the majority wanted and defended a less straightforward path, even joking about her own “Serbian stubbornness”. Yet when it is suggested that we can sometimes fall in love with our own difference and make an identity of it, Lena immediately recognises the danger. It is easy to become attached to one’s own struggle. For her, however, choosing the road less travelled was never a device for standing out; it was simply the only way she could feel truly comfortable in her own skin. If the world suddenly understood her musical vision completely, she would welcome it. And yet she admits that she would still miss a certain amount of solitude, because creativity requires it, especially when writing. It is a precious distinction: there are those who want to be different in order to be seen, and those who accept not being understood in order not to become someone else.

Lena, at least as she emerges from these answers, belongs to the second kind. Her ambition, too, seems less concerned with noise than with continuity. Half in jest and half in earnest, she has said she gives herself until the age of eighty-six to “succeed”, waking each morning almost as though nothing has yet been achieved. But here as well, she has learned to temper her own severity. She acknowledges that for years an inner voice kept moving the finish line further away. Today she has created a small ritual: looking back and quietly thanking the Lena of yesterday, the woman who took risks, endured and survived. Starting again from zero is no longer a punishment. It is a luxury. The shift is almost imperceptible, yet enormous: discipline ceases to be a form of judgement and becomes freedom.

And finally there is faith, which in Lena seems to have less to do with certainty than with an awareness of limits. Singing in church means entering a space in which applause is not the destination of the song. On stage, the voice inevitably belongs in part to the person who possesses it; in a sacred space, she says, something opposite can happen: one becomes a vessel. Lena has experienced moments, particularly in spiritual music, when her own voice seemed merely entrusted to her, as if it did not entirely belong to her. She describes talent with a beautiful phrase: “a beautiful, temporary loan.” Theologically, it may be the sentence that best reveals her relationship with success. If talent is a loan, it can never fully become a possession; it carries gratitude, but also responsibility. A gift is not only there to show the world who we are. It is there to return something that has passed through us.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the interview ends by taking away from Lena the very thing with which we most readily identify her: her voice. During her illness, her mother gradually lost the ability to speak, and mother and daughter learned, Lena says, an entirely new language. Asked what would happen if she could have five more minutes with her mother, on the condition that neither of them could speak and Lena could not sing, she does not reach for a grand statement. She says they would hold hands, look into one another’s eyes and breathe the same air. That silence would not be empty, but completely full. A smile, a touch, and there would be nothing left to explain.

Perhaps this is where Lena Kovačević can truly be found, more than in any photograph or on any stage: on that almost invisible threshold between voice and silence. In the woman who knows how to illuminate a room, but has learned to seek a place where she is allowed to arrive without light. In the daughter who did not turn her mother into a monument to grief, but into a way of loving life. In the mother who would rather be remembered for the sound of her laughter than for the scale of a concert. In the artist who defended her difference without falling in love with the battle itself. In the believer who regards talent as something temporarily placed in her care.

Her elegance, then, is not the elegance of someone untouched by fragility. It is something far rarer: the ability to let fragility exist without allowing it to become the only truth about her. And perhaps this is precisely why her light feels convincing. It does not seem to come from someone who has never known darkness, but from a woman who has entered it, looked at it long enough, and decided that it would not be allowed the final word.