Britain’s Got Talent finalist Innocent Masuku is overjoyed to have been given the platform to share his talent with the rest of the world and says that despite not winning the competition, he is content with the fact that he has introduced Opera to an audience who may not have previously been fans of the genre.
The fourth-place finalist from Mkhondo, Mpumalanga has been a revelation when it comes to his world-class performance in the international talent competition. Recently he spoke to the local news publication, The Citizen, where he shared some of the biggest highlights of the journey.
“My ambition going there I knew that, that platform is huge, and a lot of people would get an opportunity to hear me…also because I’m a guy of colour and mostly opera is associated with white people.”
He explained that in the buildup to making his stage appearance, he found himself saturated with a ball of nerves – especially since there were so many talented contestants who were competing for the very same thing as him.
“I didn’t even think I was going to make it that far […] I’m like, how am I going to compete with this,” says Innocent.
While that was enough to get him past multiple rounds, he says that it was not until making the semi-finals of the competition that people really took notice of him, after he performed his rendition of Hans Zimmer’s Now We Are Free.
The response was overwhelming – especially from South Africa where many people are not necessarily big fans of the classical genre.
“I didn’t anticipate that people would see it…I was feeling like Bafana Bafana representing the country.”
He added that the experience of being on the show has been an amazing one, and has opened doors to so numerous corporate gigs, mostly in South Africa.
After recently tying the knot with his wife, Nai Chiswo, he hoped to have ended the finals somewhere in the top 3 so he could use the money to go on a honeymoon but that did not materialise.
Meanwhile he is grateful for the way that he could reach a new audience with Opera.
In his interview with The Citizen, he said:
“Opera is a really powerful genre I believe; a lot of people don’t like it because they don’t know it. Some people don’t connect to opera not necessarily because they don’t like it, it’s just because they’ve never heard it.”
Also see: SA’s Innocent Masuku shines on Britain’s Got Talent
