The South African soprano Pretty Yende grew up in a small town in eastern South Africa, 8,000 miles from where she sang on Saturday at the coronation of King Charles III.
“Generations from now they will read about the British monarchs … and they’ll see the name of a girl from the tip of Africa written in there,” the 38-year-old said last week.
At the coronation, Yende, wearing a spectacular yellow dress, performed Sacred Fire, a new piece written by the British composer Sarah Class for the occasion.
Yende is the first African to sing solo at a British coronation. Millions watched the ceremony, almost certainly the biggest audience in Yende’s career so far and a “dream come true”, she said last week.
Born in 1985 under South Africa’s racist and repressive apartheid regime, Yende was surrounded by music from an early age, singing gospel music in church in her hometown of Piet Retief, now eMkhondo, in the far east of the country.
She remembers musical evenings with her family while washing dishes after dinner – but it was during long walks to church with her asthmatic grandmother that Yende, aged five at the time, perfected her pitch.
“When we took breaks she would open the hymn book from our church and teach me these songs,” she said, recalling the fear of then being told to perform them for the congregation. “I was very shy … but I didn’t want to disappoint my grandmother.”
Community and school choirs also played an important role in developing Yende’s musical talent, discipline and skills.
Then, in 2001, aged 16, she heardLéo Delibes’s operatic Flower Duet on a British Airways advert, which changed her life, leading her to abandon plans to train as an accountant and setting her on a path to musical stardom.
Opera “is a gift to humanity and there’s something divine about it too”, Yende said, adding that she hoped her performance on Saturday would encourage more people to try it.
Yende won a national schools championship in South Africa singing Mozart, then studied at the South African College of Music, and at La Scala in Milan. She has since starred in productions across the world and released a debut album in 2016. Reviewers have praised her “somersaulting vocal agility” and “fearless, can-do singing”.
“For someone with no foundational classical education, to go on to sing in French, Italian and German … reveals how [Yende] has triumphed against the limitations of both empire and the legacy of apartheid’s lack of opportunities for Black South Africans,” wrote Thembela Vokwana, an expert in opera in Africa at the University of Fort Hare, on the website the Conversation.
Yende joins a new wave of young South African artists who have made a major impact on the classical music scene in Europe and the US, appearing at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the Paris Opera. She also sang at the closing concert of the 2010 World Cup in her homeland.
In 2021, the singer accused French immigration authorities of “outrageous racial discrimination” after being detained, strip-searched and held in a dark room at Paris’s main airport on her way to take her starring role in Bellini’s opera La Sonnambula, at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The experience was traumatising and scary, Yende wrote. Authorities said the procedure followed was normal for any passenger arriving without a visa. Yende and her lawyer said the singer had the correct travel documents.
Yende first met King Charles when she was invited to perform at Windsor Castle by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra last year.
Some critics had called on her to boycott the coronation in protest at Britain’s colonial past. But she said: “I see each and every opportunity I get as a possibility for my gift to reconcile, to heal, to love, to give joy, to give hope and to give dreams for the future. We cannot change the past but each generation … with a small action can give hope for tomorrow.”
Speaking before the coronation last week she said: “I feel very, very honoured because it is something that has never happened before.”
