Wed, Mar 24, 2004 page16

• S Africa celebrates an ode to freedom

  Beethoven's opera about political repression, to be held on Robben Island, is intended to celebrate 10 years of democracy in South Africa

  • DPA
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  The parallels between Ludwig von Beethoven's opera about love, hardship, fraternity and liberation and South Africa's anti-apartheid struggle were too great to resist.

  The former penal Robben Island off the southern African coast that counts Nelson Mandela among its former inmates provided the ideal setting for Fidelio.

  Beethoven's only operatic offering is to be staged on the island March 27 before an audience of 900 people as one of the country's biggest and most expensive dramatic arts productions.

  Fidelio on Robben Island is intended to mark the end of South Africa's first decade as a democracy and Norway's 100 years of independence.

  It is a collaboration between producers from Cape Town Opera and the Norwegian National Opera. Heinz Fricke of the Washington Opera will conduct the outdoor event.

  "It began with the realization that what had happened on the island and what it stood for was an exact parallel of what Beethoven tried to say in his incredible masterpiece," says director Professor Angelo Gobbato.

  Beethoven wrote Fidelio in the aftermath of the French Revolution but used Spain during the 18th century as its setting. It is the story of Leonore, a woman who enters a prison in disguise -- as a Fidelio, a youth -- to search for her political prisoner husband, Florestan.

  She finds him in a dungeon where he is about to be murdered. Her actions bring about his liberation and that of other political prisoners.

  Robben Island, 11km off the Cape coast, is South Africa's "symbolic prison." Between the early 1960s and 1991 it held around 2,500 political prisoners and an undetermined number of common criminals.

  In colonial times political leaders from the indigenous Khoisan tribes and Dutch East India (today's Indonesia) were incarcerated there.

  The prison courtyard, adjacent to the block where the tiny cell in which Nelson Mandela spent 17 of his 27 years as prisoner 46664 for high treason is located, provides the center stage.

  As a popular tourist destination since 1997, the island has had more more than a million international visitors.

  Fidelio on Robben Island follows in the vein of operatic works played out in their relevant settings, like Guiseppe Verdi's Aida in Egypt and Giancomo Puccini's Turandot in China, says Gobbato.

  "Seating has been arranged in such a way so as not to dominate the courtyard and keep the feeling of the island and the prison yard for the audience," says Gobbato.

  South Africa's internationally acclaimed soprano Elizabeth Connell, Norwegian singers Carsten Stabell and Trond Halstein Moe and Cuban Moises Parker have been cast in the leading roles.

  The work also includes performances by some of the rising black voices in a country where opera is shedding its elitist image.

  Among them are Abel Moeng, Linda Bukhosini and Bongani Tembe.

  They will be accompanied by the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra and the Cape Town Opera of the Nation Chorus.

  The event that is jointly funded by South Africa, Norway and the European Union is to be recorded for international broadcast.

  Gobbato is widely credited with helping opera carve a secure place on the local arts scene over the last decade that has seen a growing number of black opera singers including a former street sweeper who took up the

  profession.

  "Essentially the high arts -- opera, the symphony, ballet -- had the support of the old apartheid system. So, support for opera had always been seen as support for the previous system," he explained.

  "The South African people adore operatic sounds. They want to sing and do so with their souls," he said. "Just when everything seems impossible -- as in Fidelio -- there is a dramatic turn, and freedom," he says.

  There have been hints that Africans are able to tell their own stories through the medium of opera, says Professor Christine Lucia, a musicologist and head of undergraduate studies at the Witwatersrand University School of the Arts.

  The first indigenous opera, Princess Magogo, took to the stage recently. The Zulu production sparked wide interest among many for whom opera is a "Eurocentric" pastime.
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