Hilde Roos. The La Traviata Affair: Opera in the Age of Apartheid. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018. xiii, 271 pp., list of illustrations, note on terminology, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0520299887 (hardback) and ISBN 978-0520971516 (e-book).

Abstract

Since the advent of democracy in 1994, music scholarship in South Africa has taken an editorial turn as more and more scholars such as Christine Lucia, Stephanus Muller and now Hilde Roos, focus on the neglected area of a particular kind of musical style regimented by the racist politics of colonialism and apartheid. In just about all music styles, fromWestern classical music through pop and traditional music, apartheid sought to organise respective population groups around specific music genres. Thus it was that certain styles of music, such as opera, in the case of Roos’ book, were reserved for white people, or, as they said during apartheid, “Europeans.” The focus of her book, The Eoan Group based in Cape Town, was established by Helen Southern-Holt in District Six in 1933. The Eoan Group focused on areas such as social work, ballet, and drama, but it was opera which set the stage for a great many encounters which speak to the personal, the historical, and the musicological. Under the leadership of Joseph Manca, who joined the music section of The Eoan Group as choral conductor in 1943, the first opera production was staged on 10 March 1956. The Eoan Group consisted of members of a population group identified as “coloured” by the apartheid government. Members were mostly blue-collar workers who had a passion for performing European operas and American musicals. Among them were Sophia Andrews and Vera Gow who excelled even as they were denied training by the best possible teachers in Cape Town. Performances by The Eoan Group received either praise or derision. Their class and “race” made it easy to invite comments such as them being musical despite adequate training or being able to thrive despite their “lack of education.” They were either caught in the apartheid projections of its henchmen, such as Manca, or, in perceptions of their fortuitous relationship with the apartheid government and “white money.” The book describes how most performers of The Eoan Group lived with these essentialist norms while negotiating the restrictions imposed around the production and reception of a music style, opera. Roos’ book addresses the issue of musical performance which unfolded, developed, and eventually perished as a result of apartheid policies and the resistance by some of the oppressed to these policies. Using Verdi’s opera, “La Traviata,” as the basis for her Yearbook for Traditional Music (2021), 53, 155–177