Black Opera

by Naomi Andre

  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.

  My personal experience does not encompass what it means to be South African, someone who has lived through the horrors and eventual dismantling of apartheid, or a citizen of the new post-apartheid South Africa. My vantage point changes in this chapter and my point of entry has shifted so that I now write about an artistic culture that, in many aspects, I approach from the outside. For this reason, I have changed the type of analytical inquiry and structure of my discussion. My three-pronged investigation (who is in the story, who wrote the story, and who interprets the story) is still relevant, but my experience draws from a different reservoir. While it is possible for me to identify the subjects and creators for the first two questions, the depth of interpretation is limited by my non–South African experience. For that reason, I leave that level of textured analysis to my South African colleagues.4

  The strengths I bring to this chapter are the questions that place Winnie: The Opera in a larger comparative framework that includes the Western opera tradition, opera in the United States, and the representation of blackness in opera more generally. I locate my discussion of Winnie within these three separate currents in relationship to each other. Though they might seem unrelated at first, my initial purpose was to juxtapose the United States and South Africa in relationship to how the two countries are using opera to express new narratives around representation. However, rather than narrow my focus exclusively on these two traditions, it turns out that early models of European opera are relevant to the larger story around nation that I want to tell. In order to situate and contextualize how I have brought together canonic European opera, recent operatic activity in the United States, and the current opera scene in South Africa since 1994, I needed to construct a framework for discussing these three elements in relationship to each other. For this I invoke strategies that postcolonial and feminist writers have used to expand what is considered the normative—hegemonic and canonic—and have applied that to the landscape of how music in general, and opera specifically, are discussed.

  I have found helpful Homi Bhabha’s placing of “the location of culture” as an in-between space that allows previously ignored or oppressed voices to be heard alongside (and sometimes commenting on) the dominant narrative.5 His articulation of the “unhomely” where culture and the dynamics of power intersect is relevant for thinking about how black musical voices in South Africa are speaking to and about dominant and oppressed discourses. In my adaptation of Bhabha’s constructions, these voices include the presence of the physical bodies producing the sounds on stage, the stories being told, the sounds of the linguistic languages being heard, and the musical styles employed. The use of opera as a relatively new musical genre for black South Africans illustrates Bhabha’s in-between space where “unhomely” works combine discourses from dominant and oppressed groups into a new dialogue.

  In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center African American theorist bell hooks identified a common practice in previously silenced groups when they are initially beginning to find their voices in a public forum. Frequently a subgroup articulates one way of telling the full group’s story and leaves out other equally valid versions that should be part of the larger narrative. Originally writing in the early 1980s, hooks names the complications of developing a feminism that reflects the lives of white, middle-class women to the exclusion of other experiences around race and class, specifically the experiences of women of color and working-class and poor women. She imagines an expansive construction of feminism that includes a wider range of voices that can handle multiple narratives simultaneously. I cite hooks as a key voice, yet she belongs to a larger conversation that has included Audre Lourde, Patricia Collins, Alice Walker, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others.

  The model of the center and a margin that reflects a counternarrative existing outside the recognized norm is especially helpful for my explorations of how opera in the United States has developed over the past forty years. Most opera narratives have focused on the traditions in Western Europe. As the voice of American opera came to tell its story, experiences of the composers from the hegemonic racial/ethnic groups dominated the narrative. As a counterpoint to the energy Winnie: The Opera reflects in South African culture toward opera, I identify two leading voices who have become associated with successful directions in American opera: Philip Glass and John Adams. I then supplement this dominant discourse with a different narrative, one that is more inclusive of a broader portrayal of American experiences, represented in recent operas about African Americans who have been relegated to the margins into a shadow opera culture.

