Long before opera was first heard in South Africa, and even longer before it took root there, the country had its own operatic figure. But Adamastor was not introduced to the rest of the operatic world until 1865 and the premiere of Meyerbeer's L'Africaine, where in Nélusko's Act III ballade the terrifying story is told of the Titan whose body, legend has it, formed the rocky spine of the Cape Peninsula and barred sailors from rounding the ‘Cape of Storms’ and opening up the sea route to the East. The literary invention – perhaps via Rabelais – of Luís Vaz de Camões, the great Portuguese Renaissance poet who himself was the first European artist to round the Cape, Adamastor appears in Canto V of Os Lusíadas (1572) and has exercised a considerable fascination over South African artists and writers. But to whom does Adamastor belong? This is a question that some, increasingly, have sought to answer, re-examining Camões's myth from an indigenous perspective – for example, André Brink in his postmodernist novella The First Life of Adamastor, imagining how that meeting with the Portuguese fleet would have looked from the landward side,Footnote ¹ and the artist Cyril Coetzee in his huge T'kama-Adamastor painting commissioned for the University of the Witwatersrand.

Opera's relatively young roots – no more than two centuries old – in South Africa have raised questions of ownership over the art form, too. Happily, the simple answer – that it belongs to everyone – is embraced by most in the ‘new’ South Africa. Opera's early fragility there, evoked a century ago by William Plomer at the start of his journey from angry young man of South African letters to librettist of Britten's coronation opera, Gloriana, is perhaps unsurprising. But the extent to which, only a few decades ago, opera was viewed strictly in racial terms remains sobering, if hardly shocking in the wider context of South African history. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that Hilde Roos needs to preface her new book, The La Traviata Affair: Opera in the Age of Apartheid, with a ‘Note on Terminology’. The La Traviata Affair is a partial history of a single cultural organisation, one operating within a particular racial group, so – strange as it may seem to outsiders – it is necessary that she immediately clarifies the use of the word ‘coloured’. Whereas in the UK and USA, the term is now old fashioned and offensive, ‘coloured’ in South Africa remains an accepted label that, as Roos notes, ‘includes mixed race but goes beyond this notion and refers to a conglomerate of diverse people and identities that were artificially grouped together during apartheid because they did not fit into easily identifiable racial categories such as “white” and “black”’ (xiii). These people of mixed racial descent, incorporating indigenous groups (including the San who greeted the first Portuguese ships) separate from the major black African tribes of Southern Africa as well as the descendants of former slaves from Asia, formed their own distinctive culture and community that was, and remains to this day, a major part of Cape Town's identity.

Few organisations exemplified this identity better than the Eoan Group, set up in 1933 as a cultural organisation for the coloured community. Taking its name from the Greek word for ‘dawn, ‘eos’, the group called Eoan – pertaining to dawn – strove consciously for an illumination through cultural expansion, and did pioneering grassroots work through dance and theatre, ballet and choirs, and most remarkably of all in opera. The Eoan Group still functions in some disciplines today, a quarter of a century after the advent of democracy, but its heyday overlapped – perhaps not coincidentally – with the high noon of apartheid. Initially based in the Cape Town inner suburb of District Six, in the shadow of Adamastor's mountain, the Eoan Group spread itself geographically in response to the forced removals from and eventual bulldozing of the area. District Six was perceived by some as a slum, and living conditions were certainly very poor, yet only in such a vibrant melting pot could the Eoan Group have thrived. Half a century on, Eoan's highly significant achievements are all too easily forgotten, overlooked now that South Africa has emerged as a vocal powerhouse for the international operatic scene; so Roos's book is a timely document that reveals the Eoan Group's very central place in the country's operatic history.

At a time when South African singers are in demand around the world – with a new generation that includes, to list just a few sopranos, such names as Pretty Yende, Elza van den Heever, Golda Schultz, Pumeza Matshikiza and Johanni van Oostrum – it is worth looking back briefly at the country's operatic history and to place the Eoan Group in context. Today there is not enough work in South Africa for all the singers the country is producing, with only one full-time company, Cape Town Opera, and a few festivals and organisations, such as Umculo, an outfit devoted to social development through music and theatre. In the transformation of South Africa since apartheid's official collapse – so rapid that, as the once-exiled writer Breyten Breytenbach observed, even former white nationalist supporters made a complete U-turn without missing a single goosestep – opera found itself marginalised. In several major cities it teetered dangerously and, in most cases, fatally, and while it was not hard to understand the new government's distaste for an art form so generously promoted during the apartheid years, it was depressing to see those who fought against racism quickly resisting multi-culturalism. Encouragingly, then, the battle cry of ‘Eurocentric’ seems to have faded a little more recently.

