Winnie: The Opera and Embodying South African Opera

Full of grand highs and lows, there's no denying that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's life experiences lend themselves to drama.¹

Winnie is perfect opera material.²

Across a few days from 28 April to 3 May 2011, a few audiences witnessed the performance of a number of firsts. The first full-length original opera by a black South African composer; the nuanced and powerful retelling of decades of struggle history in music; and, at the gala evening, the surreal presence of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela herself in the South African State Theatre, Pretoria, a venue she wryly referred to as a potential bombing target during the struggle.

In what could seem to be an unlikely turn of events after the dismantling of apartheid in 1994, South African opera has blossomed into a re-invigorated and vibrant scene. Yet for what has now become a major new voice in opera (in less than a full generation), its history is unique. Unlike other countries on the African continent, South Africa has supported a continuing operatic culture that dates back to the early 20^th century. Formally, it was a non-black venture within the colonial and apartheid systems where the primary patrons, participants, and audiences were descendants of British and Dutch colonials, Italian exiles from the Second World War (including former Italian prisoners of war), and a variety of expatriates from Europe and the United States.³ Opera theatres allowed whites only and the formal opera culture attained through necessary training programmes and apprenticeships were prohibited to blacks.⁴ The informal history of opera in South Africa – which the research behind this cluster of articles helps to document – is that black singers, composers, and audiences have had long, albeit limited, exposure to operatic music through choral societies, classical music in missionary church venues, and educational settings. Though blacks were not allowed to participate in state-sponsored operatic society, a black connection to opera developed. The beginning of the new millennium, less than ten years after the official end of apartheid, witnessed tremendous growth in this arena. Mzilikazi Khumalo's pioneering opera Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu was commissioned by Opera Africa in Durban, and premiered in 2002, helped lead the way (Mhlambi 2015). Today we see the fruits of this activity as we witness the emergence of a South African black operatic culture. Black South African voices, bodies, and talents can now be seen and heard performing at the highest professional levels on opera stages across the globe. This South African black opera culture started in South Africa, quickly moved to Italy, travelled to Germany and the United States, and is poised to become a fully international phenomenon.

In addition to new productions of traditional operatic works (for example Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro performed in a European-style production), a number of operas have been generated by South African composers and artists with South African content and forms that are in flux between various definitions of western and African sound worlds. Though significant works in their own right, and undoubtedly contributing to the development of a South African stage language for opera, new productions of traditional canonic works fall outside the focus of the articles for this collection, but are considered in the research for this cluster and related projects.⁵ Worth mentioning is the extensive operatic work of William Kentridge, inter alia Woyzeck on the Highveld (1992), Die Zauberflöte (2005), and The Nose (2010), as well as operas such as U-Carmen eKhayalitsha (2005) and La Boheme Abanxaxhi (2012) – only two of the best known productions by the immensely creative Isango Ensemble, and the 2009 operetta The Merry Widow for the State Theatre by the Black Tie Ensemble based in Pretoria.⁶

As mentioned above, of considerable importance is Khumalo's Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu (commissioned and first performed by Opera Africa in Durban, 2002) that presented a mixture of Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu's own songs and material by Khumalo. Another venture based on South African themes by black and non-black South African composers was Five: 20 – Operas Made in South Africa, commissioned by Cape Town Opera in 2010 that engaged five composers with the brief of each composer contributing one 20-minute opera (Bongani Ndodana-Breen, Hani; Hendrik Hofmeyr, Saartjie; Martin Watt, Tronkvöel; Peter Klatzow, Words from a Broken String; and Peter Louis van Dijk, Out of Time).⁷ Commissioned by the Cape Town Opera for 2011, Mandela Trilogy (written by Michael Williams with music by Allen Stephenson, Mike Campbell, and Peter Louis van Dijk)⁸ was the more traditional original work in comparison with Neo Muyanga's mythical operetta The Flower of Shembe which premiered in Johannesburg in 2012. Ziyankomo and the Forbidden Fruit,⁹ Phelelani Mnomiya's commission for Opera Africa also in 2012, offered courtly intrigue in an African idiom. Madiba: The African Opera, composed by Sibusiso Njeza to a libretto by Unathi Mtirara (with the orchestration by Kutlwano Masote), premiered in 2014 at the State Theatre in Pretoria, but was unfortunately cancelled after only three performances due to inadequate funding.¹⁰

