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Kiri Te Kanawa to give up opera
It’s too exhausting, says the 65-year-old New Zealand soprano
The New Zealand soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, who famously sang for her number one fan Prince Charles at his marriage to Lady Diana Spencer in St Paul's Cathedral in 1981, has announced that she is leaving the operatic stage because the discipline has become too exhausting.
She will sing her last opera next April at the Cologne Opera in Germany, playing the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, one of the Richard Strauss roles she has made her own over the years.
Dame Kiri, 65, said: "It will be my last. It's not as if I want to do it on a regular basis now, because it's exhausting. I think certainly our voices change; opera is mainly for young people."
The Maori singer will not give up her concert performances, and plans to continue to train the "future stars" of opera through the Solti Academy and her Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation.
Kiri Te Kanawa has lit up opera houses across the world since the 1960s, but two performances have endeared her to an audience beyond the world of opera - her singing of Handel's Let the Bright Seraphim at the wedding of Charles and Diana, thought to have been heard by 600 million people worldwide, and the 1985 recording she made with Jose Carreras of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. ·
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Dame Kiri most certainly did not give up singing in opera 20 years ago, though she did say she wouldn't sing onstage any more after the death of Sir Georg Solti (in 1997). Luckily, she relented after a while. She last sang opera in the USA in 2004 (Barber's "Vanessa"). As to the view that her singing of Maria is "terrible", that is only a point of view and not a well-founded one.
Surely she gave up opera years ago? I don't recall seeing her in an opera for 20 years or so. It is sad that her career was not longer or more devoted. She had a wonderful voice. But you cannot keep it up if you do not work at it. Being too famous seems to reduce an artist's presence on "the stages of the world", because they get paid so much they don't need to work: look at Bryn Terfel's limited career! Kiri's great days were in the 1970s, in her thirties. The truth about her Maria in West Side Story is that it was terrible because she had no feeling for that kind of theatre music, or for the acting and words that matter so much in Bernstein's great musical - and Carreras was frightful too. But nobody was allowed to tell the truth about it because he had been sick (though he recovered personally, if not vocally). She is on the old side now to do the Marschallin (who is meant to be in her late thirties, and therefore much much older than her 18-year-old lover Oktavian). But it will be very touching, no doubt. And fame will add a touch of spice to the popular interest in the event in Cologne - where the opera company is turning over a new leaf, and where the opera house is getting ready to be taken out of commission for renovation. The company needs to get a higher profile in the town as it will have a peripatetic existence for a couple of years during the renovations - and that is always going to be challenging for ticket and subscription sales for an opera ensemble.