Opera star Dame Kiri: Why I will never sing again
DAME Kiri Te Kanawa, one of the greatest sopranos of the modern age, has vowed never to perform again.
The 73-year-old, who sang at the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, says she gave her last performance a year ago but did not announce her retirement.
She said yesterday: “I don’t want to hear my voice. It is in the past.
“When I’m teaching young singers and hearing beautiful, young fresh voices, I don’t want to put my voice next to theirs.”
She said it took her five years “to say the goodbye in my own mind”.
Exhausting
The New Zealander made her name in 1971 as Countess Rosina Almaviva in The Marriage Of Figaro at London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
Dame Kiri, who has appeared in TV drama Downton Abbey, made her last public performance in Ballarat near Melbourne in Australia. She said: “Before I’d gone on I said ‘right, this is it’ – and that was the end.”
She had previously hinted at retirement in 2009, when she claimed she had sung her last opera because the discipline was “exhausting”.
The star, who has Maori ancestry, was often her own harshest critic.
She said: “I never really achieved perfection of the 100 per cent that I would have liked to. I never actually came off stage saying, ‘I’ve really nailed it’. I always thought there was a mistake in it.”
A global TV audience of 750 million people watched her sing Let The Bright Seraphim from Handel’s Samson at Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding in 1981.
She said: “I was actually told two or three months before ‘you will sing this song’. Can you imagine holding that inside for months and months, not being able to mention it to anyone?”
But she has not sung it since Diana died in a Paris car crash in 1997.
“I never wanted to,” she said. “When she died I felt that I should put that song away for ever.”
Her focus now is training future New Zealand stars of opera through her Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation.
She has also criticised singing competitions on TV which grant instant fame without the training.
She said in 2014: “I hope I am not speaking out of turn here but television talent shows have a lot to answer for – Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor.
“If you win, it is ‘zing’, there you are, and for five minutes you are famous.”