This paper traces the metamorphosis of opera in South Africa from the apartheid era to the post-1994 democratic dispensation. Beginning with a broad overview of opera's European origins and global development, the paper examines how apartheid policies restricted Black South Africans from participating in opera production and viewership, and how the art form was used as a symbol of European cultural dominance. It then analyzes the post-apartheid reforms introduced by the White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage, the dissolution of the four Performing Arts Councils, and the challenges of translating opera into indigenous languages such as Xhosa and Zulu. The paper concludes by assessing the cultural impact of landmark works including U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu, and Winnie the Opera on the growth and democratization of South African opera.
Opera is defined as a form of art in which singers and musicians perform in a dramatic piece that combines text (libretto) with a musical score. Holden et al. (1994) described opera as any dramatic piece that can be sung — and may be spoken or declaimed at times — in a performance space chosen for the singers, who appear in costumes, using original music with instrumental accompaniment. Opera incorporates various elements of spoken theatre, including acting, costumes, scenery, and in certain cases dance. Performances are usually executed in an opera house accompanied by an orchestra or musical ensemble.
The concept of opera originated in Italy towards the end of the sixteenth century with the production of Dafne by Jacopo Peri. Dafne is regarded as the earliest known work that, by modern standards, qualifies as an opera (Sonneck, 1913). The work was composed in 1597 by Jacopo Peri with Ottavio Rinuccini as the librettist. It later spread to the rest of Europe. In the seventeenth century, opera established itself as a national tradition in Germany (Schütz), France (Lully), and England (Purcell). The eighteenth century saw opera continue to dominate most of Europe. The most renowned figure of that period is Mozart, who began with opera seria but gained greater fame from his Italian comic operas. Some of Mozart's most celebrated pieces are The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte. The nineteenth century then saw the emergence of the bel canto style, producing renowned artists such as Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti, whose works are still performed in contemporary theatres.
This paper explores the metamorphosis of opera in South Africa as well as the dynamics that have played integral roles in that transformation.
The metamorphosis of opera in South Africa gained momentum in the post-apartheid era (De Jager, 2009). Initially, opera was the preserve of white South Africans and did not elicit much interest among Black South Africans, which translated into a lack of participation in opera production, performing roles, and viewership. The South African opera has undergone tremendous transformation since the country's adoption of a new political dispensation, which changed both the landscape and the frame of reference within which the creative arts industries functioned (De Jager, 2009). More recently, in 2009, Pretty Yende, a young South African opera singer, took home major prizes at the International Hans Gabor Belvedere Competition held in Australia. During the apartheid era, opera was a reserve of the privileged and was not embedded within the native Black South African community. James and Davey (2010) argue that U-Carmen eKhayelitsha won the Best Film award at the Golden Bear ceremony and was the sole African production at that prestigious event.
A review of the contemporary South African opera scene reveals that many changes have taken place over the years. A seminal review of the literature also suggests that the transformation of opera from the apartheid era to the post-apartheid era required enormous effort, determination, and struggle. The political reforms in South Africa marked a turning point in the metamorphosis of opera (Roos, 2010).
Since the years of the four Performing Arts Councils (PACs) — CAPAB, NAPAC, PACT, and PACOFS — a great deal has changed in the South African opera scene. The four PACs were a creation of the apartheid government and were mandated with the production of opera in South Africa from 1963 to 1998 (Roos, 2010, p. 192). During this period, opera production was mainly geared towards emulating Western aesthetic and cultural models as faithfully as possible. The apartheid government officials were not particularly invested in opera production for its own sake. Pooley (2008, p. 18) described the value of art music such as opera for the apartheid government as carrying a form of "symbolic capital." Art music was a symbol of European culture and was regarded as being of greater value than local and indigenous art (Roos, 2010).
The metamorphosis of opera in South Africa into an indigenous South African opera is a process with a long and rich history. The transformation involves the "indigenization" of a previously Western art form into South African art performed not in a foreign language but in Xhosa and other indigenous languages. Under apartheid, the political ideologies and structures that formed the foundation of South Africa's cultural policy were never conducive to exploring the region's indigenous cultures in opera production. Furthermore, the unfair policies of the apartheid government gave rise to several cultural boycotts by the international community, leading to the isolation of indigenous arts production (Roos, 2010, p. 52). By the mid-1980s, opera in South Africa had been cut off from international engagement and isolated from its own creative environment. The new political dispensation that took effect in 1994 opened what Roos (2010) called the "gates of creative possibility" for opera producers, enabling them to juxtapose Western and African art traditions and fostering a renewed sense of intellectual and artistic access.
