Pik Botha, South Africa’s Last Apartheid Foreign Minister, Dies at 86

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Mr. Botha, standing at center, at a news conference in 1994 given by, seated from left, the Inkatha Freedom Party leader Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, President F.W. de Klerk of South Africa and Nelson Mandela, the president of the African National Congress.CreditCreditLynne Sladky/Associated Press

By Daniel J. Wakin

Oct. 12, 2018

Pik Botha, South Africa’s longtime foreign minister, whose defense of apartheid was tempered by flashes of recognition of the system’s injustice, and who went on to serve in Nelson Mandela’s unity government, died on Friday at his home on the outskirts of Pretoria. He was 86.

His death was confirmed by his son Piet.

Mr. Botha was a busy figure on the world diplomatic scene as foreign minister from the late 1970s through the ’80s, a time of deepening unrest in South Africa, when the government crackdown on protests to white rule was growing increasingly violent.

It was also a time of rising international pressure against the racist regime. Mr. Botha fought the imposition of Western sanctions on his country.

A bluff, plain-spoken man popular with the white electorate and a jocular off-the-record drinking companion of journalists, Mr. Botha at times showed a moderate streak rarely found among his hard-line party fellows.

In 1970, during his first address to Parliament as a member, he urged the government to subscribe to the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, a move that had been strongly resisted.

In 1974, while serving as South Africa’s ambassador to the United Nations, he stated that discrimination on the basis of skin color — the foundation of apartheid rule — was indefensible.

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And in 1986, with the end of apartheid approaching, he said at a press briefing, “It would possibly become unavoidable that in the future you might have a black president of this country,” as long as minority rights were guaranteed. The president of South Africa, P. W. Botha (no relation), forced him to retract the statement.

Pik Botha served as foreign minister from 1977 until democratic elections in 1994 ended apartheid. He joined the Mandela-led coalition government — comprising the African National Congress, which had waged the fight against white-minority rule, and the formerly ruling National Party — as minister of minerals and energy. But he left two years later, when his party pulled out, and retired from politics.

Mr. Botha was “one of the few” from his party “who recognized at an early stage that apartheid was a wrong and crime against humanity,” the A.N.C. said in a statement after his death.

President Cyril Ramaphosa, himself a prominent anti-apartheid leader, said Mr. Botha “would be remembered for his support for South Africa’s transition to democracy and for his service in the first democratic administration,” according to a statement from his office.

Mr. Botha declared his support for the African National Congress in 2000.

“Afrikaners, whites should support the A.N.C.,” he said in interviews. “We cannot just continue with blacks voting A.N.C. and whites voting for the opposition. I want to break with the racist attitudes of the past.” Some news reports said he had actually joined the A.N.C., but he denied this years later.

Pik Botha, who was South Africa’s foreign minister from 1977 to 1994, addressing a National Party meeting in Johannesburg in 1987.CreditTrevor Samson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Roelof Frederick Botha was born on April 27, 1932, in Rustenburg, about 80 miles west of Pretoria. His father, also named Roelof Frederick, was a schoolteacher; his mother, Maria Elizabeth (Dreyer) Botha, was a homemaker.

Mr. Botha was educated in Potchefstroom, to the south and closer to Johannesburg, and received a law degree from the University of Pretoria.

His nickname, Pik, is short for pikkewyn, Afrikaans for penguin. He acquired it later on, some thought, because of his resemblance to that bird when he wore a suit.

Mr. Botha joined the foreign service and served in Sweden and West Germany. In 1963 he helped defend South Africa in a case brought by Liberia and Ethiopia against it in the International Court of Justice at The Hague, challenging its administration of South West Africa, which later became Namibia. The case was dismissed.

In 1975 he was appointed ambassador to the United States while also serving as permanent representative to the United Nations.

As foreign minister, Mr. Botha was involved in the talks that led to Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, and talks that preceded Namibia’s independence a decade later. He negotiated a delicate peace accord between South Africa and Mozambique in 1984.

Mr. Botha also helped broker an agreement that brought an end to a Cold War proxy struggle in Angola, which included South African forces on one side and Cuban troops on the other.

