by Naomi Andre
Table 6.2. Structure of the opera in the premiere program
[Overture—not noted in the premiere program, but an orchestral introduction was played before the Prologue]
Prologue: Mothers of the Missing
Act 1
Scene 1: Gymnasium Hall—Johannesburg, 1998. The ninth and final day of the “Winnie Hearings” in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [TRC].
Scene 2: Prison—Pretoria, 1969. Winnie is tortured during her eighteen months of solitary confinement.
Scene 3: Hills of Pondoland, 1956. A twenty-one-year old Winnie tells the women of the Madikizela clan that she has met Nelson Mandela, a Thembu prince, and hopes to marry him. Members of Mandela’s family arrive for the ilobolo (bride price negotiations). While their success is celebrated, Columbus (Winnie’s father) expresses his concern for the marriage.
Intermission
Act 2
Scene 1: Brandfort, late 1970s. Winnie is banned to Brandfort in the Orange Free State and put under house arrest. Even at this remote location, she is pursued by the foreign press.
Scene 2: Orlando West Soweto, 1980s. A scene in Soweto with the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC) that is led by Jerry Richardson and overseen by Winnie. The MUFC performs a Toyi Toyi (a militant dance-like piece associated with the protest movement). Winnie addresses the crowd at a mass funeral, the police open gunfire, and chaos ensues.
Scene 3: Gymnasium Hall—Johannesburg, 1998. Back to the final day of the “Winnie Hearings,” where the TRC chairman, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, implores Winnie to apologize for her actions.
The version performed at the premiere was the one outlined in the program. Despite the fact that the second half of act 2 and all of acts 3 and 4 were condensed into act 2, the first half of the evening before the intermission (prologue and act 1) felt a little longer than the second half. The overall effect worked well dramatically and kept the pacing moving smoothly, with the second half feeling like it moved expeditiously to the conclusion.
The souvenir program booklet, available for purchase at the performances, provides the outline of the opera (yet with more description of each scene in the printed “Opera Synopsis” than I have given in Table 6.2). In the lovely full-color booklet, there are the expected lists and pictures of the cast, the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Gauteng Choristers, the production and design teams, and stills of the performance (taken during rehearsals). Additionally, there appear a few opening statements that are not usually contained in an opera stagebill. There is the “Foreword by the Ministry” (by Paul Mashatile, Minister of Arts and Culture, and Dr. Joe Phaahla, Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture), “A Message from Mrs. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela on Winnie, the Opera,” and “Music notes from the Composer” (Bongani Ndodana-Breen). This frontmatter provides official statements from both the government and “Winnie” herself that support the opera as well as provide a helpful guide from the composer for the audience to gain a better sense of the how the music is organized and what to listen for.
After a short orchestral overture (or prelude), the opera begins with a prologue that focuses on eight women surrounded in darkness and bathed in a glowing light. They are dressed head to toe in white, with white wraps on their heads and translucent veils across their faces.38
The Mothers of the Missing scour the earth, endlessly searching for any sign of their loved ones. These women exist in a twilight world of grief and longing. They gather fireside, and smear ash on their bodies as token of their mourning.39
Their costume takes its cue directly from Xhosa traditional dress, specifically Amagqirha (medicine men and women), a connection some South African audiences probably make instinctively.40 In any case, they appear almost ethereal and not fully of this world, making stronger their relationship to those living and those missing. Mothers of the Missing sing a multipart choral hymn that becomes a central musical theme used throughout the opera to highlight pivotal events. The gorgeous, lush sound of the counterpoint between these eight women’s voices transports the listener to a nostalgic musical place that feels at once new and familiar. Ndodana-Breen writes that the “Mothers’ theme is original music but borrows very heavily from the music heard at black funerals during the 1980s, where standard church hymns were sung very slowly with improvised added layers of harmonies.”41 As this mournful hymn is transformed throughout the opera, this first presentation with the richness of the female ensemble stays with the listener and becomes almost like a haunting memory when it recurs.