The most dominant challenge faced during this transformation was the withdrawal of all government subsidies, with little private funding available to replace them. This severely limited the capacity to produce opera and hold performances. The new era also suffered from drawbacks arising from the stringent stipulations contained in the White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage (ANC, June 1996). The real implications of this policy exposed many South African musicians and composers working in the European classical tradition to increased structural pressure, as they were required to reflect their indigenous cultural environment in their work (Roos, 2010). Subsidies for opera production were also granted under tough conditions, including the need to demonstrate diversified demographic representation in both productions and audiences.
By the 1990s, certain components of the PACs had begun organizational restructuring to create racial and cultural diversity (Pooley, 2008, p. 19). Gobbato (2008) indicated that by the 1990s, the existence of a sizeable pool of quality vocal talent among Black South Africans could no longer be denied. However, as Gobbato (2008) observed:
"What became a pressing artistic issue was the creation of a suitable operatic repertoire for these singers and the possible adaptation of the production styles of the standard repertoire to create novel dramatic possibilities and credibilities, given the sudden transformation of operatic casts from being 98% white to casts being 98% black."
The new funding structures also forced several opera companies to begin operating as private institutions in order to generate income for their productions, requiring them to develop more innovative business models capable of surviving a harsh economic environment.
Approximately seventeen years after the new political dispensation, South African opera had effectively consolidated itself as an invigorating art form for people of all races, with most opera companies participating in global tours on account of their unique character. By 2011, four South African opera companies had been producing work in the country for a number of years: Cape Town Opera (Cape Town), Isango Portabello (Cape Town), Opera Africa (Johannesburg), and the Black Ensemble (Pretoria). These four companies depend on government subsidies to some degree but operate primarily as private entities.
Efforts by various South African artistic directors to adapt opera to reflect the South African cultural experience have yielded remarkable results. For instance, an opera comprising entirely Black participants based on Puccini's La Bohème was created in South Africa in 1998, with the libretto renamed La Bohème: Noir. In 2001, an Africanized version of Verdi's Macbeth was staged. Most recently, productions of Bizet's Carmen — translated as uCarmen eKhayelitsha — and Mozart's The Magic Flute received prestigious international awards including the Golden Bear and the Laurence Olivier Award.
Before examining the transformation of opera in South Africa, it is worthwhile to consider how opera developed in other parts of the world. The word "opera" derives from an Italian word meaning "work" and reflects the Baroque ambition of integrating all art forms. Coupled with music, drama, staging, and costume design — the fundamental ingredients of art — opera's status as an audible and visible art cannot be disputed. Throughout its existence, opera has consistently reflected prevailing trends in the arts. Architectural developments and paintings have manifested themselves on opera stages in the form of sets and costume designs created for specific performances.
Like any other type of spectacle, opera originally expressed noble prerogatives and was staged exclusively in courts. In the seventeenth century, lavish entertainments featuring fireworks and sensational effects — in addition to acoustic music, songs, speeches, and dances — were staged in Italy to celebrate royal weddings or welcome important guests. Although not opera in the modern sense, these entertainments achieved an integration of different art forms that fostered collaboration between disciplines and laid the theoretical groundwork upon which both opera and ballet would later develop.
A group of composers and dramatists calling themselves the Florentine Camerata, working in Florence around the year 1600, sought to revive the classical Greek stage tradition in which music and drama complemented each other in performance. During this period, the Camerata developed the recitative — a form of sung speech featuring a solo voice accompanied by sparse harmonization — as the primary vehicle for text expression. The early operas were mainly based on mythological themes or portrayed characters deemed noble and aristocratic in nature.
Music and drama were then, as now, the main features of any opera, but visual effects could not be ignored and sometimes dominated court productions in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact, set designers and theatrical machinists often received more acclaim than the composers themselves. Because conventional methods of darkening the auditorium did not yet exist, the audience itself formed an integral part of the spectacle, seated in magnificently arranged rows from which spectators followed the action — performances that often lasted many hours — using librettos, the small printed books produced for each occasion.
The use of recitative, lyrical solos, madrigals, and instrumental color for a variety of classical themes by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) was considered a landmark in operatic composition. His Favola in musica: L'Orfeo of 1607 is widely regarded as the first true opera. Despite spending much of his early career writing for the Dukes of Mantua, most of Monteverdi's later works were written for Venice's first public opera houses, which opened in 1637, underscoring the growing importance of a broad public audience.