In 2019, Cape Town Opera celebrated its twentieth anniversary – a little misleadingly, since it grew directly out of the ashes of the opera department of CAPAB, the Cape Performing Arts Board, one of four regional councils set up to fund and control the arts during the apartheid era. Though one of the aims of CAPAB and its counterparts was to show the world – and convince white South Africans – how ‘civilised’ the country was, they promoted a good level of opera thousands of miles from the next operatic centre, and such international stars as Leonie Rysanek and Jon Vickers appeared in Cape Town alongside home-grown talent. CAPAB Opera had made its debut in 1964 with The Bartered Bride performing in the city's old and now demolished Alhambra Theatre. In 1971 it moved into the newly built Nico Malan Opera House (now renamed the Artscape Opera House), inaugurating it with Aida – an inter-racial drama played out for a whites-only audience. By the mid-1970s the theatre itself was officially desegregated, but the company was still unable to employ non-white performers.

It was in parallel with CAPAB that the Eoan Group performed. But the indefatigable Eoan ensemble had a longer history that overlapped rather with the University of Cape Town's Opera School (today still contributing to operatic life in the city and often working in tandem with Cape Town Opera, but with an interesting history going back to the early 1920s under the direction of the Italian tenor Giuseppe Paganelli). UCT's Opera School flourished especially from the 1950s, when it was headed by the Scottish-born composer Erik Chisholm and Italian baritone Gregorio Fiasconaro; remarkably, on tour to London in 1957, it gave the first British performance of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle.Footnote ² Looking further back, in the nineteenth century, opera was provided mostly by travelling companies from Europe, often in the city's early (and surprisingly named) African Theatre. Weber's Der Freischütz reached Cape Town in 1831, only ten years after its premiere in Berlin.

Such was the ad hoc status of operatic life in Cape Town when the Eoan Group opened its first opera production, La traviata, on 10 March 1956 that it is fortunate that so much documentary evidence of the Group's activities has survived. The Eoan Group Archive, having been stowed for some forty years underneath the orchestra pit in the Joseph Stone Auditorium in Athlone (the less than satisfactory venue adopted by the Eoan Group when it was forced into exile by the destruction of District Six), was lodged in 2008 with the Documentation Centre for Music at Stellenbosch University (DOMUS). No one commands this material better than Roos, General Manager of the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, who has already co-edited Eoan: Our Story, a beautifully produced oral and visual history of the Eoan Group.Footnote ³ Complementing this, her new book is meticulously researched and indexed, with appendices that are invaluable to anyone interested in this subject. The narrative itself is detailed, if inevitably repetitive: Verdi's masterpiece became the Eoan Group's calling card and performances are examined repeatedly.

In the lead-up to that first La traviata, choral works paved the way for music-theatre stagings, and the Eoan Group had been in existence for twenty-three years before it ventured full opera. It staged its first operetta, A Slave in Araby (by Alfred Silver and Stanley Guise), in 1949, the year after the Nationalist Party took power and ushered in the official start of apartheid, and by 1953 the Eoan Group had introduced Emmerich Kálmán's The Gypsy Princess (Die Csárdásfürstin) to its repertoire. In the 1960s it would go on to become the first South African group to present several musicals and one can only wonder now at the reception given to the powerful anti-racism message of ‘You've Got To Be Carefully Taught’ in South Pacific. Dominating all its activities, however, was La traviata: Eoan lasted almost twenty years as a regular opera-producing entity and Verdi's opera was staged virtually every year, in 1975 also becoming the last Eoan opera production. The rest of the repertoire was largely traditional, and nearly everything was staged by the Italian emigre Alessandro Rota. There were some exceptions to the standard repertoire choices, however, a notable one occurred in 1962 when the Eoan ballet section gave the world premiere of Stanley Glasser's The Square, the first full-length South African ballet and a work about gang life in District Six.Footnote ⁴

Throughout its opera-producing existence, the Eoan Group's achievements were met with a mixture of admiration and condescension, sometimes simultaneously when well-intentioned praise was tinged with paternalism. Reviews were usually highly complimentary. The idea that performances of such apparently high standard could be achieved by all-coloured casts was always deemed worthy of remark, both from outside and within Eoan. The group's music director, Joseph Manca, was not above a paternalistic approach himself. One of Eoan's white custodians, Manca (1908–85) was born in Cape Town to Sicilian parents and despite a lack of formal musical training (he worked as a city clerk, which perhaps instilled in him his skill for organisation and the tenacity required in the face of oppressive bureaucracy), he became a conductor with undoubted motivational powers. His somewhat autocratic style comes out in the many letters quoted in Roos's book, and his resignation in 1977 – a politically turbulent time, which had seen the death of Steve Biko in police detention and, the previous year, the Soweto uprising – does not seem to have been free of rancour.

The reception history traced by Roos is one of the most interesting aspects of her study, both for how Eoan presented itself and how others saw it. Of the inaugural La traviata, Manca wrote to London to Harold Rosenthal, the editor of Opera magazine, claiming it as ‘the greatest musical success Cape Town has ever witnessed’ and the cause of ‘a furore among the local musical circles. Ever since the first night, the whole city has been talking about it … Not only was this the first Coloured performance in the world of a complete Italian Opera, but also all booking records were broken’ (2). Rosenthal obliged by publishing a short and hyperbole-free report and a very handsome photograph.Footnote ⁵ In general, though, Eoan had only very limited international exposure, which means that this archive-based book is sketchy when it comes to a 1975 UK tour; it seems that no full operas were given abroad.

