Sidwell Hartman has turned down five overseas offers this year — yet the role he most wants to sing here has been offered to a foreigner. Coenraad Visser talked to him between rehearsals for Pact’s Aida
A MODEST person with strong Christian beliefs, Sidwell Hartman does not at first evoke the image of the warrior Radames, the role in Aida for which he won the Nederburg Opera Award in Cape Town — where he is principal tenor for Capab Opera — and which he now brings to the Pretoria stage.
But, like Radames, Hartman is a patriot, strongly sensing a duty to his country. This year he has turned down five overseas offers in order to honour his commitments here. So it hurts when Pacofs refused to pay him a third of what it was prepared to pay an ageing overseas singer in Aida.
Also, although he sings three roles for Pact this year, no contract has yet been signed for next year. “Why the feast this year and next year famine?” he ponders. The role he really wants to sing, Pollione in Norma, has been offered to an overseas tenor.
He would also like to be involved in securing a future for opera in this country. He is sad that too much effort is being wasted on safeguarding bureaucracies, salaries and fringe benefits. Too little is done to provide performing opportunities for young singers, who now leap from opera school on to the mainstream professional stage. There is no time for development, for learning repertoire, for preserving their voices.
When he offered his considerable experience to Capab to help in planning the new era for the performing arts, an official told him to go overseas for five years. But still he hopes that someone in the corridors of power will hear his voice.
As one who threw off the apartheid shackles to build an international career which is taking on significant proportions in France, Germany and England, with Covent Garden, the Bastille in Paris and the Vienna State Opera beckoning, who could be better qualified to lead local opera into the next century?
Singing on stage started for him when he became a member of the Eoan Group (formed in Cape Town in the Thirties to give coloureds the opportunity of training in drama, ballet, and opera). At that time he had never contemplated a career as an international opera singer.
“Apartheid made people of colour believe that they could never achieve anything other than that decreed for them by the government,” he says.
He wanted to become a missionary. But he won an opera bursary, even though some adjudicators thought that he “copied his voice from recordings”. “Oh, you actually sound like that,” said Gregorio Fiasconaro, then head of the University of Cape Town Opera School, when Hartman first sang for him. Fiasconaro, Desiree Talbot and Michael Brimer took him under their wing.
His success in the school’s La Boheme and Werther led to a trip to New York to audition at the Juilliard School. He was immediately accepted. His teachers there included famous African-American bass Simon Estes and Enrico di Giuseppe (an acclaimed Pinkerton in Pact’s Madama Butterfly in 1980).
His American stay allowed him to achieve something else which apartheid denied him — his independence. While not married, he could not rent a place in the coloured group areas. So he had to continue living with his family. In America he fended for himself, babysitting and singing in churches to support himself.
Since his return he has sung a wide range of roles, from light to the true spinto ones. Although Mozart is “medicine for the voice”, it is a bit “prissy” for Hartman’s passionate side. He prefers the more “gutsy” roles, and they do not come much more gutsy than Radames.
* Aida opens at the State Theatre in Pretoria tomorrow night at 8pm.