NewAfricanWoman Issue 49 - Flipbook - Page 79
Francesca
Chiejina
The Sublime Soprano & Rising Star of Opera
By Omar Ben Yedder
S
oprano Francesca Chiejina is one of the rising stars of the opera world. Over
the past couple of years, she has appeared in several productions in the UK
including Puccini’s La bohème, Handel’s Amadigi, as the soloist in Berg’s
Seven Early Songs and Britten’s Miss Jessel in Turn of the Screw.
She is currently on an eight-month contract with the UK’s Royal Opera House.
She will be touring and taking part in numerous performances including
as the High Priestess in Aida in London, which runs until June 2023. In this
interview originally published in New African magazine, she discusses how
she became so passionate about this form of art and why more needs to be
done to encourage greater diversity in the industry.
African vocalists have explored and
triumphed in virtually all forms of singing from choral to pop and everything
in-between, but there have hardly been
many opera singers from the continent
— apart from a small but highly electric
group from South Africa including the
great soprano Pumeza Matshikiza and
Pretty Yende. Perhaps the lack of role
models in the rest of Africa has contributed to this. If so, the Francesca Chiejina,
is on song to change all this.
She came into opera much later than is
usual for this most exacting of vocal disciplines — when she was about 20. Her
route was also unusual, she arrived via
studying classical music.
She shrugs this off and says that opera
is such a weird genre that no journey is
conventional. Her parents were aspirational and introduced her and her siblings
to music at a young age. “I think I was the
only one that stuck to it. My brother was
more of a computer guy.” Her parents
took her to her first opera at the age of
seven, but she fell asleep, she admits.
Chiejina left Nigeria at the age of 10,
carrying her violin as hand luggage, to go
to the US with her parents. She credits the
US schooling system for exposing her to
different instruments and arts. She picked
up the French horn and then the flute in
America. Music lessons were free and she
was often part of orchestras and choirs.
She recalls that people often said she had
‘a voice’ and that there was something
there but she was focused on a medical
career.
But the feeling that she had something
special in her voice and her increasing love
of music kept nagging at her. “I started to
think about music again. I thought, OK, I’m
young, this is the time to take a risk.”
But there were lots of tears; her parents
thought she was having a mid-life crisis.
“But they were supportive,” she recalls.
“My mom accompanied me to my audition, and both said that I was a grownup and it was up to me to do whatever I
needed to.” ▶
l
March 2023 New African Woman
l 77