It is not one of the scenes from George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess that tends to end up on the highlights CDs. I arrive at rehearsals for Cape Town Opera’s new production, set in 1970s South Africa and inspired by life in Soweto, thinking of the jazzy hits such as Summertime and It Ain’t Necessarily So. Instead I interrupt Act I to find the company’s all-black ensemble huddled around a corpse, while the white actor playing a thuggish South African policeman demands to know who was responsible for the latest murder in Catfish Row. He presses a gun to Xolela Sixaba, the head of the singer playing the crippled Porgy, and repeats the request. Apparently, Sixaba’s reactions are insufficiently passionate: the director, Cape Town Opera’s artistic manager Christine Crouse, wants him to try it again, this time with more fear.
Afterwards, Sixaba tells me that it didn’t take a director’s nudge to make him act the scene more realistically. “In those days they kicked and beat you like anything,” he says of the South African police who were a regular feature of life in the township where he grew up. His colleague sharing the role of Porgy, Ntobeko Rwanqa, agrees. “What is happening here on stage,” he says, “is what really happened in South Africa.”
You won’t find a neater exposition of the mission statement of Cape Town Opera, ten years old this year and now preparing for its first visit to the UK with a full production. The company is, its general manager Michael Williams cheerfully admits, “out on a limb”. Its nearest neighbours might as well be on the Moon: there is only one other permanent opera company in the whole of Africa, and it’s in Cairo.
But Williams is not the sort of man to mope about this isolation: instead he is determined to create the sort of opera productions that he thinks will speak to both his audience — and his singers — directly. “And Porgy and Bess is the opera that has so much to say about our situation here, in such a powerful way,” he says. “The opera is about perseverance, abuse, addiction, how to rise up from poverty ... a lot of these issues are still hot topics in South Africa.”
In the decades since Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway in the 1930s, written out of George Gershwin’s conviction that black opera singers deserved more opportunities on the stage, it’s become fashionable in some quarters to criticise his depiction of the segregated community of Catfish Row as reductive, even patronising. But transplanted to a place and an era when state-sanctioned oppression and segregation was a part of life, the drama of the crippled Porgy and his attempts to wrest Bess away from her violent lover, Crown, and the drug-pushing Sportin’ Life has recovered its edge. And the singers involved recognise and respond to its message. “For me, doing Porgy and Bess is a privilege,” Rwanqa says. “I’m so proud of doing a piece like this, rather than Tosca or Traviata, because it represents more of me. Everyone here is living what he’s doing.”
For the American singers involved in the production, such passionate identification with the opera has come as a wake-up call. “I think we’ve got a little jaded in the US with Porgy and Bess,” says Lisa Daltirus, one of two singers who will play Bess on the UK tour. “A lot of people just think that this is a show that is lovely to listen to and happened way back when. They’re not thinking that you can still find places where this is real. And if we’re not careful we could be right back there.”
Yet if the drama of this Porgy and Bess is full of the nastier realities of the black experience in South Africa, the much more cheerful message to draw from CTO’s production is how inspiring it is to see artists so long excluded from opera now immersed in it. When the theatre that Cape Town Opera perform in was built in the 1970s it was open to non-white people only one day a week. Opera was generously supported by the apartheid government precisely to cement its European cultural credentials: it was not intended for the country’s black majority.
The 24-year-old soprano Pretty Yende plays Clara in CTO’s production and is therefore entrusted with the hit lullaby Summertime. She is too young to remember the brutal era evoked in Crouse’s production, though she says that “the scars are still there”. But it is Verdi and Donizetti, not Gerswhin, who really fire her enthusiasm. She will go straight from CTO’s UK tour to a coveted place on the two-year young artists programme at La Scala Milan, mentored by the legendary soprano Mirella Freni. “She asked me: ‘Do you speak Italian?’ ” Yende says, “and I said: ‘I’m a fast learner — teach me.’ ”
She has certainly moved quickly so far. Yende grew up in Piet Retief, a small rural town in the northeast of South Africa, with no television and certainly no opera. Singing was something she did on the four-mile hike to church every week. “We’d stop for a break halfway through and my grandmother would take out a songbook and say: ‘This is the song I need to teach you.’ ”
One day she heard the British Airways theme tune — the Flower Duet from Delibes’ Lakmé. “I was 16,” she says. “It was the first time I ever heard opera. And I said I would like to do that.” Six months later she had entered the country’s first national competition for opera in schools with the same piece, winning first prize and a full government-funded scholarship to Cape Town University to study music. Her sceptical headmaster told her to consider accountancy. “And I said I wanted to give God a chance, because he had changed my life in six months and said: ‘This is what you are going to do.’ ” In ten years she sees herself “singing in the biggest opera houses in the world”.
