The Class of Opera was founded in 2017 by three friends — Ongama Mhlontlo, Ntando Ngcume and Kabelo Lebyana — who first met as students at the University of Cape Town’s Opera School. What began as late-night conversations about repertoire, technique and the lives of the singers they admired became, over time, a YouTube channel and a working creative partnership.

The idea was simple: make the conversations that happen behind the scenes of opera available to anyone curious enough to listen. Too often, opera is presented as a finished, polished object — beautiful but distant. We wanted to open the rehearsal-room door.

The Class of Opera is, first and foremost, a YouTube channel. Every Sunday we publish a new performance — an aria, a song, a duet, a chamber work — drawn from our own catalogue and the wider repertoire we love. Between performances, we publish music discussions, interviews with fellow artists, and reviews of new and classic works.

Alongside the channel, The Class of Opera is the umbrella for our wider creative work: original compositions, song-cycle premieres, community arts initiatives, and the live performances that bring all of this off the screen and into the room.

We are three South African artists whose paths have taken us to New York, Cape Town and Nuremberg. Wherever we travel, we carry the music and the traditions that shaped us — and we believe South African voices have something distinctive to offer the global operatic conversation.

The Class of Opera is our way of being in that conversation: as performers, as composers, as educators, and as friends who happen to share a stage.