The grandfather of it all is Italy-born Angelo Gobbato, a former singer who co-founded the company five years after apartheid ended and who was honoured in March with a lifetime achievement award for his contribution to South African opera.
When the company was starting out, Gobbato staged Donizetti’s dramatic Lucia di Lammermoor with lead singers brought in from abroad. The cast of a just-ended 25th-birthday run of the same opera was entirely South African and featured only one white singer – an illustration of the changes, he says.
After white-minority rule was scrapped, “we suddenly got a lot of interest from black students who wanted to be trained in opera”, Gobbato, 81, says.
“This was very unusual because at the Cape Town opera school we had so-called coloured students – non-white students – but no black students.”
His students, who include the internationally acclaimed Pretty Yende and Levy Sekgapane, often came from community choirs trained in the Western singing fashion.
“They responded very naturally to opera and they wanted to sing it,” says Gobbato, who has now retired.
“I feel like a grandfather,” he adds. “I haven’t got physical children or grandchildren, but seeing students I am desperately proud of them and convinced that I have done something for the good of the country.”
As the casts have become more representative of South Africa’s racial make-up, so too have the audiences.
Opera in South Africa was once a niche performing art with mainly white audiences, says soprano Brittany Smith, the tragic heroine in this year’s run of Lucia di Lammermoor.
Now, “Cape Town Opera is standing on the forefront of reintroducing opera and making it more accessible to everyone and that makes us relevant,” the 29-year-old adds while prepping for a rehearsal at the Nelson Mandela Theatre, in Johannesburg.
Smith highlights the company’s outreach programme that sends performers to schools and townships to show youngsters what it is all about.
The dramatic themes of opera are relevant to today’s South Africa, says her co-star Conroy Scott, a deep baritone who developed his voice in church choirs.
“It deals with real issues, with human emotion. It deals with issues that haven’t really gone away: politics, sex, violence, child abuse, death,” the 43-year-old adds.
Stagings of European opera classics post-apartheid have moulded a form that is distinctly South African in the portrayal of characters and music, with settings that are recognisable to local audiences, says critic and author Wayne Muller.
A performance of La Bohème was set in Cape Town’s District Six area that was bulldozed by the apartheid authorities in the 1960s and ’70s; Macbeth was played as a Central African militant leader; and Porgy and Bess confessed their love in the shacks of Soweto, Muller wrote in his 2023 book Opera in Cape Town: The Critic’s Voice.
“This process of transforming the arts and opera in South Africa has not ended by any means,” Muller says.
“Nonetheless, there is an ease with opera as being African, and the possibilities that even the standard Western European repertoire brings to make opera relevant here,” the critic adds.
“Opera, as scholars and artists have expressed, has become a South African genre – an art form that is also from here.”