Up to the present, new opera continues in South Africa. The Afrikaans opera Poskantoor (music by Braam du Toit, libretto by Tertius Kapp) was performed during the Aardklop Nasionale Kunstefees [National Arts Festival] in Potchefstroom in October 2014. As these articles are going to press, December 2015 will see the premiere of a new set of operas following the Five: 20 model in Cape Town in 2010 with another collaboration between the Cape Town Opera and the UCT Opera School; this time they will feature four operas of 30 minutes each, Four: 30. These operas will be performed at the Artscape Theatre in Cape Town (The Application, Robert Fokkens; Blood of Mine, Sibusiso Njeza; Bessie: The Blue-Eyed Xhosa, Angelique Mouyis; and Anti-Laius, Adrian More). Kamal Khan, conductor and professor at the UCT asserts ‘We must constantly create new operas … There are so many exciting new singers being discovered in South Africa, but what will they sing? They should be able to sing their own stories’.¹¹

Winnie: The Opera presents a new kind of South African opera in conception, scope and production. This opera is notable for being a full-length, bi-lingual (English and isiXhosa) opera by a black South African composer of international standing, produced by a South African production alliance.¹² In this cluster of articles Innocentia Mhlambi reflects on the significance of African languages in South African opera and Naomi André engages with the politics of representation in post-apartheid cultural production. Donato Somma's contribution reflects on the relationship between the subject matter and opera generically. Suffice to say that Winnie: The Opera, while by no means emerging from a cultural void, is an important node in the accruing independence of what diplomat, scholar, and journalist Brooks Spector has identified as ‘a distinct national operatic voice’.¹³

As well as being relatively familiar with opera as a mode of treating South African historical material, South African audiences are equally familiar with a wide range of literary and scholarly ways to process the figure of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Cultural historians and other commentators have created a corpus of work along these lines – variously creating and critiquing representations of this iconic South African that range widely from historical contextualisation, as in Hassim (2014) and Iqani (2012), to biography, Bezdrob (2003), and its creative interpretation, Ndebele (2003), and her recurrence in the story of South African public life, Krog (1999).¹⁴ In the articles in this cluster we present several ways of thinking about, naming, and discussing Winnie. Her many names: Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela, Winnie Mandela, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela are all encompassed in the world that is presented in Winnie: The Opera. We see her for the first and last time as Winnie Madikizela-Mandela at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in the present time of the opera, 1998, that bookend the work. Yet, even this complicates time since the opera premiered in 2011 and lives on into the present time of performance; currently Winnie is still alive and is an active agent in history, outside of the opera. Inside of the opera, the persona of Winnie keeps evolving as we see her throughout her adult life as the inexperienced young woman in Pondoland who is about to marry Nelson Mandela, the tortured wife (who was jailed and physically beaten) of the imprisoned Nelson, the politically prominent ‘Mother of the Nation’, and the controversial activist as her name becomes associated with violence in the apartheid struggle. In our articles we acknowledge ‘Winnie’ as a real person as well as an iconic symbol: both shape her portrayal in the opera.

Winnie: The Opera uses the TRC hearing at which the title character appeared as the source for staging key points in her life that, be they private or public, real or imagined, shaped the person who finally appeared at that hearing.¹⁵ As we move through these key moments we are presented with characters that influence the formation of Winnie Mandela. Those that are based on actual characters from her life include: her ‘confessor’, the man she describes as a father figure in a later scene (words taken from her actual testimony at the hearings), Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Her tormentor and torturer, Major Theunis Swanepoel, who is countered by the alternately spectral and physical presence of her father Columbus, who appears first as a projection of her imagination and then as an active, real character in the Pondoland and Soweto scenes. Her staunchest devotee Jerry Richardson and daughter Zindzi are represented sharing moments of her activism, banishment, and trial.