Right from the beginning, reception at home was mixed. The most high-profile critic was the novelist and activist Alex La Guma, who wrote a stinging letter to the Eoan Group:

The book's title itself is taken from the heading of a pamphlet, ‘THE LA TRAVIATA AFFAIR’, distributed on the streets in protest at both the response accorded to the production and a special performance put on for an invited audience including politicians. ‘We do not share’, the pamphlet began, ‘the amazement the columns of the daily press oozed over the recent production of Italian opera by a so-called “all-coloured cast”. We are not surprised that human beings can sing, dance and act’ (4). The pamphlet spoke for many when it stated, ‘The Eoan Group is befouled by an apartheid atmosphere’, but the situation was complicated. Since the Eoan Group relied on some government subsidy and worked within the system, they may in a sense have been stooges for apartheid. The singers certainly faced a dilemma when practising their art within existing structures, for their art was also their only means of self-empowerment.

These were indeed complicated times politically; even when in the 1950s the ruling National Party succeeded in removing coloured people from the voters’ roll, this disenfranchised group enjoyed relative privilege compared to their black fellow citizens. This was the era of so-called ‘petty apartheid’, but hard-core draconian apartheid impacted more from the 1960s. Eoan's country-wide tour in 1960 – met with queues for tickets and rave reviews – went smoothly and seems not to have required special permits, but increasingly this is a story of permission letters and segregated venues; seating plans show separate areas for different races. Eventually the public tended to boycott segregated performances but by the time the colour bar was lifted at least in a limited way (1975 in the case of the Nico Malan Theatre in Cape Town), the Eoan Group was in artistic decline. If in the slowly changing country this ensemble seemed to have already served its purpose, it is hardly surprising that under the new order, memory of it has largely been swept away.

Some names stand out in Roos's account, including that of the principal soprano May Abrahamse, who sang Violetta in the first and last productions of La traviata and in many in between. There were some stars. The tenor Joseph Gabriels, possessed of ringing, Italianate tone, left the country in 1967 and went to study in Milan, becoming in 1972 the first South African to appear at the Metropolitan Opera (a single performance of Canio in Pagliacci). Tragically, emphysema ended his career a few years later, but he can be heard on the only commercially available recording of the Eoan Group, as the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto in 1960.Footnote ⁶ The mezzo Judith Bailey so impressed Claudio Abbado that he arranged vocal training for her at La Scala. Perhaps the most internationally significant of the Eoan alumni was Gordon Jepthas, who came up through the ranks as répétiteur (later returning briefly to be Manca's successor) and subsequently appeared as a regular pianist in recital for such artists as Renata Tebaldi, Montserrat Caballé, Joan Sutherland, Leontyne Price, Elena Suliotis, Marilyn Horne and Luciano Pavarotti, before his death in New York in 1992. Other Eoan members such as the soprano Virginia Davids and tenor Ronald Theys have gone on to shape opera in post-apartheid Cape Town.

Roos's chapters are all headed with quotations from an English translation of La traviata's libretto and the dominance of Verdi's opera in this story makes the symbolic parallels she suggests tantalising; it is a pity that this thread is not developed in greater depth. As she points out early on, ‘Eoan's upwardly mobile social aspirations, resulting from its operatic performances, uncannily resemble the “Violetta predicament” of these endeavors’ (6). The way in which Violetta's relationship with Alfredo threatens the purity of the Germont family, that is, has a potentially fascinating echo in this apartheid context, where racial purity was everything. A greater exploration of this theme and more rigorous editing would have made this book a more rewarding read. Her prose frequently falls back on such phrases as ‘examining the documentation’, while it is certainly not ‘impossible to know’ whether the Eoan Group's Cavalleria rusticana was the first Cape Town production: Alfred Loewenberg's Annals of Opera lists a performance in Cape Town in 1895 and one in Johannesburg in 1905.Footnote ⁷ Some details suffer from unnecessary repetition and the South African currency (the rand) is variously abbreviated, sometimes in the same line, as R and ZAR; but all the documentation one could wish for is there.

‘Farewell, happy dreams of bygone days / The roses in my cheeks already are faded. Ah, all is over, all is over now’ (182). The motto at the head of Roos's postscript stands also for the bittersweet memory of the Eoan Group. Indeed, this book is perhaps best read in conjunction with the oral history previously cited, Eoan: Our Story. Yet Roos's book, so far the only operatic entry in the University of California Press's ‘Music of the African Diaspora’ series, represents a notable contribution to the growing body of post-apartheid musicology: one that looks back at a hugely significant part of operatic life in Cape Town that brought satisfaction to many amid the frustrations and deprivations of the apartheid era.