Opera in South Africa: “You Get What You Deserve”

One of the most remarkable developments in classical music today is the profusion of gifted Black South African opera singers graduating from the University of Cape Town and winding up on major stages in Europe and the United States. Why and how is that happening? As I was recently in South Africa, I enjoyed an opportunity to try and find out. The outcome is the most recent of my “More than Music” documentaries on National Public Radio. You can hear it here.

South Africa is a “singing country.” In segregated Black townships, under apartheid, singing was inherent to church and school. And it became commonplace for Black high schoolers to sing selections from oratorios. With the end of apartheid in 1991, the cork was out of the bottle. By 2000, more than 90 per cent of the opera students in Cape Town were Black. 

As remarkable: casting in opera became color-blind virtually overnight. In the US, opera companies and audiences resisted seeing Black tenors sing opposite white sopranos. Today, the acrimony continues over who should sing what, and whether the entire enterprise is “colonialist.”

Here is the soprano Goitsemang Lehobye, whom you can hear singing Verdi and Gershwin on my “More than Music” show: “I want to sing [Puccini’s] Madame Butterfly one day. But am I not going to do it because I’m not Japanese, I’m not Asian? I come from a place where we don’t think like that. When you get onstage, you pretend to be what you’re supposed to be. And life goes on.”

And here is the tenor Sakhumzi Martins, whom I (surreptitiously) recorded – in Fish Hook, South Africa — in a rapturous rendition of “Maria,” from West Side Story: “It’s a shame what Black Americans are facing. In South Africa, for you to get cast, you have to be  hard worker. There’s no short way. The opportunities are quite slim, so you have to work and sweat. We have learned not to take things personally. It’s just business, you have to want it more than the next person. So it’s got nothing to do with color [who gets chosen]. We all know one another. In South Africa, you get what you deserve.”

And here is John McWhorter, quoted on my radio show: ”To a Black American, some Africans cam seem almost oddly secure and joyous – they don’t seem to have a basic sense of whiteness as an insult to them.”

To hear a related “More than Music” program on George Shirley and racial integration at the Metropolitan Opera, click here.

LISTENING GUIDE:

Part 1 (00:00): Sakhumzi Martins sings Bernstein; Jeremy Silver (who runs the University of Cape Town opera program) on what’s happening and why

Part 2 (12:00): Goitsemang Lehobye sings Verdi and Gershwin; Angelo Gobbato on the history of opera in South Africa; Mzilikazi Khumalo and the South African choral tradition (with commentary by Khumalo and music historian Thomas Pooley)

Part 3 (29:58): Khumalo’s epic Ushaka (commentary by orchestrator/conductor Robert Maxym); summing up: “In South Africa, you get what you deserve.”