There are also characters that are abstractions of individuals and groups of people that influenced her. Most abstract of these is the collective identity of the ‘Mothers of the Missing’, an ethereal chorus of eight anonymous, symbolic mothers in mourning who haunt interludes and transitional moments in the opera performing rituals of burial. They inform the Winnie that we see, working in an implied parallel dimension of the spirit, highlighting suffering and guilt outside of the main narrative. They often appear mute in the diegetic world of the opera, but also command powerful choral music that helps articulate their manifestation of death (see Mhlambi in this cluster). Their recurrence and influential presence contrasts to the total absence of any representation of Nelson Mandela and this sets powerful parameters for the ambit of the opera as the story of Winnie herself, not Winnie as part of a constellation of struggle heroes or the wife of Nelson Mandela. Both composer and librettist have emphasised the desire to tell Winnie Madikizela-Mandela's story as a stand-alone narrative both for its intrinsic richness and out of a sense of drawing on her life as a valuable piece of South African history that has, to a certain extent, been side-lined

Other minor characters variously taunt and interrogate, support and celebrate Winnie as the representations of forms of ‘hype’ that she has been the centre of through her life. These include the baroness (representing a shallow, nagging white liberal politics), the three counsellors who interrogate her at the hearing (who in their haranguing share many lines with more sympathetic characters presented at other times),¹⁶ her clanswomen in Pondoland, her Mandela United Football Club, the public at the hearing, and the pair of janitors whose Prologue and Epilogue frame the opera. Generically these characters lend heavily from operetta.

These real characters from Winnie's past, as well as the collective representations of anonymous crowds, clansmen and mothers, establish a realism for the story-telling that is further shored up by the almost verbatim use of transcripts of extemporised speeches and utterances at events from Winnie's life for much of the libretto. The scenes that are matters of public record – her words and actions at the TRC, Orlando West and Brandfort – are worked from transcript into libretto, and those scenes that were not public – her torture and the bride-price negotiations in Pondoland – are constructed using key character elements that are affirmed in the public record. These include the impression of Winnie as wilful, and of Winnie as having the power to utter words that affect the course of events (Mhlambi deals with this at length). These well-documented characterisations are drawn into the blank spaces of public record and underpin the essentially realist conception and approach of the opera. This is born out by the vision of her father and the presence of the Mothers of the Missing, who are clearly presented as outside of the ‘real’, as aspects of Winnie's psyche. Noting this has a bearing on a key aspect of Somma's contribution to the cluster, namely, that without producing copious words and speeches to place in the mouth of a fictional Winnie, the creators of Winnie: The Opera have relied heavily on the capacity of the genre itself to communicate a perspective on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.¹⁷

Genre is a principle marker throughout all the articles as the fit of Winnie: The Opera in operatic history as a whole, and South African history in particular. The use of genre presents an interaction between history, culture, art, and politics that go back to the early beginnings of Italian opera in the early 17^th century up through the present with black Americans writing operas about the Middle Passage and Atlantic Slave Trade, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights era.¹⁸ While opera as a genre has long been a space for presenting voices and perspectives of underrepresented and unsung heroes, the use of opera as a space for voicing black experiences in the present is a critical intervention for how black lives and culture are being represented on both sides of the Atlantic today.

The methodology behind this examination of opera in South Africa, with a strong focus on Winnie: The Opera, draws heavily on traditional opera scholarship as the authors believe the culture of opera in South Africa has a deep connection to the western opera tradition originally brought in through colonial exposure. Our articles include traditional musicological discussions of the genres and forms employed in the opera, the situation of its premiere performances, and the historical context for opera in South Africa. Recent opera scholarship exploring different paradigms of the voice, opera in indigenous communities alongside the European tradition, the impact of operatic settings and productions, and the broader sociological issues that opera in society can generate have also been especially helpful, examples include Abbate (2001), Karantonis and Robinson (1999), Levin (2007), Lindenberger (2010), Žižek and Mladen (2002). Our work is interdisciplinary and engages directly in emerging debates that approach opera from a wide range of disciplines.

