A Voice for Eternity: Johan Botha on His 60th Birthday

On this day, August 19, Johan BOTHA would have turned 60 years old. When one writes these words, it is still hard to grasp that his voice, almost to the very day, already fell silent forever nine years ago.
Had he been granted the chance to live to see this day, it does not take much imagination to picture that with the greatest probability he would have stood on stage today – he could not have thought of anything else for such an occasion. For singing, that was literally his life.

Many today can hardly imagine what the emergence of Johan Botha on the international opera scene in the early nineties 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, equally successful in the Italian and German repertoire. At that time, such a thing had not been heard for a very long time, and for many opera houses – but not least for the VIENNA STATE OPERA, which in his last year of life rightly named him an honorary member – he solved all the usual tenor problems, practically as a one-man show.

When Johan BOTHA died, he was at the height of his career. Almost all of the dream roles of the repertoire that he wanted to sing he had embodied by that time at the great opera houses of the world. When he died, he had Tristan, on which he had literally worked until his last days, nearly completely learned; Tristan and Peter Grimes – these were the two roles he still absolutely wanted to sing. Alas, it was not to be. But one must be grateful for what he accomplished in his short life – the likes of him we will probably never hear again.

Fortunately, many of Botha’s most important roles were recorded in one way or another – not all, but most have been published up to now. And of course we will do everything in our power to make sure that the remaining treasures also become accessible, so that in future generations people may learn what an exceptional phenomenon Johan Botha was among the great opera stars of his time.

In September 2026 his day of death will then also mark its 10th anniversary. By then we have resolved to renovate his grave at Vienna’s Central Cemetery for the first time (and perhaps even to supplement it), as well as above all to create online files with the recordings (published and unpublished). In the following years, we also aim to document his performance dates as completely as possible and, of course, to establish a – hopefully steadily growing – image archive.