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Inhabiting Whiteness: The Eoan Group La traviata, 1956

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2019

Juliana M. Pistorius
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Abstract

Active at the height of the apartheid regime, the Eoan Group treated South Africans to operas ‘in the true tradition of Italy’. The group relied on elaborate, naturalistic stage settings and the most stereotypical of operatic conventions to construct a hereditary link between itself and Italy, thus creating an alignment with the cultural ideal of Europe and its colonial representative – whiteness. This article offers a materialist reading of the Eoan Group's first operatic endeavour, La traviata in 1956, to argue that their invocation and emulation of the ‘Italian tradition’ served to situate them within a class-based discourse of racially inscribed civility. Drawing on archival records relating to props, costumes, advertisements and funding, it shows how the group constructed an imagined Italian heritage both to emphasise the quality of their productions, and to create an affinity with their white audiences. In this reading, the construction of an Italian operatic tradition functions not as a neutral aesthetic category, but as a historically situated politics of race and class.

Type
Research Article
Information
Cambridge Opera Journal , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 2019 , pp. 63 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

*

Juliana M. Pistorius, University of Huddersfield; [email protected]

References

1 ‘1965 Opera Season Advance Press Publicity’, 15 February 1965, Eoan Group Archive 2:10.

2 In post-apartheid South Africa, the use of racial terminology codified and endorsed by the regime is a controversial matter, and one that has no easy solution. The continued use of apartheid-era language serves to sustain semantically a system that has been discredited in every other way. Simultaneously, however, it remains impossible to write about this system without invoking the categories on which it relied for its implementation and preservation. For the sake of clarity, I shall use the racial classifications inherited from apartheid discourse. My discomfort with these terms, however, will be indicated first by non-capitalisation, and second by presenting the initial occurrence of each term between inverted commas.

3 In the absence of conclusive evidence, Roos, Hilde makes a convincing case, in ‘Remembering to Forget the Eoan Group – The Legacy of an Opera Company from the Apartheid Era’, South African Theatre Journal 27 (2014), 1–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, that this was the first complete Italian performance of La traviata in Cape Town.

4 For a chronological account of the Eoan Group's history, see Hilde Roos, ‘Opera Production in the Western Cape: Strategies in Search of Indigenization’, PhD diss. (Stellenbosch University, 2010).

5 ‘1965 Opera Season Advance Press Publicity’.

6 Correspondence, Joseph Manca to Miss Hasker of G. Ricordi, 18 November 1955 (Eoan Group Archive 29:200).

7 ‘The Eoan Group Arts Festival: Introductory Remarks by Joseph Manca’, 1956 (Eoan Group Archive 1:4).

8 ‘1965 Opera Season Advance Press Publicity’, original emphasis.

9 All primary sources cited in this article reside in the Eoan Group Archive, hosted at the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS), Stellenbosch University, South Africa. The Eoan Group's complete archive was discovered beneath the stage of the Joseph Stone Theatre in Athlone, Cape Town, in 2010. For more on the discovery of the archive and its subsequent transfer to DOMUS, see Hilde Roos, ‘Remembering to Forget’, 5–6.

10 Roos, Hilde, ‘Indigenisation and History: How Opera in South Africa Became South African Opera’, Acta Academica Supplementum 1 (2012), 117–55Google Scholar. Hilde Roos conducted the first exhaustive survey of the material in the Eoan Group Archive, which remains uncatalogued. She was also a steering member of the Eoan History Project, which conducted a series of interviews with former members, extracts from which have been published as Eoan: Our Story (ed. Hilde Roos and Wayne Muller, Johannesburg, 2013), and as a film entitled An Inconsolable Memory (dir. Aryan Kaganof, Johannesburg, 2013). Roos's own publications have done much to reconstruct the history of the group (‘Remembering to Forget’, 2014), to situate them within the broader history of South African opera production, and to investigate the role their activities played in the subsequent adoption of opera as an indigenous South African art form (‘Indigenisation and History’, 2012). I am grateful for the generosity with which she has shared her own knowledge of the archive. In the current text, I have not been able to take account of Roos's monograph, The La Traviata Affair: Opera in the Age of Apartheid (Berkeley, 2018), which was published after this article went to press; instead, I engage with Roos's previously published work.

