South African opera stars: Timothée Chalamet says ‘no one cares’ about opera. SA’s global super-singers beg to differ
While a Hollywood golden boy dismisses opera as a dying art, South African singers are filling the world’s biggest stages, from the Vienna Opera Ball to the sold-out Bayreuth Festival.
During a legit terrible week, one where the planet reeled from WW3 angst, Timothée Chalamet chose to dis opera. During a CNN and Variety town hall promoting Marty Supreme, the actor told Matthew McConaughey he didn’t want to end up in an art form where artists beg audiences to pay attention.
“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera, where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore,’” he said, adding that he’d probably “lost 14 cents in viewership” with the remark. Yet, South African opera singers’ 2026 schedules prove the art form is more vibrant than ever.
Timothée. Timmy. Read the room, bro.
The Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Ballet and Opera, and the English National Opera all fired back within days. Seattle Opera offered a 14% discount code, “TIMOTHEE,” for its run of Carmen. The Met posted a video montage captioned, “This one’s for you, Timothée.”
But what made Chalamet’s comment more annoying than it should have been in an already overly annoying week was this: the global opera circuit he glibly dismissed is powered, in extraordinary measure, by South African voices.
South African opera stars 2026
Take Pretty Yende, for example. She headlined the Vienna Opera Ball in February 2026, singing Bernstein and Verdi before an audience of Austrian high society, broadcast live to 1.4 million television viewers. This is the same soprano who performed at King Charles III’s 2023 Coronation. Yende’s 2026 calendar includes Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare in Frankfurt and multiple performances at the Vienna State Opera itself. Nobody needs to beg anyone to keep Miss Yende’s career alive.
Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, from Limpopo province, made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Liù in Turandot late last year and was immediately hailed as “the vocal star” of the production by the New York Classical Review. The Bachtrack critic wrote that audiences should “see this show just to hear Rangwanasha in action.” As a reminder, Rangwanasha won the Song Prize at the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World in 2021. The leap from Limpopo to the Met’s 3,800-seat auditorium took fewer than five years.
Johannesburg-born Elza van den Heever is singing Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre at the Bayreuth Festival this July, the 150th anniversary season, conducted by Christian Thielemann. That festival sold out its entire 2026 run in under ninety minutes. She’s also making her role debut as Turandot in Frankfurt in April and performing Beethoven’s Ninth under Thielemann at Bayreuth’s opening concert. I had the pleasure of hearing van den Heever as Chrysotemis in the Chicago Lyric production of Richard Strauss’ Elektra, and suffice it to say, she was the star of that show. Her 2025 Salome (also Strauss) for the Met was hailed as a definitive reading. The “dying art” appears to be thriving, Timothée.
The tenor pipeline from South Africa to Europe’s top stages
Levy Sekgapane, from Kroonstad in the Free State, has built a career as one of the world’s premier Rossini tenors. He won Plácido Domingo’s Operalia competition in 2017 and has since sung Count Almaviva at the Glyndebourne Festival, the Vienna State Opera, the Berlin State Opera and the Paris Opera. This May and June, he makes his San Francisco Opera house debut in The Barber of Seville.
Siyabonga Maqungo has been a member of the ensemble at Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden since 2020, performing everything from Mozart to Wagner. Critics have praised Maqungo’s “easy, full tenor” and his ability to master the demands of the heaviest German repertoire. He recently debuted at Teatro alla Scala in Milan and has been announced as a featured soloist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for their 2026/27 season under incoming music director Klaus Mäkelä. I’ll be there for that.
Golda Schultz rounds out the group as one of Europe’s most versatile sopranos. She received rave reviews for her role debut as Rosalinde in Die Fledermaus at Opernhaus Zürich earlier this year and continues a major recital tour across the United States. She’s also the creator of This Be Her Verse, a project highlighting female composers, because singing at the world’s top houses wasn’t enough.
The ‘Brazil of opera’ isn’t a metaphor
South Africa’s rise in opera resembles Brazil’s in football. And it’s no accident. The country’s choral culture runs deep, rooted in church and community singing traditions that predate formal music education. Institutions such as the University of Cape Town’s South African College of Music (UCT) and Tshwane University of Technology have become feeders for Europe’s top young artist programmes.
Rangwanasha studied at both. Sekgapane trained at UCT under Kamal Khan and Hanna van Niekerk. Van den Heever came through the San Francisco Conservatory and the Merola Opera Program. The pipeline is prolific and it keeps producing.
Far from easily dismissible as a DEI thing, the global opera machine isn’t “diverse” because of South African singers. It increasingly relies on them for some of its highest-quality performances. When the Bayreuth Festival needs a Sieglinde, when the Met needs a Liù who will have audiences sobbing, when Vienna needs a headliner for its most prestigious social event of the year, South Africa is on speed dial.
Fourteen cents and a standing ovation
Chalamet’s comment was vacuous rather than malicious. His was a point about film audiences, and Chalamet certainly wasn’t aiming to make a cultural assessment of the performing arts. But still.
The remark landed during a week when a South African soprano was announced for a sold-out 150th anniversary festival, another was packing a 3,800-seat New York house, and a third was confirmed as a soloist with arguably the best orchestra in the USA.
Fourteen cents in viewership? Tell that to the standing-room crowds at the Met.