In addition to traditional theoretical paradigms, this research also branches out to explore how opera expresses larger political, cultural, and historical meaning in South Africa with its specific legacies of colonialism and apartheid. While being introduced by the colonial encounter and shaped by the history of apartheid, the current South African opera culture has expanded outside of the tight framework of European opera into something that has a new meaning to South Africans. In his interview/conversation at the end of this cluster of articles, composer Neo Muyanga talks about the history of opera in black communities and asserts ‘it's indigenized … It's no longer a western imposition, it's indigenized; it's internalized by many, many people in our communities’.¹⁹

All three authors were able to see at least one of the premiere performances of Winnie: The Opera. André was also able to observe the rehearsals and dress performances during the week leading up to the opening as well as to speak with several members of the cast and production crew. All three of us had access to the Winnie: The Opera programme book that was available for sale at the premiere performances and our essays draw on information from this booklet. Especially helpful was the essay ‘Music notes from the composer’, written by Ndodana-Breen for this programme booklet, that provides analytical information about the opera (including identifying recurring musical themes, how these themes are used, and the harmonic language of the score) as well as information about Ndodana-Breen's musical influences. Through the generous kindness of William Wilensky (the principle librettist) and other members of the production staff, all three of us were able to consult the rehearsal piano vocal score of the musical manuscript, the DVD recording of the final dress rehearsal, and the libretto. We have not included specific musical examples at the request of the composer and librettists since this work may undergo some alteration as it is revised for future performances.²⁰

André’s article provides an overview of Winnie: The Opera in structure through a quick summary of the general action, some of the principal themes in the opera's telling of Winnie's story, and how these themes are staged. This article also presents this work in the larger context of opera history. Through a discussion of the political and national frameworks of opera in Europe from its beginnings in the 17^th up through the 19^th centuries, the use of vernacular languages (for example, Czech instead of Italian), nation-building, and the commemoration of important historical events have been central features of the conventional operatic tradition. As South Africans are now writing operas, these practices are seen in how the use of languages and the articulation of the nation through central controversial figures (for example, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela) implicitly follow in these footsteps. Moreover, the voice of the oppressed penetrating the mainstream can be further juxtaposed between newer African-American themes in recent American operas and South African artists presenting their stories in post-apartheid operas.

Somma's article argues that Winnie: The Opera is able to realise a version of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela the individual that registers as homage and critique in equal measure. Somma argues that opera as a form is able to comfortably contain this complexity because of the well-established capacities the genre has to simultaneously present what Foucault identified as historically consecutive forms of narration of identity: the epic and the psychological. Opera provides musical settings for the broad sweep of a political movement as naturally and as well as the intimate portraits of an individual psyche. The unique vehicle for these is the aria, and the analysis will reveal the subtle cross-referencing between the musical moments in two instances of the opera. In this article he offers an analysis of two key moments of the opera that demonstrate the capacity of opera, specifically the moment of the aria, to answer two related questions: what makes opera such a good fit for telling the story of Winnie, and what is added to the discursive space of Winnie by telling her story through opera?

Mhlambi's article examines the African aesthetics embodied in African vernaculars. She argues that these aesthetics nested in vernacular idioms bring about an admixture of perspectives which demand a full appraisal of the polyphonies and dialogism at play in the opera. Mhlambi also investigates the idea of an embodied discordance brought about by coexistence of languages in opera. Drawing from Diamond's (2011: 31–56) treatise of ‘vocables’ (inverted languages) in Sámi opera, Mhlambi illustrates the internal processes at play when diverse languages and music styles are intermeshed in Winnie: The Opera. Underpinning her assertions is the viewpoint which reinforces perceptions that when linguistic nuances are not easily grasped by audiences, particularly non-indigenous audiences, ‘the slippage in translation between languages and connotations that are directed to cultural insiders become forms of critique and agency’ (Diamond 2011: 55). Through this slippage in interpretation she analyses how Winnie: The Opera deploys isiXhosa language and the orality-derived performative traditions to problematise, historicise and question dominant understanding of its operatic subject, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. In this discussion new focal points opened up by the isiXhosa language and Afrocentric encodings embedded in the language take a stand, a Brechtian Gestus. This stance is affected by the stylistic use of Xhosa rituals, lyricism, symbols and artifice, songs and the actual speech in the opera that allows for an Africanist worldview or African discourses to claim and reshape the interpretation of the operatic subject despite prevailing views in the international public sphere.