In addition to his son Piet, Mr. Botha’s survivors include his wife, Ina; another son, Roelof; two daughters, Anna Hertzog and Lien Botha; and a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. His first wife, Helena Bosman, died in 1996.

Toward the end of his life, Mr. Botha paid tribute to Nelson Mandela and the goal of racial coexistence.

“From our point of view, he led an organization which we regarded as a terrorist organization, and they saw themselves as freedom fighters,” he said in an interview with the BBC in 2013, the year Mr. Mandela died. “Of course, all of that had to change. It is not always that simple and easy to change, you know, mental attitudes, mind-sets, but eventually it did change.”

Speaking of Mr. Mandela, he said, “I so often experience his capacity to forgive, and then his will to improve the country, its systems, the poor black people, uplift them but without damaging the economy.”

He added, “Black and white in this country need each other to succeed.”

Montserrat Caballé, Opera Star With ‘Ethereal’ Voice, Is Dead at 85

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Montserrat Caballé performing in Spain in 2012.CreditCreditDaniel Perez/Getty Images

By Margalit Fox

Oct. 6, 2018

Montserrat Caballé, the Spanish soprano widely counted among the last of the old-time prima donnas for the transcendent purity of her voice, the sweeping breadth of her repertory and the delirious adulation of her fans, died on Saturday in Barcelona. She was 85.

Her death was confirmed by Sant Pau Hospital in Barcelona, Spain, where she was admitted last month, and by the city’s Gran Teatre del Liceu.

One of the foremost opera singers of the second half of the 20th century, Ms. Caballé was an enduring, vibrant international presence, appearing at the Metropolitan Opera, with which she sang 98 times; Covent Garden; La Scala, and elsewhere, as well as at the opening ceremony of the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona.

She was also widely heard in recital, for many years making an annual appearance at Carnegie Hall.

Montserrat Caballe Encore at her Carnegie Hall 1978 RecitalCreditCreditVideo by OperaMyWorld

Ms. Caballé was, critics concurred, one of the sublime representatives of a type of diva most often associated with a bygone, golden era: smolderingly regal, seemingly inscrutable, a larger-than-life presence accorded godlike status by her reverential public.

“La Superba,” the world press called her, elevating her to membership in an international soprano triumvirate that also included “La Divina” (Maria Callas) and “La Stupenda” (Joan Sutherland).

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Ms. Caballé’s exalted status was won by virtue of the vast number of roles at her command (more than 100, an almost unheard-of tally, from fleet, silvery Mozart to weighty Richard Strauss and weightier Wagner); the length of her performing life (she sang publicly until she was well into her 60s, more than a decade after a singer’s usual retirement age); and the lather of adoration into which her fans routinely whipped themselves.

Her recitals were often interrupted mid-song — after she had tossed off an especially intricate passage or scaled a particularly daring height — with wild cheering, foot-stomping and cries of “Brava!” On one occasion, at Avery Fisher Hall in New York in 1983, a fistfight nearly erupted in the audience, with adulatory screamers on one side and pugilistic purists, demanding silence, on the other.

But above all — and this is what moved her fans to ardor in the first place — there was the voice itself.

For sheer vocal glory, reviewers wrote, few voices, if any, could rival Ms. Caballé’s. She was possessed of a lyric soprano that, though light and shimmering, was not without heft. It was renowned for its riverine suppleness, and for an ethereal translucence that few other voices could equal.

‘Shimmering,’ ‘Unearthly’

Over nearly half a century, critics invoked adjectives to describe Ms. Caballé’s sound that would read as staggering hyperbole for almost anyone else: “limpid,” “liquid,” “shimmering,” “quicksilver,” “celestial,” “unearthly,” “velvety,” “voluptuous,” “lustrous,” “ravishing.”

“She possesses,” Stereo Review magazine said of Ms. Caballé in 1992, “one of the most beautiful voices ever to issue from a human throat.”

