A voice for eternity: Johan Botha on his 60th birthday

Today, August 19th, would have been Johan BOTHA's 60th birthday. As one writes these words, it is still hard to believe that his voice fell silent forever almost exactly nine years ago.

Had he been granted to experience this day, it doesn't take much imagination to envision him standing on stage today with the greatest probability – he couldn't have imagined anything else for this occasion. Because singing was literally his life.

Many people today can hardly imagine what Johan Botha's emergence on the international opera scene in the early 1990s meant. It was nothing more and nothing less than a revolution – a dramatic voice of such beauty and, at the same time, of complete technical mastery, which succeeded equally in the Italian and German repertoires. At that time, something like this hadn't been seen for a very long time, and for many opera houses – but not least for the Vienna State Opera, which rightly made him an honorary member in his final year – he broke all the usual mold. Tenor -Problems, almost as a one-man show.

When Johan Botha died, he was at the peak of his career. By that time, he had performed almost all of his dream roles in the repertoire, which he wanted to sing, in the world's great opera houses. When he died, he had almost finished learning Tristan , which he worked on literally until his last days; Tristan and Peter Grimes – those were the two roles he still desperately wanted to sing. But it was no more than that. But we must be grateful for what he accomplished in his short life – we will probably never hear anyone like him again.

Fortunately, many of Botha's most important roles have been recorded in one way or another – not everything, but most of it has been published so far. And we will of course do everything in our power to make the last treasures accessible, so that future generations can also experience what an exceptional phenomenon Johan Botha was among the great opera stars of his time.

In September 2026, the 10th anniversary of his death will also take place. Until then, we have planned to renovate (and perhaps even supplement) the tomb at the Vienna Central Cemetery for the first time, and above all to create online files with the recordings (published and unpublished). In the following years, we also want to record performance dates as completely as possible and, of course, create an image file – which will hopefully grow steadily.