By the close of the eighteenth century, opera had become an international phenomenon, with both comic and serious genres flourishing in France, England, the Habsburg Empire, and Italy. Italian remained the dominant language of the libretto throughout this period. Under renowned composers such as Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) and Georg Frideric Handel (1685–1759), orchestras expanded to include woodwind instruments, horns, and drums in addition to the original string section. The castrato soprano voice was accorded a hero's welcome, making the castrati among the greatest stars of the age. However, the ornamentally demanding music written for such virtuoso singers gradually overwhelmed the dramatic element of opera, provoking calls for reform. These calls were answered by Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714–1787) in his Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), which sought to restore dramatic integrity to the operatic form.
The continued evolution of opera at the close of the eighteenth century was sustained by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), whose vocal and orchestral writing was alive with dramatic purpose. Lorenzo Da Ponte's libretto for The Marriage of Figaro (1786) provides exquisite melodies that illuminate the characters of Figaro, Susanna, the Countess, the Count, and Cherubino, all drawn from a French play by Beaumarchais. In Don Giovanni (1787), Mozart and Da Ponte narrate the downfall of an unrepentant seducer culminating in two striking scenes in which the statue of a man the seducer has murdered arrives to escort him to hell. Mozart's final opera, The Magic Flute, is a German comedy set in a world that continues to inspire new experiments in set and costume design, as demonstrated by recent productions devised by artists Marc Chagall and David Hockney at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
The nineteenth century brought conditions favorable to both expanding opera's audience and changing the art form itself. Bourgeois taste displaced court concerns about subject matter, while composers, singers, and theatre impresarios engaged in fierce competition for popularity. In France and Italy, Romanticism, Orientalism, and Realism — broad cultural movements — manifested themselves powerfully in opera as in the major visual arts. At the same time, the rise of nationalism in Germany and Russia gave birth to new and vigorous operatic traditions.
Romanticism in the early nineteenth century generated a robust interest in irrational, exotic, and historical subjects that opera portrayed admirably. This led to the writing of Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) by Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848), based on a novel by Walter Scott and featuring themes of ancestral enmity, star-crossed love, and the sudden tragic death of a heroine preceded by a vocally demanding mad scene. Similar concerns shaped contemporary French grand opera, whose leading composer was the German-born Giacomo Meyerbeer (1797–1864). His Robert le Diable (1831), like most of his successful Parisian works, was staged with lavish effects, spectacular sets, choreographed dances, and mammoth onstage ensembles — hallmarks of the French grand opera tradition. Another defining character of the genre is the Devil himself, as conceptualized in Faust (1859) by Charles Gounod (1818–1893).
Despite the fact that most nineteenth-century operas were based on earlier stage plays or literary works, the subject of romance continued to dominate long after painters and writers had moved on to other concerns. For example, Georges Bizet (1838–1875) based his Carmen (1875) on an early nineteenth-century novella by Prosper Mérimée. Like its source, this opera had a full Spanish flavor that captivated French opera audiences. Themes of violence, passion, and transgression — central to these works — were contradictory to the mores of bourgeois society, which led many artists to portray female spectators watching from the privacy of their private boxes as key subjects of fascination.
Giuseppe Verdi's (1813–1901) operas were dominated by high tragedy; his dramatic instincts produced wonderfully expressive music for chorus, ensemble, solo voice, and orchestra. His first major public success, Nabucco (1842), featured stirring choruses expressing the longing of captives for their homeland. Most of his opera plots involved moral conflicts and powerful emotions. In Rigoletto (1851), he presents a court jester whose desire for revenge leads to his daughter's death. In Aida (1871), he narrates the story of an Ethiopian princess in love with an Egyptian general who represents her country's enemy, staging it with the grandeur of Pharaonic Egypt through a triumphal parade. Otello (1887), adapted from Shakespeare, concerns a hero's fatal jealousy that leads to his wife's murder and his own undoing.
Richard Wagner (1813–1883), considered Verdi's contemporary, took a very different approach to opera, conceiving what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk — the total work of art — in which drama, staging, and music are forged into a powerful unity. He realized this ambition by controlling every aspect of his work: writing his own librettos, supervising set designs, and composing the music. Wagner composed for large orchestras that required powerful voices, while elevating his dramas to encompass profound themes such as redemption through love and the relationship between humanity and the divine. His greatest project, the Der Ring des Nibelungen (1853–1874), comprised four dramatic parts, each longer than any standard Italian opera, drawing on Germanic mythology and presenting abundant opportunities for visual spectacle.