As a segue into the first act, the first scene opens with two janitor sweepers preparing the courtroom for the ninth and final day of the “Winnie Hearings” in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As the hall opens to the public, there is an explosion of movement and sound; the beginning of act 1 juxtaposes several layers of activity with the vibrant energy of the dance troupe depicting the paparazzi of the international media and the singing chorus, representing the general audience of South Africans who have come to witness the TRC hearings. While the anticipation grows for Winnie’s entrance, she finally appears off to the side, almost anticlimatically, at first hardly noticed by anyone else onstage. In mid-conversation with her daughter Zindzi, Winnie searches her purse for her glasses. This first image of the title character is telling, for it removes the hype that everyone has been set up to expect with a grand entrance. Moreover, the glasses function as a metaphor that comes back at the end of the opera in the final scene as Winnie, again looking for her glasses, seems to ignore TRC Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu when he is asking her to apologize. In the actual TRC proceedings, Winnie was reported to have been fumbling with her glasses; this was variously reported on as her defiance and distraction.42 I would like to suggest that this real event from the TRC is taken up in the opera and extended. In the opera, the glasses provide a metaphor that illustrates the clarity of Winnie’s physical eyesight and visionary gaze; these are the lenses through which she views the world. Her searching for her glasses signals an intention, on Winnie’s part, to try to see things distinctly not on her own, but as they are seen by everyone else. As a recurring image for sight (and insight), wide-open eyes—most likely Winnie’s—projected against a black curtain are presented between various scenes as a visual trope that takes the theme of watching, witnessing, and judging from Winnie’s experiences onstage to our experience as spectators in the audience.
The spectacle of the opening of act 1, scene 1 is followed by an intimate scene of torture, set several decades earlier in a prison in Pretoria, between Winnie and the prison guard Major Theunis Swanepoel, a recurring figure who follows Winnie throughout her life in the opera and who is determined, unsuccessfully, to extract her confession. In his moving aria, Swanepoel is not apologetic for his torture of her, nor does he try to explain his political philosophy. Instead, the critical element that focuses his character is the emphasis brought to his hands. The text of his aria explains how he sees his hands not primarily as instruments of torture but rather as the part of him that is meant to build, nurture, and help things grow. When he goes home, his hands are busy raising children, planting gardens, and fostering a safe community. The strength of his role is that he is not a caricature that can be quickly written off as a simplistic villain. This aria shows us another side of him that becomes more human. In essence, this makes him even more menacing because we in the audience want him to change—and he seems capable of change—despite his unmovable quest to bring Winnie Mandela down. Though he could easily be the villain in the opera, embodying the persecution by the white apartheid government, the opera is more complicated in its portrayal of good and evil. Swanepoel is the white government agent who physically and emotionally tears Winnie down year after year. Yet the real placement of evil is in the effect of that torture and how it transforms both of them. For Winnie we see the evolution of her youthful idealism on the eve of her engagement to Nelson Mandela in scene 3 of act 1, when she is first attracted to Mandela and his revolutionary cause
s, through the height of the apartheid struggles in the late 1980s presented in the penultimate scene of opera in act 2. For Swanepoel, his first-act aria from 1969 is juxtaposed to his later appearances in the second half of the opera in the late 1970s and 1980s, wherein he continues to harass Winnie; he becomes a parody of the moral compass he tried to emulate early on in his life and is reduced to an ineffectual specter that periodically haunts Winnie.
