Black Opera by Andre Naomi;

Author:Andre, Naomi;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2018-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

6Winnie, Opera, and South African Artistic Nationhood

Winnie: The Opera, composed and orchestrated by Xhosa composer Bongani Ndodana Breen, is the first full-length, fully orchestrated opera by a black South African composer. Working alongside Breen on the libretto was the interracial team of Warren Wilensky and, in the last stages, Mfundi Vundla. I write about Winnie: The Opera for its historical importance as a leader in black South African opera, as well as because I had the opportunity to see the last week of rehearsals, the premiere, and the second performance.1 Hence, along with the other nonfilm case studies in this project (From the Diary of Sally Hemings, Gershwin’s 1935 version of Porgy and Bess, and Bizet’s Carmen), I have experienced this work as a member of the audience. Like the 2011 Broadway production of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, Winnie: The Opera is also unavailable as a commercial DVD recording (at the time of this writing) and I experienced the operatic presentations of both as live performances.2

Winnie: The Opera fits into as well as challenges conventions around what is considered “South African” music. The opera breaks the model of thinking that “traditional” South African music has no deep connection to music on other continents. Scholarship has documented the syncretic components of South African jazz (such as Marabi and Jaiva), hip hop (and Kwaito), and other popular musics that show how traveling minstrel troupes in the late nineteenth century interacted with mission hymns to help create isicathamiya and the intercontinental dialogue of jazz musicians who produced global variations of musical genres.3 Given the colonial and apartheid history to South Africa, and the long-term encounters with the West, the musical tapestry of post-apartheid South Africa interweaves musical diasporas together.

We see less scholarship on how interracial collaborations between black and white South African musicians and performers have been influenced by Western musical forms that are considered “art music” or music for the concert stage. This discussion of Winnie: The Opera helps fill that gap and positions the work at the center of a conversation about musical genre, identity, and nation building in Europe, the United States, and South Africa.

In the other case-study chapters, I have written as an audience member who is proficient and knowledgeable in the cultural codes for the specific works. As an opera scholar, I am well versed in the conventions of the Western European operatic tradition. As an African American who grew up in the United States, I have experienced black-white racial dynamics from a black perspective. (This is not to imply that there is only one monolithic understanding of these issues but rather to value direct insider experience.) Finally, as someone who has grown up in the United States, I am able to speak about American nationhood as a citizen. My subject position in each of these arenas does not mean that I have an exclusive copyright on the “black American experience.” Instead, I refer to these things to highlight that my experience relates directly to the areas of identity and representation I analyze.

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