Bongani Tembe’s journey from Umlazi to the opera house

Having been bitten by the orchestral bug and then trying to break into the opera scene, the question that perennially haunted 18-year-old Bongani Tembe was “Can you read music?”

He was asked this question at every turn, and it nearly put paid to his lifelong ambition. Here was a young man who undoubtedly had the voice, but could not read a musical score to save his life. However, acquiring this skill as a black person growing up under apartheid, surrounded by barriers at every turn, was near impossible.

Nevertheless, today Tembe is the unlikely main proponent of South African orchestral music, and perhaps its most recognisable face. He leads the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra (KZNPO), the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra (JPO), and the Mzansi National Philharmonic Orchestra (MNPO), which performed at President Cyril Ramaphosa’s inauguration last month.

The high point of his quest to promote orchestral music — not only in South Africa, but also on the continent — will be the Africa United Youth Orchestra (AUYO), comprising young orchestral players from several African countries. The 65-strong ensemble, the first of its kind, will make its debut in Pretoria at Unisa’s ZK Matthews Hall on July 28, ahead of its appearance at New York’s Carnegie Hall on August 3, where it will be a main feature at the World Orchestra Week festival. The event will bring together youth orchestras from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.

The AUYO’s performance will highlight groundbreaking works by iconic South African composers such as Michael Mosoeu Moerane and Mzilikazi Khumalo.

Included in the programme will be Moerane’s Fatshe La Heso (My Country), followed by arias from Khumalo’s uShaka kaSenzangakhona and Princess Magogo (the first Zulu opera), sung by South African sopranos Goitsemang Lehobye and Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha. Audiences will also be entertained by Bongani Ndodana-Breen’s Three Orchestral Songs on Poems of Ingrid Jonker.

We meet the Durban-based Tembe in the lobby of a hotel in Johannesburg, where, amid his busy schedule, he is attending a board meeting of the JPO.

Looking back, Tembe’s upbringing in the Durban townships of Lamontville (his birthplace) and Umlazi (where he grew up) — and where the music of Brenda Fassie, mbhaqanga and isicathamiya were the soundtrack to his life — seems light years away. His interest in music was piqued by both his family and the church. For his musical success he also credits his alma mater, Menzi High School, which had “one of the best choirs in the country”.

“My mother and father worked for the Assemblies of God church. We were always singing, either at home or in church. Music was planted in my heart that way,” he says.

“One day, I was fascinated to hear Mario Lanza playing from one of my parents’ records. He sang I’ll Walk with God and The Lord’s Prayer. Hearing his passion and voice, I thought, ‘Eish, I must find someone to train me to sing like this man.’”

And so began his quest to acquire formal training in orchestral and classical music. Standing between him and his dream was the distressing paradox of his having a formidable singing voice (which later made him a leading tenor) but being musically illiterate. “I’d never watched opera in my life and didn’t even know the word. I thought it sounded nice, but I never imagined I could pursue it professionally. It was just the love. I was driven by the passion. Often the people I asked for help from would ask me, ‘Can you read music?’ I told them I couldn’t read music, but I was serious about [pursuing] it,” he says, recalling how his life’s ambition was nearly crushed.His big break came when he was referred to and landed a slot to learn music under Anthony Hannan, who had also asked him about his musical literacy.

This would unleash his stellar career as a classical performer, artistic director and leading administrator in the arts, and see him picking up a master’s degree from the prestigious Juilliard School of Music in New York along the way.Before 1988, when Tembe went to Juilliard, blacks could not study at “white” higher education institutions, including those teaching music, without government permission.

Of his early days as a singer, he remembers with pride his principal role in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman in 19876. “I was the first black person to be cast in a principal role in South Africa. It was the first opera the SABC televised in its entirety live.”