In addition to Swanepoel’s textual accent on hands in his aria, the opera visually highlights the trope of hands more generally. One of the animated short film clips projected onstage later on in the opera is the active image of moving hands that are building, shaping, and molding things. In a conversation with William Wilensky (co-librettist) I had mentioned the power of these animated hands during the animated short and how they seem to refer to several characters in the opera who shape and move the narrative along (particularly Swanepoel, Winnie, and Columbus—her father). Wilensky said that this short film was originally intended to be shown during Swanepoel’s aria, but the production team found it to be too distracting from the aria. So it was placed later in the opera during an instrumental interlude with no other action onstage. The decision to use the animated short later becomes very effective as it links Winnie not just to Swanepoel but to the two men who are shown to have the greatest influence on “shaping” her—her torturer and her father—in this telling of her story. (Though many might expect her ex-husband Nelson Mandela to play an important role, in this opera he is not a developed character and is a presence only referred to by others.)
The first half of the opera (act 1 in the program) ends with a scene set in 1956 that provides the earliest look at Winnie—twenty-one years old as she goes back to her home in Pondoland and announces her interest in “a Thembu prince”—Nelson Mandela, whose Thembu clansmen later approach Winnie’s Madikizela people to discuss the ilobolo (bride’s price) and celebrate the traditional slaughtering of a cow to seal the couple’s engagement. This scene provides a fitting finale to the first act with the framing of the opening portion with the all-women’s chorus and Winnie singing traditional songs in Xhosa and the closing traditional ilobolo ceremony with the full chorus onstage. The act ends with Columbus having the last word and singing his concern about his daughter marrying a revolutionary. His caution adds to the intensity of the drama, for at this moment in the opera we are most removed from the present. This is the earliest point in the narrative, just prior to Winnie’s becoming officially engaged—and we get to see Winnie right before she marries Nelson Mandela, when her role in the whole saga will be set into motion. Here the opera allows us to see Winnie, unequivocally full of potential and innocence, before she is who she eventually becomes.
One of the most powerful elements of Winnie: The Opera is that it takes us back to a Winnie the audience has either forgotten or never knew, a Winnie who certainly does not exist anymore. While opera Winnie comes to embody South Africa—as the ever-complicated “Mother of the Nation”—the opera brings us back to a point before any controversy. There is joy in the Madikizela women’s Xhosa hymn to Winnie in Pondoland; the language belongs to her clan, the music fits the fabric of traditional Xhosa song, and we are steeped in the tradition of the homeland. We are far from every other location in the opera—the TRC hearings in Johannesburg, the prison of Pretoria, her banished exile to Brandfort, and the township of Soweto. Here is Winnie, and South Africa, in the prime of their existence. The new role opera Winnie will take up as “Mother of the Nation” when she lives her life as Winnie Mandela in the second half of the opera is far from the unsullied memory this moment has recreated. Opera Winnie in her youth, just before her marriage as the soon-to-be “Mother of the Nation,” is juxtaposed with the “Mothers of the Missing” who haunt the opera’s prologue with their mourning and wailing of grief. A new identity for South Africa has emerged in this opera and we, as the audience, see the post-apartheid nation through the lens of Winnie: The Opera.
As South Africa defines itself as a nation built on post-apartheid values, the opera stage—as it has been in Europe and the United States—has become an arena for working out nuanced cultural issues around gender, power, heroism, and modernity. With the first full-length operas by a black South African based on the life of such a strong female political figure—Winnie Madikizela-Mandela—this new South African voice in opera resonates with the Western European tradition where women’s voices are specially marked and get to carry power and authority. As a political woman whose public life was also shaped by her private roles of mother and wife, her negotiation between the professional and domestic spheres are given operatic treatment that help shape new memories of a modern nation. Winnie Mandela’s courage, as the waiting wife for so many years when Nelson Mandela was imprisoned and in her own experience with torture, is juxtaposed with her admitted guilt at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. This opera, which boldly opens up an opportunity for a millennial operatic heroine—a divorced, convicted woman living today in a South Africa she helped to build—is not only modern in Pretoria but also for the rest of the world. In post-apartheid South Africa, opera has become a critical space that fuses past histories with current aspirations for the future while also engaging intersections of gender with race and nation.
