You are invited to the book launch of ‘The La Traviata Affair – Opera in the Age of Apartheid’ by AOI scholar Hilde Roos.

With music from Verdi’s opera La Traviata and songs by Joseph Manca, performed by Leah Gunterr, Brittany SmithMinette Pearce, Thando Mjandana, Theo Magongoma and Albert Combrink.

8pm Tuesday 10 September 2019

The Center of the Book, 62 Queen Victoria Street,  Cape Town

RSVP by 3 September to roosh@sun.ac.za

The book chronicles the history of the Eoan Group’s opera productions

Race, politics, and opera production during apartheid South Africa intersect in this historiographic work on the Eoan Group, a “coloured” cultural organization that performed opera in the Cape. The La Traviata Affair charts Eoan’s opera activities from the group’s inception in 1933 until the cessation of their productions by 1980. It explores larger questions of complicity, compromise, and compliance; of assimilation, appropriation, and race; and of “European art music” in situations of “non-European” dispossession and disenfranchisement. Performing under the auspices of apartheid, the group’s unquestioned acceptance of and commitment to the art of opera could not redeem it from the entanglements that came with the political compromises it made. Uncovering a rich trove of primary source materials, Hilde Roos presents here for the first time the story of one of the premier cultural agencies of apartheid South Africa.