Fases del Análisis de Riesgos

In the months preceding the première of Masque, Cape Town Opera provided Huyssen with a cast of three professional singers to sing the leading roles, of which two were black singers and one white, all of them previously trained at the University of Cape Town’s Opera School. The rest of the cast (including the other five leading roles and the choir) consisted of students from the Opera School. Of this group two were white and the rest (about 20 singers) black.

The main character in the opera, the African story teller, was sung by Fikile Mvinjelwa. During the past few years, he had already established himself as a professional opera singer in South Africa, singing major roles in operas such as Rigoletto, Nabucco, Tosca and Faust. Mvinjelwa is also an advocate of new and local opera and has sung a number of roles in contemporary opera such as Enoch in Roelof Temmingh’s opera Enoch, Prophet of God and also King Dinuzulu in Princess Magogo kaDinuzulu by Mzilikazi Khumalo. On introducing Mvinjelwa to Huyssen’s idea of vocal sound for this production, the

composer explained that the singer was initially rather skeptical. After some individual rehearsals with the piano without clear progress on this issue, Huyssen took along the uhadi player who was to accompany the story teller throughout the opera. For Mvinjelwa this was the first time singing with the uhadi in an operatic context and, according to Huyssen, the ‘penny dropped’ with Mvinjelwa the moment he heard the sound of the uhadi. According to the composer, the singer immediately understood the context of Huyssen’s thinking and was able to make a sound approximating Huyssen’s idea.

Mvinjelwa himself was rather careful in his own opinions, shying away from the emphasis on difference between European and African singing. In my interview with him, he said that he did not experience Huyssen’s idea of sound as a different way of singing:

There is no African versus European singing. In opera you have to project your voice, otherwise no one will hear you. I have done many different kinds of opera and have never used traditional shouting yet, but it is all opera.

However, Mvinjelwa was convinced of the merit of Huyssen’s thinking and assisted the composer in trying to convince and educate the rest of the cast in this regard.

The role of Sam, the blind musician, was sung by Skumbuzo Kunene. He hails from Swaziland and at the time of the production was a student of the well-known singing teacher Nellie du Toit. Kunene grew up in Swaziland, where he sang in the local choir and got to know opera by watching DVDs of Verdi’s operas. He fell in love with Verdi and singing this kind of opera has remained his career dream. Huyssen also clashed with Kunene’s teacher about the technique of singing required for the production, and Kunene felt that there was definitely a difference in the way Nellie du Toit taught him to sing and what was expected from him in Masque. According to Kunene, Huyssen wanted him to ‘shriek and shout’, which hurt his voice. The composer and singer nevertheless came to some kind of compromise and he did experience the opera as a good production.

On questioning one of the white singers, Arthur Swan, yet another point of view surfaced. Swan also did not like to focus on the differentiation between African and European voice production and said: ‘that would be a white man’s idea of what a black voice is’.

According to him Huyssen also expected him to shout and shriek at times, but he

negotiated with the composer, told him that he could not do that and Huyssen accepted his reasoning. Swan referred to Mvinjelwa’s actual singing as ‘shouting and shrieking at a

pitch’.59 Referring to the opera on a compositional level, Swan was not convinced of the story as such and also did not know what to make of terminology such as ‘indigenous opera’. He also mentioned that the voice parts were not composed in an accessible way with many difficult rhythms and leaps. The only white female singer in this production, Sophie Harmse (also an established singer in Cape Town), was outright negative about the opera and condemned the work as ‘junk’ and ‘incoherent’.

What does one make of these diverging opinions? The fieldwork presented evidence of a certain ambivalence or reluctance amongst singers, white and black, to accept and fully engage with the concept of ‘indigenous African singing’ as a technique in the operatic arena. On the aesthetic level one may assume that the perceived reluctance derives in part from the all-too common skepticism towards any new music, a skepticism which was also prevalent in a number of reviews, especially those printed in Die Burger.

There is of course the matter of education. Again the composer had a clear opinion on this: he felt that singing education at South African institutions was insufficient and one-

dimensional. According to him singers at the Cape Town Opera School are only taught to sing in the style of nineteenth-century Romantic opera, with Pavarotti and Domingo as role models.60 Huyssen further explained that in Europe singers are exposed to a much wider frame of reference during their training and a good singer can produce any kind of sound when asked to do so. This seems fair enough, but would such a desired production of sound reflect ‘an authentic African voice’, or rather a highly cultivated European imagining of what an African voice may sound like? Perhaps Huyssen had in mind the kind of voice that could for example also perform Sequenza by Berio and one might be entitled to ask: is singing like an African man an approximation of ‘authentic African voice’, or just another technique in the repertoire of the twenty-first century’s treasury of sound effects?

Perhaps most interesting though, it emerged that neither the composer nor the singers were able to describe in technical terms how to produce this African voice, in the same way that one can technically describe how to use European voice. The composer was not able to describe it in more accurate terms other than ‘vibratoless singing’, ‘from the stomach’ or

59 _{There is, incidentally, no hint in the notated music of this desired sound effect.}

60 _{Since the Cape Town Opera School’s inception in 1920s, the school has been run predominantly} by Italians.

‘in the moment’. One suspects that he assumed that the African singers would, with these words, understand what kind of sound he had in mind. He may have assumed that the sound of for instance the uhadi resembled that of a distant memory, called up by the

association with the indigenous instrument. His experience with Mvinjelwa, who had some understanding of it after hearing the sound of the uhadi, indicates this. But, perhaps the appeal of African voice lies on the level of ‘origin myth’, so common in writing and thinking on South African music. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in a comment the composer made during the run-up to the première: ‘As a white composer in South Africa, I write an opera about indigenous African culture. I ask an African singer to sing like an African man, but he does not want to, he wants to sing like a white man.’61