Sa's Soaring Soprano

Italy, Manhattan, Vienna − across the world, Pretty Yende is stunning audiences and critics with her opera talent.

- Nicide Wet

A TV ADVERT changed every thing for this young woman , w ho’s now regarded as one of the finest young opera singers in the world. Until that moment she had her heart set on being an accountant – but aspirations of a career behind a desk were abandoned in a heartbeat. And her legions of fans can thank their lucky stars for that.

The ad was for British Airways and it featured the Flower Duet from Delibes’ opera, Lakmé. Watching TV in her home­ town of Piet Retief in Mpumalanga, 16­year­old Pretty Yende was transfixed.

“I was drawn to the music,” she tells us from Milan, Italy, where she’s now based. “I’d never heard anything like it before – it sounded supernatural to me.”

The next day Pretty marched up to her high school teacher at Ndlela Secondary School and told him to teach her how to sing opera. “I didn’t ask him if I could or couldn’t do it. I just said, ‘Teach me.’ ”

And so began a career that now sees the 31­year­old regularly being celebrated in the world’s most iconic opera houses.

Yet while Pretty draws sell­out crowds everywhere from New York and London to Barcelona and Berlin, she’s still “ours” – a home­grown star who’s helped alert the world to the diversity of talent in South Africa.

Pretty is now releasing her debut album and will be returning to SA at the end of September to promote it. The album, A Journey, “preserves all the musical moments I’ve had in my career – from the beautiful Delibes Flower Duet that opened my heart to opera to the aria Vous que l’on dit sensible, which I sang on my debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York”.