11 Correspondence, Joseph Manca to Andrew Mackrill, 12 July 1955 (Eoan Group Archive 29:201).

12 ‘The Eoan Group Arts Festival: Introductory Remarks by Joseph Manca’.

13 See ‘History of the Eoan Group’ in ‘Programme, 1956 Arts Festival’ (Eoan Group Archive 29:200). The Cape Town Municipal Orchestra later became known as the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra; it is currently called Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra.

14 ‘Eoan Group Arts Festival: Stage Properties, La Traviata’ (Eoan Group Archive 29:200).

15 ‘Programme, 1956 Arts Festival’ (Eoan Group Archive 29:200).

16 ‘La Traviata Costumes, Principals’ (Eoan Group Archive 82:632); ‘La Traviata Costumes, Chorus’ (Eoan Group Archive 82:632).

17 Roos, ‘Opera Production’, 83.

18 Die kostuums was van die mooiste en deftigste wat ek al ooit gesien het. ‘Kaapse Kleurlinge Voer Italiaanse Opera met Groot Welslae Uit’ [Cape Coloureds Perform Italian Opera With Great Success], Die Burger, 12 March 1956 (Eoan Group Archive, Ruth Fourie Newspaper Cuttings).

19 ‘Eoan Group Arts Festival: Stage Properties, La Traviata’.

20 Abbate, Carolyn and Parker, Roger, A History of Opera: The Last 400 Years (London, 2015), 524–5Google Scholar.

21 Lowerson, John, Amateur Operatics: A Social and Cultural History (Manchester, 2005), 123Google Scholar.

22 Gossett, Philip, Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago, 2006), 452CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 ‘Advance Publicity, 1962 Opera Season’ (Eoan Group Archive 82:632).

24 Correspondence, Manca to Ian Bernhardt, 24 May 1961 (Eoan Group Archive 33:226).

25 ‘Photographs of La Traviata at La Scala’ (Eoan Group Archive 29:200). My thanks to Matteo Sartorio of the Archivio del Museo Teatrale alla Scala e Biblioteca Livia Simoni for his assistance in tracking down further details about this production.

26 Eoan History Project, Eoan: Our Story (Johannesburg, 2013), 128–9. My thanks to Mr Breytenbach for his kind permission to reproduce this image.

27 ‘The Wayfarer's Talk of the Day: Watching from the Wings: An Opera in Rehearsal’, Daily News, 28 July 1960 (Eoan Group Archive 30:208).

28 ‘Introduction to Opera by Joseph Manca’ (Eoan Group Archive 28:194).

29 ‘Eoan Group Call for Financial Support by Subscription’ (Eoan Group Archive 20:140).

30 ‘Advance Publicity, 1962 Opera Season’.

31 ‘The Eoan Group Arts Festival: Introductory Remarks by Joseph Manca’.

32 Gossett, Philip, ‘Critical Editions and Performances’, in Verdi in Performance, ed. Latham, Alison and Parker, Roger (Oxford, 2001), 133–44Google Scholar, at 134, 140.

33 Gossett, Divas and Scholars, 452.

34 Gabriele Dotto, ‘On “Traditional” Performance’, in Verdi in Performance, ed. Latham and Parker, 151–6.

35 Roos, ‘Indigenisation and History’, 128–9.

36 The PhD dissertation in which Roos first reconstructed the Eoan Group's history is entitled ‘Opera Production in the Western Cape: Strategies in Search of Indigenization’.

37 Sofer, Andrew, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor, 2003), 11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Sofer, The Stage Life of Props, 17, 11.

39 See Erasmus, Zimitri, ed., Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town (Cape Town, 2001)Google Scholar; Adhikari, Mohamed, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens, OH, 2005)Google Scholar; and van der Ross, Richard, In Our Own Skins: A Political History of the Coloured People (Johannesburg, 2015)Google Scholar on socio-political constructions and experiences of colouredness under apartheid.

40 Sofer, The Stage Life of Props, 24.

41 ‘Wm. Spilhaus & Co. Ltd.’, ‘Programme, Opera and Ballet Season, March 1958’ (Eoan Group Archive, Copies from Mrs Ruth Fourie); ‘Good Old Chateau, the Aristocrat of Brandies’, ‘Programme, 1956 Arts Festival’.