Tembe says that — in contrast with the early days, when he was still knocking on the door and asking to be let in as a black person and an outsider — the opera scene has changed significantly. “I think there’s been an incredible improvement. There were times in opera productions in the early 1980s when Linda Bukhosini and I were the only black people in a cast of more than 100 people. Today, when you stage an opera, a minimum of 80% of the cast is black. You’ve had South African opera singers, both black and white, do very well across Europe — artists such as Pretty Yende, as well as many others.” (Bukhosini, a leading soprano in her own right, ended up marrying Tembe, and is currently CEO of The Playhouse Company in Durban)

“People used to say opera is a white thing. But what’s opera? You choose a story, and the composer sets music to it, and then you hire people. A genre is not a white or black thing. It’s like saying film is a white thing just because 60 years ago the stories were all about white people. I’m glad we did something like uShaka kaSenzangakhona. We’ve done one about Winnie Mandela composed by Bongani Ndodana-Breen, as well as one about Nelson Mandela.”

Similarly, he says, “big strides” have been made on the orchestral front, “but there’s still a long way to go”. “When it comes to the national orchestra — depending on what project we are doing and who is available — black people make up 45-55% of the players. Women are roughly 50-55%. It’s a huge improvement in terms of diversity.”

What will help speed up change, he says, is the cadetship programme he started in 1998 with the KZNPO, which has now been embraced by the national as well as the provincial orchestras. He says more than 60 South Africans who have gone through the programme have gained full employment in South African orchestras, and a few of them internationally.

We turn to Tembe’s pet project — the AUYO, built around the MNPO. “We are using the arts — in this case, orchestral music — to unite the young people of Africa. It’s going to be exciting having all these young people from across Africa get together to share music.”

Extolling music’s nation-building capacities, he says: “South Africa is a young democracy that is still defining itself. We have different views about what it means to be a South African. The Americans, the English and the Australians know what it means to be American, English and Australian — and this is mostly related to cultural things. “It was easier in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Mandela defined us. More than just a political leader, he was a cultural icon. His main project, among others, was reconciliation. Bishop [Desmond] Tutu’s was ubuntu [you are because I am]. Now that they are both gone, we are scrambling. The question we need to ask ourselves is ‘What does it mean to be a South African?’

“While sport is great at uniting people [as the Springboks have done], in arts and culture there are no winners and losers. At the end of a show, everybody is happy, but at the end of a sports match, somebody is crying. However, you can’t deny the power of sport to bring us together,” he says with a chuckle.

His other obsession is promoting excellence in the arts, which he says can rub off on society generally. And so from time to time he invites South African musicians who have made an impact abroad to give performances at home. “There was a time when ‘excellence’ was like a swear word in South Africa. This idea of promoting excellence is very important for the country across the board. We mustn’t be satisfied with mediocrity. If you talk of excellence, some people think you are trying to exclude black people or people in underserviced communities. But who says those people are not capable of excellence? Anything done at the highest level appeals to all of us. The arts play this role of engendering excellence in society.”

So how did Bongani Tembe, the famous tenor, segue into management? “When I came back from the US after Juilliard in 1994, the landscape had changed. There were now very few opera productions compared with before. In fact, some people were saying we should close down theatres and opera houses, as well as specific genres such as ballet and opera, because they served only white people. But Linda and I said, ‘No, don’t close them — rather transform them.’ Our view was that there was nothing wrong with Handel’s Messiah, but we also needed to perform music and put on artistic productions that reflected our own heritage. We recognised that to make an impact you had to be involved in management. We said, ‘Other than just protesting, we should get involved and be part of the change.’”

It was The Playhouse Company that provided Tembe with the first opportunity to dirty his hands in management. Together with the late Mbongeni Ngema and Glen Mashinini (the former Electoral Commission of South Africa chair), he Tembe joined the The Playhouse Company as a director.

His association with the JPO, which had gone into business rescue, started in 2014 as a short-term project involving “running a workshop and drafting a business plan”, done at the invitation of its board. It led to his appointment in 2016 as its CEO, with former deputy chief justice Dikgang Moseneke as its chair. Later, he became the force behind the formation of the MNPO, which is funded by the department of sports, arts and culture. This orchestra, he says, aims to use music to promote social cohesion and nation-building, as well as harness the skills of young orchestral players and increase the available talent pool across all races. It also aims to build South Africa’s brand in Africa and around the world.

“A six-year-old kid in Soweto must be able to pick up a violin and say, ‘One day I can play for the Johannesburg Youth Orchestra, progress to the JPO, and possibly play for the MNPO’,” says Tembe, 61.

Perhaps then the aspirations of disadvantaged young musicians won’t be jeopardised by the dreaded question “Can you read music?”