  Since the 1970s, opera studies have looked at representations of the “Other” in terms of an exoticized or orientalized figure. Based heavily on Edward Said’s Orientalism, this discourse has been framed around the power dynamics surrounding the West’s hegemony in defining the East as weak and subordinate. Though this paradigm was helpful in asking questions around who has the power to define whom, Said’s orientalism focused on the East-West dichotomy (invoking an exotic Eastern foreignness) and posit
ioned the primary vantage point as the West looking at the East. Music scholars have extended this examination to explore how the “exotic” works in opera, and the focus has primarily been on representations of the “Other” by Westerners working within the European tradition.6 Recent operas in South Africa give us the opportunity to ask different types of questions. This growing South African scene goes beyond being an issue of how the West represents the non-West. Here is a situation where the non-West is fluent in the musical languages of the West but is also employing additional “languages” in terms of musical allusion and sound, historical context, and cultural references.

  Through a different lens than orientalism, one way South African opera might be better articulated is through a newer paradigm, the Global South, which draws upon global studies and transnationalism.7 An examination of opera that opens up the Global South allows for a more comprehensive view of the North, specifically Western norms in opera, queried from a different perspective: the vantage point of South Africa. In this way, the Global South speaks for itself and in dialogue with the West as South Africa becomes an important producer of operas. Moreover, the vantage point has shifted; it is now South Africa that gets to redefine opera on its own terms through its adaptations of Western operas in South African settings and the creation of new South African operas.

  Cultural anthropologist Karin Barber discusses how genre can open up such dialogues between African, Western, and other non-Western forms of oral and written culture. While her inquiry usually focuses on poetry and theater, her compass of a “text” is capacious and brings together multiple forms of cultural and artistic practices that effortlessly include opera. Barber’s constructions of genre and text invite ways to think about South African opera as it relates to Western opera. With both articulations belonging to the same genre of opera, I seek to dismantle a hierarchical relationship between an original and a copy, parody, or imitation. Instead, I engage a theoretical framework that operates cross-culturally. In a helpful formation of these ideas, Barber writes that “genre is the principle by which texts converse with each other.”8 Later on, she further extrapolates, “genre is thus the key to the relationship between an individual work and a larger tradition.”9 Hence, we see how genre—in this case, opera—can generate the power to reach across culture and geography to create complementing narratives of black bodies, experiences, and voices on both sides of the Atlantic.

  With a specificity toward South Africa after apartheid, literary and cultural historian Sarah Nuttall uses the concept of “entanglement” as a “means by which to draw into our analyses those sites in which what was once thought of as separate—identities, spaces, histories—come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways.”10 Nuttall’s rubric for expressing the entwining and twisting together of disparate elements provides a fitting metaphor for the complications behind the genre of opera in South Africa. First being popular with whites throughout the twentieth century and up through apartheid, since 1994 opera has a new resonance with the black world as it writes itself into history through this same genre. In this use of entanglement, I posit that opera in the black world fits into Nuttall’s entanglement framework as it signals a counterracist move and works toward desegregation.11

  I have outlined a theoretical context to analyze the post-1994 opera situation in South Africa as it replaces a previously all-white practice with the newer scene in which black and mixed race South African stories and participation are being added to the artistic tradition.12 The question of opera as a chosen genre might seem jarring to some, since it could represent the height of white Western European elitism. However, rather than being eliminated and rejected out of hand, opera is being transformed to do different things. No longer a borrowed replication of a foreign tradition, South Africa—specifically black, mixed race, and white South Africans—is creating a new vision and function for opera. South African opera brings together a new interracial collaboration between white, mixed race, and black South Africans that present Western and traditional South African inspired narratives performed by the bodies and voices of all of its citizens.

  After this examination of how opera functions as a genre, my discussion of Winnie: The Opera looks to its immediate context in South Africa. Continuing the line of inquiry into how opera tells stories about mainstream and marginalized culture, I provide a brief outline of how opera has long had ties with political meanings since its inception in the sixteenth century (and especially in the nineteenth century, when opera was used to assert a country’s national identity in music and narrative). I then juxtapose the way the United States and South Africa have supported dual strands of opera making where the voices and stories of black citizens present contrasting narratives to the established mainstream and use the genre to write themselves into history. This discussion picks up on the construction of a shadow opera culture introduced in chapter 1 by exploring different shadow threads in U.S. and South African operas. The rest of this chapter will then focus on the case study of Winnie: The Opera to present the overall structure of the opera and how the work taps into different interpretations and roles for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela as a complicated and conflicted heroine and leader in the nation.

