Joseph Manca
Joseph Manca (1908-1985) Italian-born musician, conductor
Contents
Biography
Italian immigrant Joseph Salvatore Manca, the son of a Sicilian barber. (According to Roos, Manca was born in Cape Town of Sicilian parents).
He was an amateur musician. Manca was a qualified accountant and worked at the Treasury Department of the City Council. In 1968, aged 60, Manca resigned from his City Council position and became the full-time cultural director at the Eoan Cultural Centre in Athlone.
From 1963 he served on CAPAB’s opera committee, and was elected to the Council of the Department of Coloured Affairs in 1968.
He died on 10 October 1985 in Cape Town.
Contribution to SA theatre, film, media and/or performance
He composed the operetta San Maratto (1932).
His musical career started in 1930s when he collaborated with Alessandro Rota. Hereafter he conducted various choirs.
In 1941 he became conductor of the Cape Town Light Opera Company.
From 1943, Manca was conductor of the EOAN Group choir. During the first thirteen years of his association with Eoan, Manca developed the small choir into an amateur opera company that presented its first full-scale opera in 1956. He also conducted the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra for the group’s productions, which were usually staged in the Cape Town City Hall.
These included:
1956: La Traviata
1958: Cavalleria rusticana
1959: Rigoletto
1960: La bohème
1962: Madame Butterfly
1965: Il trovatore
1969: Il barbiere di Siviglia
He conducted musicals, including:
1958: Rose Marie
1967: Oklahoma!
1968: South Pacific
1970: Carmen Jones
Awards
Certificate of Merit from the Three Centuries Foundation, a United States/South Africa Leader Exchange Programme award (1962); an hononary Doctorate from UCT (1963); and a Commemorative Medal from the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns (1974).
Sources
Wayne Muller. 2018. A reception history of opera in Cape Town: Tracing the development of a distinctly South African operatic aesthetic (1985–2015). Unpublished PhD thesis.
Sjoerd Alkema. 2012. "Conductors of the Cape Town Municipal Orchestra, 1914-1965: a historical perspective". University of Cape Town. Unpublished PhD thesis.
Hilde Roos. 2010. 'Opera Production in the Western Cape: Strategies in Search of Indigenisation'. Unpublished PhD thesis. Stellenbosch University.
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