In these three articles focused on Winnie: The Opera, this cluster in African Studies provides both an introduction to this opera, since it has not been widely performed up to this point (at the time of this publication, the only known performances of this work were during its premiere run), and deeper examinations of how this opera works. This cluster is not meant to be an exhaustive appraisal of the opera, but rather an extended discussion of one of the central works that defines the current vibrant new opera movement in South Africa.

It is here in the relatively unlikely location of the opera stage where black and white interracial collaborations and European and South African traditions come together to tell new narratives of South African history, culture and nationhood. In addition to this larger context, these articles focus on Winnie: The Opera as a case study for making South African opera come alive by going in depth into the musical analysis, observations about the first production, and theories about how vernacular South African traditions and languages can be embodied within this uncanny art form.

After we proposed this cluster of articles on Winnie: The Opera to African Studies, the opportunity arose to have an interview/conversation with another composer who is active in this black opera culture in South Africa – Neo Muyanga. We were delighted to add another voice to this discussion as we provide both depth and breadth to this exegesis on the current state of the vital opera scene in South Africa. Born in Soweto, trained in Italy and other parts of Europe, and well travelled in the United States and Ethiopia, Neo Muyanga is a composer who brings his experience as a South African in dialogue with the music and culture from other parts of the globe. He has been awarded the 2015 Composer in Residence Fellowship at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa) and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI in Irvine, California, US). In February 2015 Donato Somma was able to sit down with Neo Muyanga to have an extended conversation about Neo's musical background and his almost unintentional path into opera. His first extended musical drama (referred to both as an operetta and musical play), Flower of Shembe, was based on the life of Isaiah Shembe, the celebrated and controversial founder of iBandla lamaNazaretha Church of Zululand.²¹ It was premiered at the Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town in 2012 and later that year was performed at the Dance Factory in Johannesburg. During his 2015 fellowship year he has been working on two operas. The Heart of Redness, based on Zakes Mda's 2003 novel of the same name, that premiered at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town in August 2015. The second opera project during this fellowship year ‘explores the meaning of Mandela in today's climate of class and race tension in the aftermath of the killings at Marikana, Ferguson, and New York’.²² Muyanga's current work in opera reveals a space where opera, blackness, post-apartheid violence and democracy in South Africa, and the US-based ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement coexist within contemporary cultural artistic life. It is telling to find Neo Muyanga – a South African composer – looking across the Atlantic to the United States and finding connections in these articulations of power and dominance. These articles focusing on Winnie: The Opera, examine the history and struggle of a country through the kaleidoscopic lens of one of its most important citizens: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. The final piece in this cluster pulls the microscope back to peer through a larger lens at the multiple influences – musical, national, political – on one of the leading composers in this operatic movement.

Acknowledgment

The authors express appreciation to the Andrew W Mellon Foundation grant for ‘Joining Theory and Empiricism in the Remaking of the African Humanities: A Transcontinental Collaboration between the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa) and University of Michigan’. We gratefully thank the University of Michigan (specifically the African Studies Center with the African Heritage Initiative, and the African Presidential Scholars Programme) and the University of the Witwatersrand (specifically the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, the Music Department at the Wits School of the Arts, and the Department of African Languages). It is through the vision, encouragement and support of these institutions – carried out by scholars and administrative staff – who have made this international collaboration possible and so productive. We also want to express our gratitude to Catherine Burns and Dina Ligaga at African Studies for their interest and efforts in publishing this cluster of articles.

Notes

1 Emily Wither, ‘Winnie: The Opera: Mandela's ex-wife gets musical treatment’, CNN 12 June 2011 <http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/06/10/winnie.mandela.opera/index.html?_s=PM:WORLD>.

2 Brent Meersman, BBC World Service.

3 For more information on the Italians in South Africa and their legacy for opera after the Second World War, see Somma (2007).