Ms. Caballé displayed a noteworthy consistency of timbre throughout her range, largely sparing listeners the audible gear-shifting that can occur when singers move from low notes to high. Though she was not strictly a coloratura soprano, the innate flexibility of her instrument let her essay the Olympian heights of some coloratura works with ease.

She was especially esteemed for her ability to spin out haunting, sustained pianissimos — the whisper-quiet passages that are among the most demanding tests of a singer’s mettle, entailing diaphragm strength and breath control akin to an athlete’s.

Early Caballé's divine pianissimo upper registerCreditCreditVideo by Lohengrin O

All of these qualities made her voice particularly well suited to the bel canto repertory, consisting of elegant, filigreed works by 19th-century Italians like Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini. As a result of her prowess in that genre, Ms. Caballé was acknowledged to have helped spur a bel canto revival on opera and concert stages round the world at midcentury and beyond.

She was also adept in other genres, counting among her repertory German lieder; the Spanish dramatic songs known as zarzuelas; the operas of Verdi, for which she was widely known; Richard Strauss’s Salome, which she called her favorite operatic role; and the title part in Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia,” which propelled her to international stardom after a single performance in 1965.

Ms. Caballé even recorded a well-received album with the British rock star Freddie Mercury, titled “Barcelona” and released in 1988.

"The Golden Boy," from "Barcelona."CreditCreditVideo by FredMTheBest

Inevitably, as in any operatic career, there were critical cavils.

Ms. Caballé’s evident devotion to tone over text, reviewers complained, could result in diction so slipshod that it bordered on anarchy. At times she would actually substitute nonsense syllables for a song’s text, when she appeared to feel that the words as written, with their congestion of consonants, would impede the flow of pure, vowelly sound.

She was no actress, critics agreed, a consensus in which Ms. Caballé cheerfully concurred. And her ample frame, reviewers sometimes noted, cut an unpersuasive figure of the consumptive heroine — think of Mimì in Puccini’s “La Bohème” — that is grand opera’s stock-in-trade.

Ms. Caballé also developed a reputation for pulling out of scheduled performances, a source of chronic irritation to reviewers and chronic disappointment to fans.

Montserrat Caballé sings "Com'é bello" from Lucrezia Borgia at Carnegie Hall 1965CreditCreditVideo by angpama

“It is a standard joke in the business,” the music critic Will Crutchfield wrote in The New York Times in 1986, “that ‘Mme. Caballé is available for only a limited number of cancellations this season.’ ”

And yet … there was the voice, for in the end, when it came to appraisals of Ms. Caballé, it was always the voice that carried the day.

Writing in Newsday in 1994, the critic Tim Page encapsulated the perennial contradictions of her art.

“We attend Montserrat Caballé concerts for one reason — with the hope of being transported,” he wrote. “There are many more versatile artists, many more incisive interpreters and — God knows — many more venturesome programmers. But when Caballé is ‘on’ — as she was sporadically during her Tuesday night recital at Carnegie Hall — there is no more beautiful voice in the world.”

That voice, Ms. Caballé often said, had been a gift from God — one on which she had built rigorous, hard-won training that her impoverished childhood had very nearly placed out of reach.

One Dress to Her Name

Named for Our Lady of Montserrat, the patron saint of Catalonia, Maria de Montserrat Viviana Concepción Caballé i Folch was born in Barcelona on April 12, 1933.

Amid the Depression, and the Spanish Civil War, she was reared in poverty. (In interviews throughout her career, Ms. Caballé diplomatically expressed equal pride in her Catalan and Spanish backgrounds. She was also circumspect about whether her family had been Republicans, supporting Spain’s democratically elected government, or Nationalists, supporting the military dictator Francisco Franco.)

What was plain was that during those years, her family, formerly middle class, knew great hardship. Long afterward, when she was safely swathed in the jewels and furs that are a diva’s prerogative, Ms. Caballé recalled a time when she owned only a single dress. To the sneers of her classmates, she wore it to school every day for a year.

Her parents, Carles Caballé i Borrás and Anna Folch, loved music and, listening to their collection of opera records, young Montserrat was smitten. At 8, she took it upon herself to learn “Un Bel Di,” Cio-Cio-San’s aria from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” and so she did, by ear, singing it for her family.

