Introduction

In April 1959 several performances of Handel's Messiah took place in the City Hall in Johannesburg which attracted unusually widespread publicity and attention. An estimated 11 000 people attended (Transvaler, 1960) and according to one account, ‘Johannesburg music lovers went mad with delight’ (Star, 1963b). The performances were considered sufficiently significant to warrant newsreel coverage, and were so successful that they initiated a series of annual performances stretching over the following decade.

Since Messiah performances by a variety of choirs, most notably the Johannesburg Philharmonic Society, had been a regular feature of musical life in the city for many years, an obvious question arises: what was the reason for this sudden attention? The answer leads directly to the theme of this book: the relationship between musical activities and a society shaped (or deformed) by apartheid. At this time and in this place, the most surprising and therefore noteworthy feature of the performances was the identity of the singers: they were all black Africans. It was thus inevitable that the significance of these performances would be explicitly constructed in terms of race, apartheid's central category and concern.

Different socio-political positions, however, could inflect that construction in very different ways. The available positions were, at this moment, becoming more sharply defined than before, and facing people with choices that were made more difficult because they involved not only a programme of political action but also a struggle over identities imposed, chosen, or negotiated. This was a turning point in the history of twentieth-century South Africa. A space of three years (1959-1961) saw the formation of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the Progressive Party, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's ‘winds of change’ speech to Parliament in Cape Town, the shooting of demonstrators by police at Sharpeville, the introduction of a whole range of apartheid laws, South Africa becoming a republic outside the Commonwealth, and the start of the African National Congress's (ANC) armed struggle.

This historical context heightens the visibility of music's never-absent but often-hidden entanglement with politics. At this juncture, a black choir and soloists performing one of the greatest icons of Western classical music with a white orchestra and conductor, to (separate) black and white audiences in the heart of (white) Johannesburg, was entering exceptionally complex and fraught ideological territory.