Behind a music stand in his grey school uniform, Khanya Mtala takes a deep breath. The shy teenager locks eyes with his teacher sitting at the piano and releases his powerful baritone voice. “You my soul, you my heart,” he sings in German, the melody of Robert Schumann’s Widmung (Dedication) resonating in the small room.
His vibrato suggests years of training, but the 17-year-old took up classical singing 10 months ago.
Mtala, from Philippi township, south of Cape Town, is one of 13 singers selected by the city opera’s Foundation Studio – a training programme for the next generation of South African soloists.
The teenagers, chosen from among 100 applicants from under-resourced high schools, share the same aspiration: to eventually sing at the world’s most distinguished opera houses.
Mtala fell for opera when the conductor of his school choir, Thato Machona, took pupils to a performance. “I didn’t care for opera until then, but that’s where the whole story changed,” he says.
When Cape Town Opera’s Foundation Studio at Artscape Theatre Centre, sent out a call for auditions, Machona encouraged Mtala to try out. “He saw the passion in me, that I loved music and I was a hard worker. I wanted to fulfil my dream of being a singer, and I thought this would be a perfect place for me to do that.”
This has been a year of firsts for South African opera: in May, soprano Pretty Yende became the first African artist to sing a solo at a British coronation. And last week Cape Town hosted the world’s biggest opera competition, Operalia, the first time it has been held on the continent.
“It is a great recognition of our fantastic singers, and of how this art form has evolved in South Africa,” says Wayne Muller, of Stellenbosch University. “The fall of apartheid enabled black singers to enter this white space.”
Since 1995, more than 20 local operatic productions have been staged in Cape Town alone. Many recount forgotten or unacknowledged histories of South African activists, royalty or prophets.
“We are a singing nation. We have 12 official languages, but we all share singing. And we use it to tell our own transformational stories,” Muller says.
In one of the Foundation Studio’s rooms, Siphokazi Diamond is absorbed in sheet music. The 17-year-old from Gugulethu township, 9 miles (15km) outside Cape Town, dreams of following in the footsteps of her idol, Yende.
“She’s proven to me that wherever you come from, you can make it big. It’s just hard work and determination,” Diamond says.
The singers get individual vocal coaching, music theory classes and language lessons to learn Italian, German and French pronunciation. And transport from their homes to the studio.
“These kids are super-talented, they just don’t have access to music education,” says Madré Loubser, who heads Cape Town Opera’s development division and founded the programme in 2021.
“Some of us started with lessons when we were four or five years old. They start at 15 or 16, so we are trying to bridge that gap. Some students take this opportunity and run with it – they turn everything into gold.”
For Diamond, who first saw opera on YouTube aged 12, “it’s like a door that was always closed in me has now been opened”.
She says: “When I’m here, I feel that sense of freedom. This is where I belong.”
The programme won an impact and equality prize at the International Opera Awards last November and one of its first students, Iviwe Boms, was admitted to the College of Music at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
“It shows that we don’t have to take a step back. Just because we sit at the tip of Africa doesn’t mean we can’t take up space,” says Boms, now in his second year. “And because there are so many excellent singers here, the world looks at us with different eyes now.”
The British conductor Jeremy Silver, director of the opera school, says that because of the “huge choral tradition”, the country is home to “incredible raw talent”.
“At the moment, there are two or three countries in the world where all the greatest talent is coming from – and this is one of them.”
Among the five South African singers selected for Operalia – out of 34 international finalists – four are alumni of the university. The fifth is still a student, although Luvo Maranti, 29, almost dropped out for financial reasons in his first year.
Having secured support from benefactors including the KT Wong Foundation, five years on, his booming tenor voice echoes in the rehearsal room during a daily voice-coaching session.
Maranti aspires to an international career, but wants to develop a vocal training technique designed for African voices. “Those who wrote opera weren’t thinking about an African voice; they were writing for German, Italian or French singers. But now the music transcends and goes all over the world,” he says.
“Opera is literally storytelling – and we have a lot to say.”
Two years ago, Maranti performed in Madiba: the African Opera, about the life of Nelson Mandela. His tenor solo was in his mother tongue, Xhosa.
“I had chills the entire time,” he remembers. “It felt like I was home.”
The winner of Operalia will be announced on 5 November
