Mandela crescendo
Madiba’s words set to music for centenary
This year’s celebration of Nelson Mandela’s centenary will bring many “goosebump” moments but perhaps none more poignant than in Regina Mundi Catholic Church, Soweto, on August 17.
That’s when one of the world’s leading orchestras will play a new piece commissioned from one of South Africa’s top composers to pay tribute to the country’s greatest son.
Bongani Ndodana-Breen, born in 1975 in Queenstown, just over 200km from Mandela’s home in Qunu, told the Sunday Times this week that the Minnesota Orchestra had given him a once-in-a-lifetime experience with its commission — via US concert tour organiser Classical Movements — for Harmonia Ubuntu, a 15-minute composition for soprano and orchestra.
And he said the inclusion of Soweto’s “people’s church” — a gathering place and refuge during the liberation struggle — in the orchestra’s tour was the cherry on top.
His composition, featuring Mandela’s words, and rhythms and scales typical of the Xhosa music the former president grew up hearing, took its cue “from a man who rose above his circumstances and became a global humanist”, he said. “I’m hoping it conveys something about Mandela’s universal human values.”
The liberation struggle and its great personalities have been a theme in NdodanaBreen’s work since 2010, when Hani told the story of Chris Hani, the SACP leader who was assassinated in 1993.
In 2011 Winnie: The Opera brought the story of Mandela’s second wife to the stage, and on Mandela’s 95th birthday in 2013 Ndodana-Breen premiered Credo, which celebrated the Freedom Charter.
Harmonia Ubuntu felt like a closing of the Mandela circle after working so closely with family members and acquaintances on the Madikizela-Mandela project, he said. “As I was working, I thought, ‘They’re part of the same constellation but they are such very different people.’
“Ma Winnie has always had a life that’s passionate and colourful, but there is a measuredness and a restraint in the text I’m using from Nelson Mandela. It almost reminded me of Abraham Lincoln.”
Ndodana-Breen said the first line sung by soprano Goitsemang Oniccah Lehobye when the composition is premiered at the Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis on July 13 will be: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”
The libretto of Harmonia Ubuntu goes on to include Mandela’s words, “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner,” and ends: “The greatest glory in living is not in falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
The Minnesota Orchestra’s first concert in South Africa, after 10 Music for Mandela performances at its home base — including one on Mandela’s birthday, July 18 — will be at Cape Town City Hall on August 10. Others will be at the City Hall in Durban on August 12, the Aula Theatre at the University of Pretoria on August 16 and the City Hall in Johannesburg on August 18.
But the Regina Mundi concert will be extra special. It will include the Minnesota Chorale and the Gauteng Choristers performing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy and songs written in Xhosa, Zulu and Sotho.