  Recent Black Opera in South Africa

  Though opera had been associated with white European culture in South Africa, black South Africa is now putting its mark on the form and structural organization of opera. The musical and textual meanings are now imbued with a new set of layered codes. Those familiar with the Western opera tradition can see the roots and relationships of the canonic repertoire in both the recent South African productions of the standard operatic repertoire as well as in the newly composed South African operas that began to emerge in the years immediately following the dismantling of apartheid. Mzilikazi Khumalo’s Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu (2002) and Bongani Ndodana-Breen’s Winnie: The Opera (2011) represent the two largest and most established full-length operas written by black South African composers within the first two decades after apartheid.13

  These two recent operas represent a South African operatic voice that is both modern and new—particularly since South African opera by black composers had not existed earlier. Moreover, these new works point in multiple directions simultaneously. They represent original stories—of two notable South African women—whose lives had been lived in the spotlight for the deeds of the men associated with them as well as actions in their own right. In the larger international context, modern women’s lives present a welcomed complement to the trend of male protagonists featured in recent operas by (who have become) the more mainstream American composers Philip Glass and John Adams.14

  Musically, the South African operas have forged their own voice. Both Western and South African operas employ operatic singers supported by a full Western orchestra. Frequently in the South African operas, the European orchestra instruments are complemented by traditional African instruments that have moments when they are featured on their own as well as times when they blend in with the full orchestra. The musical organization fits into a typical through-composed musical texture (used by many contemporary Western operas) that can be interspersed with strophic songs for diegetic moments when the characters onstage are singing a song. In fact, the presence of “song” is used several times in Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu, who herself was a singer, and in Winnie: The Opera, most notably during the end of the first half, when Winnie goes to Pondoland and the village women sing her praises. Though Khumalo and Ndodana-Breen both have their own musical sound, the general style is similar to a post-Romantic harmonic language that is present in most modern opera written since the second half of the twentieth century (for example, Benjamin Britten, Gian Carlo Menotti, John Corigliano, William Bolcom). By “post-Romantic” I am referring to a musical style that has points of tonality interspersed with less tonally focused sections and a frequent reliance on melody or a lyrical quality in the vocal line as well as the orchestra. While the South African ope
ras utilize classically trained orchestral musicians, there is also the use of traditional African musicians who play South African instruments.

  African languages (isiZulu in Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu and isiXhosa in Winnie: The Opera) are incorporated and give the operas a unique diction wherein the vowel-driven African languages, to a Western listener not familiar with African languages, can almost pass for Italian (the language opera was conceived in, and whose vowel-based nature makes it easy for the words to flow together). Yet intermittently the isiZulu and isiXhosa vowels (and consonants) are interrupted by the sonic marker of the “click” sounds that both Nguni languages share. To an ear used to hearing Italian opera, the “click” sounds shift the almost-familiar aural world into a stark new soundscape that highlights the foreign nature of this linguistic terrain. While Princess Magogo is entirely in isiZulu and Winnie uses isiXhosa but relies heavily on English, the sonic signifiers of the “click” sounds in the African languages, embedded within a vowel-saturated context, provide the audience with a syncretic linguistic experience, somewhere between Western opera and South African singing. These two South African operas provide a foundation for building upon Western opera in a way that opens up a space for African stories and histories to be told in their own African languages.

  How Opera Tells History: Narratives of Opera Past and Present

  The topic of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and the genre of opera might seem unlikely ways of articulating a new nationhood. Yet within the context of opera—both past and present—there is a relevant history about how the genre has provided a space for underrepresented perspectives. In narratives of Western European opera, this space has elevated such voices into the discourse of high culture while also providing a flexible medium for keeping up with evolving musical styles, musically setting different languages, and developing new narrative strategies. From the earliest days of opera history in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century up through the past forty years in American opera, there are similarities in how opera has gone about the cultural business of expressing national identity. This new operatic movement in South Africa finds resonance with the past and present in how larger national concerns can be echoed musically.