Pretty Yende: An Opera Star From Africa

Seniors love opera! They enjoy going to a concert or listen to an opera on the radio. Pretty Yende is a young opera singer who loves Antonín Dvořák and his opera Rusalka. Let’s read more about her.

Pretty Yende (*March 6, 1985) comes from Piet Retief, a small town in South Africa.She sings opera, she is a soprano¹, and she sings in famous opera houses, for example in La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera.

2001 - Pretty Yende studies at secondary school and she hears opera for the first time in a British Airways TV commercial.She says that “it sounds² so supernatural³ that it cannot be human⁴.” After this, she wants to be an opera singer.But she doesn’t know if she is really⁵ talented.

2016 - Pretty Yende is one of the most famous opera singers, a star of Milan’s La Scala, New York’s Metropolitan and London’s Covent Garden.
She has a lot of prizes⁶ from the Belveder Competition in Vienna from 2010.Journalists⁷ say that “her voice can reach to the stars.”.

One of her favourite composers⁸ is Antonín Dvořák and his opera Rusalka.She sometimes sings in Prague’s Municipal House.

Vocabulary: ¹soprán| ²znít| ³nadpřirozený| ⁴lidský| ⁵opravdu| ⁶ocenění| ⁷novinář| ⁸skladatel
Language notes: come from=pocházet odněkud|opera house=operní scéna(divadlo)|secondary school=střední škola|for the first time=poprvé|TV commercial=televizní reklama|reach to the
stars=dotknout se hvězd|Municipal House=Obecní dům
Sources: nytimes.com|goodthingsguy.com en.wikipedia.org|.