4 There were a few exceptions to this policy; for example, the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town on the campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT) at various points during apartheid was able to have blacks attend theatrical performances. Yet this was more of an exception rather than a definition of black participation in opera during this time.

5 All three contributors in this cluster (Mhlambi, Somma & André) have works in progress and articles already published on this broader topic of opera and South Africa.

6 The quick sampling of opera includes the wide-ranging work of South African William Kentridge's work with the Cape Town-based Handspring Puppet Company (Woyzeck on the Highweld), his work for Le Théatre Royal de la Monnaie, Brussels (The Magic Flute) that later toured to other opera houses, and his premiere for the Metropolitan Opera in New York City (The Nose). André has an article on U-Carmen eKahyelitsha for a forthcoming issue of Opera Quarterly in 2016.

7 Various extant texts on a range of subjects. Cape Town Opera, Gordon Institute for Performing Arts.

8 With Michael Williams (libretto) and funded by Rand Merchant and Lotto.

9 Phelelani Mnomiya (composer) and Themba Msimang (poet).

10 For information about Madiba: The African Opera, see Brooks Spector, ‘Madiba's song: opera and the state in post-apartheid South Africa’, Daily Maverick 26 May 2014 <http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-05-26-madibas-song-opera-and-the-state-in-the-new-south-africa/#.VgcPqmRViko>. For information about the opera's cancellation, see <http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-27588244>; <http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/362781/lifestyle/artandculture/mandela-opera-cancelled-after-3-performances>; <http://mg.co.za/article/2014-05-27-mandela-opera-cancelled-after-three-performances>.

11 Homepage of the Cape Town Opera for Four: 30 <http://www.capetownopera.co.za/index.php/season/2015-at-home/four30>.

12 VUNDOWIL consists of Mfundi Vundla, Bongani Ndodana-Breen & Warren Wilensky.

13 See Brooks Spector, ‘“Ziyankomo and the forbidden fruit” taste great, shine brightly’, Daily Maverick 25 March 2012 <http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-03-25-ziyankomo-and-the-forbidden-fruit-taste-great-shine-brightly/#.VC-yV2eSy8A> (accessed 4 March 2014).

14 Also see <http://www.sabctrc.saha.org.za/>.

15 Winnie Madikizela-Mandela appeared before the TRC Commission in 1997. A number of evocative literary and scholarly accounts of the historical event exist, written from various perspectives (Krog 1999: 367–94.). An archive of the portions of the TRC hearings as they were aired is available at <http://www.sabctrc.saha.org.za/>.

16 Music appears for three in the score – tenor, baritone and bass – though only two appear in the final dress rehearsal and consequently the available clips.

17 See André ‘Winnie, Opera and South African artistic nationhood’ in this cluster for a more detailed outlining of the chronology of the opera's plot as well as the devices of continuity in the narrative.

18 See André in this cluster for more information about the African American opera scene in the United States.

19 See the interview between Donato Somma and Neo Muyanga.

20 For those not familiar with the tradition, the revision process is a very common procedure for new musical theatre works, especially operas.

21 ‘Flower of Shembe: A Mythic Opera about Faith and Destiny’ <http://youngblood-africa.com/collaborations/flower-of-shembe/>.

22 The events referred to in the quotation: 2012 Marikana massacre refers to mineworkers who were on strike at a mine owned by Lonmin in the Marikana area close to Rustenburg, South Africa. Over 40 striking mineworkers were killed by the police and many more were injured. This led to further strikes at other mines across South Africa and presented the most violence thus far since the end of apartheid. In 2014 Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year old African American man was killed by a white Furguson police officer which led to protests and civil unrest. Also in 2014 Eric Garner, and unarmed African-American man, was killed by a white police officer while being apprehended during an arrest while Garner said ‘I can't breathe’ (recorded by a cell phone video). These two events in the US along with other racially motivated violence by white policeman to African American men has led to the Black Lives Matter movement. ‘Neo Muyanga awarded Composer in Residence Fellowship’ blog post by the University of California Humanities Research Institute (22 January 2015) <http://uchri.org/blog/neo-muyanga-fellowship/#.Vfxq2GRViko>.