42 Gauntlett, Mark, ‘Theatre-going, Theatre Programmes, Tourism’, Australasian Drama Studies 22 (1993), 113–27Google Scholar, at 115.

43 ‘Morris Oxford’, ‘Programme, 1956 Arts Festival’.

44 See Van Den Berghe, Pierre L., South Africa: A Study in Conflict (Berkeley, 1965), 38Google Scholar, on the conflation of European culture with whiteness in early apartheid South Africa.

45 Eichbaum, Julius and Viljoen, Henning, ‘Opera in South Africa – Where are We Going Wrong?’, Scenaria 78 (1987), 23–4Google Scholar (Eoan Group Archive 62: no folder).

46 See Ndebele, Njabulo, ‘The Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Some New Writings in South Africa’, in Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture (Scottsville, 2006 [1991]), 41–59Google Scholar, on the exhibitionism of white privilege under apartheid.

47 ‘Operas Worthy of Italy’, Sunday Express, 21 August 1960 (Eoan Group Archive 30:208).

48 ‘Servants, Teachers in Eoan Group Cast’, Daily News, 12 August 1960 (Eoan Group Archive 30:208).

49 Lewis Sowden, ‘A “Traviata” of Irony and Enjoyment’, undated, source unknown (Eoan Group Archive 60:494a).

50 Turner, Kristen M., ‘Class, Race, and Uplift in the Opera House: Theodore Drury and his Company Cross the Color Line’, Journal of Musicological Research 34 (2015), 320–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 347.

51 Christina L. Ruotolo (2013), cited in Turner, ‘Class, Race, and Uplift’, 347.

52 ‘Programme, 1956 Arts Festival’.

53 Correspondence, Manca to Harold Rosenthal (Opera), 2 April 1956 (Eoan Group Archive, 29:200); Manca to Miss Hasker of G. Ricordi, 18 November 1955.

54 Correspondence, Manca to Miss Hasker of G. Ricordi.

55 ‘Programme, 1956 Arts Festival’.

56 ‘The Eoan Group Arts Festival: Introductory Remarks by Joseph Manca’.

57 ‘As iemand my haarfyn sou vertel het wat ek Saterdagaand sou sien en hoor, sou ek hom nie geglo het nie.’ Emol, ‘Kaapse Kleurlinge Voer Italiaanse Opera met Groot Welslae Uit’, Die Burger, 12 March 1956.

58 The Cape Argus, 21 March 1956 (Eoan Group Archive, Ruth Fourie Newspaper Cuttings).

59 Letter from South African Coloured People's Organisation, signed by Chairman Alex La Guma and Secretary R. September, undated (Eoan Group Archive 29:200).

60 ‘The La Traviata Affair’, 31 March 1956 (Eoan Group Archive 29:200).

61 Martin, Denis-Constant, ‘What's in the Name “Coloured”?’, Social Identities 4 (1998), 523–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 530. See Martin's Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town: Past to Present (Cape Town, 1999) for more on this topic.

62 Juliana M. Pistorius provides an in-depth discussion of coloured identity, its stereotypical treatment in apartheid South Africa and the impact this had on the activities and aspirations of the Eoan Group, in ‘Eoan, Assimilation, and the Charge of “Coloured Culture”’, SAMUS: South African Music Studies 36/37 (2017), 389–415.

63 For more detailed discussions of this article, and of the group's political reception in general, see Pistorius, Juliana M., ‘Coloured Opera as Subversive Forgetting’, Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 43 (2017), 230–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 ‘The La Traviata Affair’, 31 March 1956 (Eoan Group Archive 29:200).

65 On the politically prompted demise of the Eoan Group's music section, see Eoan History Project, Eoan: Our Story (Johannesburg, 2013); Roos, ‘Remembering to Forget’; and Pistorius, ‘Eoan, Assimilation’.

66 Kotnik, Vlado, ‘The Adaptability of Opera: When Different Social Agents Come to Common Ground’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 44 (2013), 303–42Google Scholar, at 303.

67 Gossett, Divas and Scholars, 452.

68 Dotto, ‘On “Traditional” Performance’, 152.