If Yende makes it that far — and, judging from the string of international prizes she has already scooped, the signs are auspicious — part of the success will be down to Cape Town Opera. For while the rest of South Africa’s opera companies were collapsing in the mid-1990s as the new democratic Government ended their subsidies, the relaunched and rebranded CTO was forging the links that would eventually result in the transformation of the company, absorbing a new wave of (mostly black) singers either, like Yende, recruited from Cape Town University’s music faculty or directly from the region’s innumerable township choirs. It is a large part of the reason why the company still exists.
“Race is an issue,” Williams says “because it’s important that we produce art with people who represent the majority of this country. Fortunately the talent is such that we would use them all anyway.”
The operatic world is certainly waking up to this rich new seam of talent. There are, for example, two hugely promising South African singers — Vuyani Mlinde and Pumeza Matshikiza — in Covent Garden’s own Young Artists Programme. Back in Cape Town, however, the reality for most of CTO’s ensemble is occasional work on stage and plenty of freelancing: the fairytale journey of Pretty Yende is not the typical tale.
Sandile Kamle, one of the tenors playing Sportin’ Life, has been associated with CTO since 1994. “When I started, opera was thought of as music for sissies,” he says. “Now it’s starting to get into people’s thick skulls.” But when the young people — usually his choirmates — in Kamle’s home township of Gugulethu, outside Cape Town, do ask him about making a career out of singing he is cautious. “I always tell them first to do something else. Opera here is hard — for the companies, and the soloists. You need a back-up plan so that whenever things turn sour you always have something to go back to.”
Rwanqa agrees: “Every year I have to look for work. When I’m not singing, I do theatre. If there’s no theatre, I do television. That’s how I survive: I didn’t focus only on my voice.”
It’s a problem that the company is all too aware of: limited funds for the company’s relatively short season of performances. The chorus that forms the heart of the company has 18 members: Williams would like to double it to 36. “The quality of the voices is absolutely astonishing,” Crouse says. “And if you go to the university you’ll be amazed by the voices that are there. But the problem is that there’s not enough work for everybody. The fact is that our Government doesn’t necessarily believe that opera is important: [they say] that it’s a Eurocentric artform.”
It’s a battle that Williams has been fighting ever since he joined CTO. In the 1990s he found himself attacking the same argument on national TV, opposite Ben Ngubane, then Minister for Culture. “I said: ‘Minister, there’s no more Eurocentric item than the soccer ball, but that has been embraced by Africans throughout South Africa.” At the moment CTO receives a small allocation from the country’s national lottery fund, and relies on touring productions — such as the new Porgy — to balance the books.
The main challenge for the company remains attracting as many black faces in the audience as there are on stage — still an uphill task. “Our audiences are not as mixed as they should be,” Crouse admits. Meanwhile, its regular core audience are so far proving stubbornly conservative in their choices. “As soon as you do something a little bit less known,” Crouse says, “they don’t come.”
Yet few opera companies in Europe or America seem to expend half as much energy as CTO does on thinking about the very nature of opera and investing in bold new productions to engage and refresh their audience. In 2004 the company staged a landmark production of Beethoven’s great hymn to freedom, Fidelio, on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years. Beethoven’s clunky spoken dialogue was replaced by recordings from key Mandela speeches. In The Times, the critic John Allison called it “unforgettably powerful”. Since then, the company has toured La Bohème Noir, an adaptation of La Bohème around the city’s townships. When the football World Cup takes place in South Africa next summer, the big show will be a new, hybrid piece — a cast-iron crowd-pleaser, the company hopes — about the life of Nelson Mandela, told through a combination of musical styles.
It is new work such as this that excites Williams the most. Hence he has commissioned a hugely exciting new series of operatic shorts — called 5:20 and inspired by Scottish Opera’s scheme of the same name — that will encompass themes as wide as Afrikaans prison poetry, the tragic story of Saartjie Baartman, the 18th-century woman known as the “Hottentot Venus”, and an opera examinining contemporary xenophobia towards African immigrants from Nigeria and Zimbabwe.
All this is intended by CTO to harness the vocal and emotional commitment that’s so obviously displayed in Porgy and Bess, but to make something fully their own. “It’s in the pursuit of our stories, and our librettos, and our music, that you’re going to find the voices that match the story and give it power,” Williams says. In the meantime, Gershwin is being proudly served.
Porgy and Bess, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff (0870 0402000; wmc.org.uk), Oct 21-24; Festival Hall, SE1 (0871 6632500, semi-staged), Oct 26-27; Edinburgh Festival Theatre (0131-529 6000), Oct 30-31
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