Pretty Yende

Bel canto soprano Pretty Yende grew up in a Zulu-speaking home in the small town of Piet Retief, South Africa, where she was born in 1985. A TV commercial that featured Lakmé’s “Flower Duet” motivated her at age 16 to learn opera, a style she was unaware Black women had ever sung. Yende studied voice at the South African College of Music and won several competitions between 2008 and 2011, when she made her professional debut as Micaëla in Carmen at the Latvian National Theatre. Her signature role, however, became La Traviata’s Violetta, one of several operatic dreamers she has identified with. In 2016, Yende’s lush coloratura was on full display on her debut album, A Journey, which reflected her rapid ascent through opera’s ranks with a personal and powerful collection of arias. On the following year’s Dreams, she applied her extraordinary technique and lush tone to Gounod’s Juliette, La Sonnambula’s Amina, Lucia di Lammermoor and other characters devoted, like Yende herself, to the pursuit of transcendent self-fulfillment.