Up to 1943, Indra used his real name Juozas Padleckis.
Indra was an opera singer, conductor and composer.
His first music teacher was his brother, Stasys Padleckis. Since 1936, Indra played in the Third Infantry Regiment
Orchestra. 1938 to 1945, he studied solo singing, composition and conducting at the conservatory in Kaunas
with Evgenij Vitting,
Petras Oleka, Vladas Jakubėnas, and Juozas Gruodis.
His career as a singer began and ended in Vilnius and lasted nearly 10 years, during which he performed 25 roles.
He also sang at the Kaunas opera (1944).
1945 to 1948, Indra was in Vorkuta, Komi ASSR region, where he sang with the Vorkuta Philharmonic and
Music Theatre. That means that he was a political prisoner – Vorkuta was not a town at the
time of Stalin, it was a gulag, and all musicians at the theater were inmates. After the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states
in 1940 and again in 1944, hundreds of thousands of
people were arrested for political reasons and deported to Siberia: not just those who had been political adversaries of the
Soviets, but lots of members of the elite, just for the sake of repression, terror and intimidation of the Baltic
populations. In Indra's case, the reason for his imprisonment was that he had played in the Lithuanian military orchestra
mentioned above.
1948 to 1953, Indra taught at the conservatory in Vilnius and sang with the Lithuanian National Opera
and Ballet Theatre; in 1954 he became first conductor of the Kaunas opera.
His repertory included:
German, Lenskij, Roméo, Faust, Alfredo, José, ...
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