Pretty Yende
soprano
Pretty Yende was born in 1985 in Piet Retief, a small rural town in South Africa's Transvaal region, at a time when the apartheid regime was still in power. She grew up in the township of Thandukukhanya and discovered opera thanks to a commercial illustrated by Léo Delibes' Duo des fleurs. At the age of sixteen, she won her first local singing competition, which enabled her to audition for the South African College of Music.
In 2009, she won prizes in the Hans Gabor Belvedere and Montserrat Caballé international competitions. She sang Clara in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess during a Cape Town Opera tour of the United Kingdom. The following year, she won First Prize in the Vincenzo Bellini International Bel Canto Competition and First Prize in both categories (opera and operetta) at the Belvedere Competition in Vienna. In 2011, she won the Operalia-Plácido Domingo Competition and graduated from La Scala Academy in Milan.
In January 2013, she made her debuts at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and at the Theater an der Wien.
The 13/14 season sees her debut at the Los Angeles Opera and the Hamburg Staatsoper.
She made her debut at the Opéra national de Paris as Rosine in The Barber of Seville in 2016 and has since returned regularly to the stages of the Opéra Bastille and the Palais Garnier, singing the title roles in Lucia di Lammermoor and Manon, Teresa in Benvenuto Cellini, Norina in Don Pasquale, Violetta Valery in La Traviata, Pamina in The Magic Flute and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet.
She sings on the world's most prestigious opera stages: the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, the Maestranza in Seville, the Rossini Festival in Pesaro, the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, the Zurich Opera House, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the Vienna Staatsoper, etc.
On 6 May 2023, she sang at Westminster Abbey for the coronation ceremony of Charles III. She sang Sacred Fire by composer Sarah Class, a work commissioned by Charles III and watched live by hundreds of millions of television viewers around the world.
In December of the same year, she became Dior's ambassador for the collections of Maria Grazia Chiuri, its Artistic Director.
Martin Coulon
ROYAL ARTS VISIONS: PRETTY YENDE