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Lindsay Johns explores the flourishing of operatic talent in post-Apartheid South Africa.

The operatic voices emerging from South Africa are extraordinary. In recent years, Pretty Yende sang at King Charles’s coronation, and Cape Town hosted the world’s biggest opera competition, ‘Operalia’. In the two most recent editions of Cardiff Singer of the World, Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha and Siphokazi Molteno have soared above other competitors.

Opera, a type of classical music often perceived as elite and the acme of white Western high culture, is now very much a black South African art form - and one of the country’s most successful exports. Yet in a nation still beset by racial and social inequality, not to mention poverty and an enduring lack of opportunity for the black majority, what accounts for it being embraced so enthusiastically by this, perhaps unexpected, demographic?

In Cape Town, Lindsay visits the Foundation Studio, Cape Town Opera’s training programme for the next generation of South African soloists. He also travels with the company’s Vocal Ensemble to performances in local neighbourhoods, including Langa, the city’s oldest township.

Set against these contemporary initiatives is a longer story of transformation – of opera’s survival through the turbulent renegotiation of the artistic landscape. Under Apartheid, opera was made for white people, by white people, and subsidised by the government. Post-transition to democracy, opera has had to compete on an equal footing with indigenous and black popular culture for state funding and has been forced to make itself relevant to the diversity of the ‘Rainbow Nation’.

Lindsay Johns meets singers, teachers, critics and locals to tell the story of a nation’s relationship with a colonial artform they have made their own.