The La Traviata Affair

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 Eoans opera activities from the groups 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 groups 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.