It was clear that the child had a remarkable talent. Though her parents could scarcely afford it, she soon began studies at the Conservatori Superior de Música del Liceu in Barcelona, first on the piano and then, as a young teenager, in voice.

Her primary voice teacher, Eugenia Kemeny, made her pupils spend a full year doing vocal exercises and breath training before they could approach real music. That training, Ms. Caballé would say afterward, let her sustain her career as long as she did.

When Montserrat was about 16, her father fell ill and could not support the family, forcing her to withdraw from the conservatory. She worked for nearly a year in a handkerchief factory before attracting the sponsorship of wealthy Barcelona patrons, who agreed to support Montserrat and her family. In gratitude, she returned annually throughout her career to sing in Barcelona.

At 20, Ms. Caballé graduated from the conservatory with its gold medal for voice and embarked on auditions with Italian opera companies. Nervous and untried, she failed at all of them, inspiring one agent, she recalled, to suggest she forsake singing and find a husband.

Trying her luck in Switzerland, she caught on with the Basel Opera in 1956, singing small roles until she was called upon to sing Mimì in place of an ailing soprano. She spent the rest of the ’50s and early ’60s singing throughout Europe.

Cheers at Carnegie Hall

Ms. Caballé remained relatively unknown in the United States until April 20, 1965. She had been engaged to fill in that night for an indisposed Marilyn Horne, singing Lucrezia Borgia in a concert production by the American Opera Society at Carnegie Hall.

Reviewing the performance in The Times, Raymond Ericson wrote:

“Miss Caballé had only to sing her initial romanza, a typically melting Donizetti aria with small vocal flourishes, and it was apparent that here was a singer not only with a beautifully pure voice but an outstanding command of vocal style. It was not surprising that so early in the opera the audience stopped the performance for five minutes with its applause and cheers.”

The performance established Ms. Caballé’s international career. She made her Met debut in December 1965, singing Marguerite in Gounod’s “Faust.”

Her other Met roles include the title heroine of Bellini’s “Norma,” which for its pyrotechnic rigor is considered the Everest of soprano roles; Mimì; Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello” and Violetta in his “Traviata”; Liù in Puccini’s “Turandot”; and the title characters in Verdi’s “Aida,” Puccini’s “Tosca” and Richard Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos.”

Ms. Caballé, right, performing with Marilyn Horne in Paris in 1985.CreditAssociated Press

Ms. Caballé’s career was not without difficulties. Over the years she endured a series of illnesses, including phlebitis, a heart attack and a benign brain tumor, resulting in missed performances.

“I don’t cancel because of temperament,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1995. “I have had seven major surgeries in my life. I have had tumors. I have had two children with Caesareans; you don’t just get up and sing the day after one of those.”

In a Spanish tax fraud case of 2014-15, Ms. Caballé agreed to a suspended sentence of six months and a fine of 254,000 euros, then about $278,000, for having falsely claimed residence in Andorra, a tax haven. (In reality, she had long maintained homes in Vienna and in the countryside near Barcelona.)

But ultimately it is Ms. Caballé’s transcendent voice, preserved on dozens of recordings, that will doubtless be remembered. Among the most highly regarded are two for RCA: a “Lucrezia,” with Shirley Verrett and Alfredo Kraus, conducted by Jonel Perlea, and a “Salome,” with Sherrill Milnes and Regina Resnik, under the baton of Erich Leinsdorf.

Ms. Caballé’s survivors include her husband, the Spanish tenor Bernabé Martí, whom she married in 1964 after he sang Pinkerton to her Cio-Cio-San; a son, Bernabé Jr.; and a daughter, Montserrat Martí, also an opera singer.

In a 1997 interview with The Telegraph, the British newspaper, Ms. Caballé gave voice to what was unmistakably the guiding ethos of her life.

“If I cannot sing,” she said simply, “I have the impression that I no longer exist.”

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Sunday, October 14, 2018

A00976 - Pik Botha, South Africa's Last Apartheid Foreign Minister