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Chaka. An Opera in Two Chants
Opera is music. It is also drama. Although we might be tempted to follow Wagner in joining the two words to make a third, "music-drama" really only registers an artistic intention. High quality drama does not guarantee successful opera. Memorable music does. (Devotees are more likely to leave the opera house with music ringing in their ears than with concerns about the plausibility of the plot.) What resound in the memory are the voices of singers. Opera, then, is not just music; nor is it just performed song. Opera is voice (see Abbate).
If opera is ultimately voice, then opera is fully compatible withAfrican modes of expression (see Soyinka). No other instrument -- certainly not the sensationalized drum -- occupies as central and critical a place in African traditions of music-making. The range of vocal ideals is vast, ranging from syllabic, speech-like declamation to the melismatic and wordless singing originating from, or inflected by, North African and Middle Eastern styles. Voice is the gateway to meaning in music.
Oddly, however, opera is not readily associated with Africa in the popular imagination. Perhaps global economies of representation and reportage are to blame; but perhaps there is a concrete absence that needs to be acknowledged. If we ignore folk operas and the productions of concert parties, we wipe out most of the data that would support the view that opera is widespread in Africa. We might mention Saka Acquaye's The Lost Fishermen, Walter Blege's Kristo, Adam Fiberesima's Opu Jaja, Soleymane Koly's Waramba, Duro Ladipo's Oba Koso, Solomon Mbabi-Katana's The Marriage of Nyakato, and perhaps a dozen more titles, but we won't be able to provide a lot of evidence to prove that opera occupies a key position in the work of African art music composers.
Publication of a CD recording of Akin Euba's Chaka thus marks a special moment in African art music...