At the close of the nineteenth century, opera was regarded as the pinnacle of art forms suited to portraying the grandest aspirations of heroic individuals and nations. Modest Mussorgsky's (1839–1881) celebrated Russian opera Boris Godunov (1874) offers a dramatic depiction of a turbulent period in Russian history, with particular emphasis on the choruses of common people marveling at the glittering world of the Czars. The Russian opera remains largely an invention of the nineteenth century and signals both social ferment and rising nationalism. The vigor of Russian literature furnished rich material for works such as Pyotr Tchaikovsky's (1840–1893) Eugene Onegin (1879), based on Pushkin, and Sergei Prokofiev's (1891–1953) War and Peace and The Gambler, based on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky respectively.
Although many great opera composers devoted much of their time to tragic subjects, they also produced comic operas that still thrill audiences worldwide. Verdi, despite limited early success with comedy, brought his career to a close with Falstaff (1893), based on the antics of the Shakespearean knight. Gioachino Rossini's (1792–1868) The Barber of Seville (1816) remains a comic opera rich with brilliant tunes and fast-paced hilarity. Wagner too ventured into comic opera with Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868), a masterpiece set in sixteenth-century Germany with a happy ending and a cast of craftsmen-singers.
Operas have also been used to magnify the lives of actual and fictional artists, and portraits of singers form an important part of the rich visual history that surrounds the art form. Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) drew on the life of the flamboyant sixteenth-century artist Benvenuto Cellini for his eponymous opera of 1838. Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) composed Mathis der Maler (1938) to explore the life of the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald. Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) composed The Rake's Progress (1951), a chamber opera inspired by the satirical prints of William Hogarth. Artists also appear in two of Giacomo Puccini's (1858–1924) most popular works: the painter Cavaradossi is the leading man in Tosca (1900), and the painter Marcello is the sympathetic companion of the poet Rodolfo in La Bohème (1898).
The spread of Western culture during and after the colonial era exposed opera to a variety of external influences in communities into which European settlers integrated in large numbers. In most of these communities and nations, opera is still practiced today, with its influences visible in the aesthetics and traditions of indigenous music practices. The ideological and social parameters of former colonies have been reconfigured by the assimilation of the "new" art of opera. In the South African context, exposure of indigenous communities to opera culture has over time given rise to productions that have clearly departed from the norms of Western aesthetics, leading to the innovation of a wholly new genre of indigenous opera. Gaining a full understanding of this indigenization requires that the country's political context be brought into the discussion.
The apartheid era created several barriers for Black South Africans in the production of opera. The main reason was that the South African arts and culture sector was initially founded on a structure that depended on State patronage based on the ideology of European supremacy and imperialist domination of the white minority (De Jager, 2009, p. 48). The existing structure was reserved for and catered to the needs of the white South African minority. This meant that, under apartheid law, only white South Africans interested in arts such as opera were entitled to the various services from the arts and culture sector.
"Racial exclusion policies and translation difficulties"
"White Paper reforms and democratization of opera"
"Cultural impact of landmark South African opera works"
An opera based on the life and songs of Princess Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu was commissioned by Opera Africa and premiered at the Durban Playhouse in May 2002. Meredith (2006) indicated that the work highlights issues including Zulu nationalism and the struggle against colonial rule. Meredith (2006, p. 47) also noted that Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu deals with themes of patriotism, peace and reconciliation, cultural heritage, and African Renaissance. The opera was composed by renowned artist Mzilikazi Khumalo, with additional music and orchestration provided by Michael Hankinson. The main purpose of commissioning the piece was to explore the viability of creating an authentic African genre. Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu is also significant as a vehicle for empowering women and eliciting a sense of heritage and national pride.
Winnie the Opera is a powerful portrayal of the life of the Mother of the Nation (DAC, 2011). The opera depicts Winnie being subpoenaed to appear before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), where she is confronted by a lawyer and accused of serious crimes. The opera is a source of inspiration and important public education, and it demonstrated that the local South African opera genre could be produced without borrowing any European acts or instrumentation — the set is entirely African, as is the context. As noted by the South African-born producer and librettist Mfundi Vundla (DAC, 2011), opera in this case served as a vehicle for conveying crucial information about the country's history, including the struggle for liberation and independence. According to Minister Paul Mashatile, Winnie the Opera presents Ms. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as a legendary heroine who epitomizes the struggle for national truth, justice, reconciliation, and equality.
This paper has shown that the transformation of opera in South Africa has been gradual over the years. Rapid changes, however, were realized after the installation of the new democratic dispensation and the abolishment of racial segregation. This provided the momentum for opera to be practiced and enjoyed in a democratic space — a development that led to both diversity and the creation of a wholly new genre of South African opera, one that retains elements of European tradition while in certain cases being purely African in character and expression.
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