Confessions of a diva: Dame Kiri’s
Kiri Te Kanawa tells Ben Lawrence why young opera singers need guidance — and why her acting career never really took off
Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is a small but forceful bundle of charisma. I expect her to be a diva, of course, and there is an element of imperiousness in her bearing, but there is an earthiness, too, and she has a joyously pragmatic attitude to her industry.
“Some people say: ‘ Oh, I think I am going to try singing now.’ I think, don’t even bother. Don’t even start.”
This comment is surprising given that Te Kanawa is patron of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition, Britain’s biggest singing contest and an important stepping stone for many international stars (previous winners include Finnish soprano Karita Mattila).
Yet Te Kanawa is not, I think, advocating cruelty, but realism. In any case, the Cardiff contestants have already been heard by several expert singers. It’s not as if they are walking on to a stage for the first time a la Britain’s Got Talent.
She shudders at the very idea. “This is not a gladiatorial contest. I’m not sure what a TV talent show for opera would achieve. It’s a tough enough profession without having someone like me being mean to them. I would not like to see a bunch of singers shouting at each other. Sometimes there is rivalry among our competitors at Cardiff, but often there isn’t and it’s never a competition of egos.”
Te Kanawa believes that today’s opera singers are more nurtured, but also that they have it tougher in many ways. “There are more pressures and less opportunities. More is demanded of them and there is more they have to conform to.
“There’s more to it than simply getting up and having to sing. They are given opera after opera to study, recital after recital — it’s a big workload. I was able to do things more gradually.”
At a glance, however, it looks as if Te Kanawa’s fame was acquired very quickly. She arrived in London to train in 1966 — “I came, I saw, I conquered” — and within four years had appeared at Covent Garden. Yet, she had already achieved a certain fame as a singer in New Zealand, where she had been encouraged by her adoptive parents and by the nuns at her convent.
At the time she was untrained and made a brief and unsuccessful foray into acting in a film called Runaway Killer about a psychopath who is described on the poster as “a young man in a hungry hurry”.
Te Kanawa laughs at the memory. “Oh goodness, that was so long ago and I didn’t really know what I was doing. It was just a silly thing.”
Acting for her, nevertheless, has retained a residual appeal and her rare gift of combining technical ability with gutripping emotion has always hinted that she could have been a great classical actress. Would she have liked to play the great Shakespearean roles? “Of course!” she says, sounding slightly indignant. “What else is there?”
She says she was too preoccupied with the stuff of life to give much thought to acting