Author of Opera in Cape Town: The Critic’s Voice; Dr Wayne Muller recently launched his book which was ideally just going to be a thesis as part of his PhD in Musicology.
Dr Muller writes about how opera critics have shaped audiences’ ideas of especially the “Africanisation” of opera during the post- apartheid period.
The George-born former journalist told the Weekend Argus that his mission was to piece together the thesis while he studied at Stellenbosch University (SU) since 2013.
Dr Muller, who has a keen interest in music, started playing the piano and organ from a young age and followed a path in the local music industry with an extra attention on operatic singing and started taking singing lessons.
His passion for music and its history led him to become an arts journalist.
“I’ve always been interested in how arts reportage related the history of our performing arts landscape. So, in 2013 I registered for a PhD in Musicology at SU to investigate that by looking at what was written in reviews of opera performances in Cape Town.
“An interesting story evolved of how opera in South Africa became ingrained in our society, so much so; that we ‘Africanised’ opera and made it a distinctly South African art form – meaning we transported the settings of standard Western European opera repertoire to local settings, inserted indigenous music into the opera, translated Italian and German operas into local languages and many South African composers wrote new operas that tell local stories that we can relate to.
“This all happened alongside and within the context of the socio-political changes happening in the country after the fall of apartheid.”
Dr Muller said his PhD thesis of 2018 touched on the elements of a transformation that happened in opera since 1994.
“Even before I started my PhD, I thought the topic could make for an interesting book, but I also realised it was going to take a lot of research – hence I registered to do a PhD degree.
“When the research was done, I realised that the material would indeed work well for a book. During the Covid lockdown period I started to restructure the thesis and rewrite some text to make it more accessible to a general reader public.
“Having been a journalist, this was something I enjoyed – rewriting and creating text that a layman can understand.”
The storyline also steers towards the changes and shifts that is manifested in the performance practice and traditions of opera in South Africa.
“This book is a means of initiating a conversation on how opera has impacted our cultural landscape over the past 30 years. This is one of the strands in our history of 30 years of democracy and talks about how opera reflected the socio-political and democratic transition in the country.
“In the book, this is done at the hand of several examples of opera productions that aimed to be inclusive and giving voice to unacknowledged histories, political activists and even significant places in South Africa’s liberation struggle.
“I didn’t want to create a book that only academics would find useful. The book then went for a peer review, and looking at the feedback, I did some more ‘reconstruction’ of the manuscript into what has now been published.
“Of course I like writing, but this book project was especially great because it was about a topic I knew so well and an art form I really enjoy.”
An excerpt from the book reads:
“Much like the roots of trees that are centuries old, the historical trajectory of opera in Cape Town and South Africa stretches deep and wide – from the music-making of those forced into slavery during the colonial era (1600s to 1800s) to the appropriation of opera to serve political ambitions during the apartheid years (1948 to 1993). Also, following the first democratic election of the country in 1994, opera in South Africa began charting a distinct path in the local arts landscape. Those roots of yesteryear have extended even wider into uncharted spaces, exploring new settings, stories previously buried, characters often despised, and music unheard.
“In August 2003, Angelo Gobbato, then managing director of Cape Town Opera and head of the University of Cape Town (UCT) Opera School, delivered his inaugural lecture as professor in opera at UCT, titled Towards the Creation of a Transformed South African Operatic Aesthetic. In his presentation, Gobbato focused on the creation of a new operatic aesthetic in an industry where local opera companies would produce operas that are distinctly South African.
In a newspaper report on the lecture, Gobbato was hailed for being at the forefront of the transformation of opera, having established the Choral Training Programme and an opera studio specifically for emerging black singers.
“If black singers – by 2003 possibly most of the opera singers in the country – were to be cast in local productions, a new repertoire and a new aesthetic in the performance of Western European operas would have to be investigated and developed. In the years since Gobbato’s lecture, there have indeed been fundamental changes in the operatic repertoire, and the staging of those operas has resulted in the development of a South African ‘way of doing opera’. I see this as the creation of a distinctly South African operatic expression that, musically and theatrically, was aimed at combining the Western European operatic tradition with music and stories rooted in African cultures. What has transpired is the creation of a novel art form that is distinctly South African.
“The South African heroine of Puccini’s La Bohème, Mimi, walks the streets of District Six in Cape Town while a bulldozer lurks in the shadows, waiting to obliterate this neighbourhood destroyed by apartheid laws.
“Gabriel von Eisenstein and his wife Rosalinde, the stately couple in Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus, live in the affluent beachside neighbourhood of Camps Bay along the Cape Atlantic Seaboard, speaking Afrikaans to Adele. Macbeth, as Verdi portrayed him in operatic guise, becomes a militant leader in central Africa, leading a guerrilla war. Porgy and Bess confess their love amidst the shacks of the Johannesburg township of Soweto, and the hero Florestan in Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio is incarcerated on Robben Island in Table Bay, where South African slaves and political prisoners had been (wrongly) imprisoned for centuries.
“Performed in Cape Town, these are some manifestations of opera in post-apartheid South Africa, where a Western European art form has been moulded into an aesthetic representation that aims to be distinctly South African in the way that it portrays characters, sounds music, and inhabits spaces that are recognisable and relevant to, as well as representative of, a new and aspirational nationhood.
“What has transpired on the stage is a consequence of and emerged amid a changing socio-political and arts landscape – indeed, the opera stage has mirrored the social tapestry and concerns of the post-apartheid era.”
The book is available online or at orders@africansunmedia.co.za at R390 for the printed version and R290 for the e-book.