Conclusion
Engaged Musicology, Political Action, and Social Justice
There are many hurdles to overcome in making opera more accessible to a broader audience. It is an old and revered genre that is frequently considered to be either elitist or overly intimidating. Since there is no mandatory music education that includes opera studies in the United States (and this is true in many other parts of the world), the genre can appear to be remote and exclusionary. While there are exceptions, most opera requires an orchestra in the pit, singers onstage, sets, and costumes; it is an incredibly expensive endeavor to pull off. Moreover, there are not opera houses on every corner, let alone in every city; it is often not easy or convenient to attend. If you happen to have an opera house within easy traveling distance (by car, bus, or train), the ticket prices tend to be prohibitively expensive for many people. This list of hurdles to opera’s accessibility continues. One of my goals is to show in print what I have experienced in real life many times: opera can be relevant, provocative, and empowering. Opera is an art form that has potential for being a site for critical inquiry, political activism, and social change.
Unlike the audiences for the very first opera performances in seventeenth-century northern Italy (in court theaters and a limited number of public theaters) that represented a rather small percentage of the general public, the audiences I envision in this book are vast. They encompass a diversity of publics and include the people I sit next to in opera houses across the world; my friends who are opera lovers; my friends who do not know much about opera but are willing to learn more; and the many students I teach in my classes in addition to music majors (I frequently have undergraduate engineers, business school and liberal arts students, and student athletes). These audiences also include people who attend pre-concert lectures, academic conference sessions, and other adult-learning venues; they go to university alumni camps and enrichment opportunities, they listen to National Public Radio interviews, and some have been incarcerated at the local women’s prison where I volunteered and team-taught women’s studies and opera classes for four years.
My approach to this book has been greatly shaped by feminist theory and pedagogies that originated outside the academy; these influences are reflected between the lines in the opening paragraphs above. I have long admired the capaciousness of many of bell hooks’s ideas. From the title of her books, such as Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, to her definition that “simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression,” to her stance encouraging scholars to write in a style that is easily accessible and readable, I have tried to use these concepts in the presentation of my ideas about opera and how I writ
e.1 I do not claim that “opera has to be for everyone”; I know it is a stylized genre that might not appeal to all people. However, I ask questions and frame my inquiry in ways that open up spaces for anyone who might want to learn more. I treat issues that opera scholarship has not deeply engaged regarding how race, gender, sexuality, and nation are contrapuntal voices working in ways that reinforce their coming together and at times in ways that seem to be in opposition. I argue that the identities of the opera’s creators (the composer and librettist), the interpreters (the performers onstage), and the people in the audience matter greatly and produce multiple simultaneous meanings of an operatic production.
A good deal has been written about the importance of understanding the background of a composer and the immediate context around the genesis of a work. On the other hand, the contrasting position has argued that the arts need to be freed from the weight that there is only one “true” interpretation locked inside the world of the artist. It would be an oversimplification to say that such debates have been resolved. There are valid reasons to want to understand an original performing context for a work and the composer’s intentions—as far as we can decipher and interpret—for thinking about a work. The contemporaneous aesthetics surrounding art are also central for gaining a deeper knowledge about how a work could have been seen and heard by its original audiences.2 Many of my colleagues have written textbooks about and will teach using such a pedagogy for understanding an artwork in its own time. I also have written about this approach in my first book, Voicing Gender, with the construction of the “Period Ear,” which explores the conventions in the early-nineteenth-century Italian opera tradition for understanding how a woman’s voice could be heard to sound as multiple types of roles across gender and character. A blameless female heroine, a woman who can do terrible things and still survive the end of the opera, and the male heroic lead could all be performed by the same singer throughout her career during the first half of the nineteenth century in Italy. Hence, understanding contemporaneous primo ottocento aesthetics for opera helps us see how voice types and character types for women changed over the nineteenth century; women were not only allowed to successfully challenge male domination in the beginning of the nineteenth century, but during this time women also frequently performed as male characters and embodied this patriarchal authority.3