There are some people who enjoy singing at openings of international importance. I daresay it has a domino effect – you do one and before you know it you’re asked to do more. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is one such person because she thrives on appearing in more than her fair share of bigger-thanBen-Hur events. Take the day she sang wearing that unique multi-coloured hat at some wedding or other in London and was watched by an audience of 600 million. Or when she sang the anthem for the 1991 Rugby World Cup in the British Isles. That was OK, incidentally, because Australia won the tournament. And the previous year she drew an audience of 140,000 to an open air recital in Auckland. That’s almost the entire population of New Zealand – people, that is, not sheep. And then, she regaled us at the opening of the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games when she defused a potentially tricky diplomatic situation by singing one verse of God Save the Queen together with Happy Birthday to Her Majesty.
Dame Kiri was born Claire Mary Teresa Rawstron in Gisborne, New Zealand to a European mother and a Maori father who gave her up for adoption as a foundling . She was raised by Nell and Tom Te Kanawa who themselves were of mixed ancestry. She has never attempted to look for her birth parents.
Showing promise as a singer she was formally trained at a young age in opera by Sister Mary Leo at St Mary’s College in Auckland. Her initial range was as a mezzo-soprano but she later embraced the lyric soprano repertoire. Such was her fame that her recording of Johann Strauss’ Nun’s Chorus from the operetta Casanova became New Zealand’s first locally produced gold record.
After winning a host of prestigious competitions in both Australia and New Zealand she won a musical scholarship and enrolled at the London Opera Centre aged 22. But Kiri’s career was slow to bear fruit. She languished for several years unable to fulfil her early promise. In early 1971, however, she sang the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro for the Sante Fe Opera. That same winter she created an international sensation by repeating the role at Covent Garden. Norman Lebrecht wrote that she ‘knocked the place flat’. Three years later she made her Metropolitan Opera debut as Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello when at short notice she replaced an ailing Teresa Stratas. A La Scala performance followed.
For a singer who owes much to classical music she has views contrary to the profession that is her bread and butter. She was one of the first to pioneer the use of surtitles by insisting it appear in her contracts. She ensures that ticket prices for her performances are not ‘over the top’. She’s complained that most opera house dressing rooms lack windows that open to the outside and, she asked, why are dressing rooms situated above or below the stage area? The stage can only be reached by lift or by dimly-lit stairs. ‘More than once,’ she exclaimed in an interview with Neil Evans, ‘I have ripped my dress and needed a quick repair just before going on stage, or broken my heel on an uneven staircase.’
She has a fascination for the music of Richard Strauss. Since her collaboration with the late Sir Georg Solti she admits to wallowing in Strauss’ music. Quoting from her interview with Neil Evans again: ‘His music creates beauty. He writes long, glorious lines like beautiful strings of even pearls that just go on and on like a hand caressing you.’
Dame Kiri sang her last live opera, Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, with the Los Angeles Opera in November 2004. Her final stage performance was in Ballarat, Australia, in October 2016, but she did not reveal her retirement until September 2017.
She is busy promoting her own charity, The Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation, which helps budding New Zealand singers. There was no such organisation, she says, when she left home. By fostering the foundation, she has created a musical body that can advise singers at vital stages of their career.
Te Kanawa was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 1982 Birthday Honours for services to opera. She was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2018 Birthday Honours for services to music and received the Order from the Prince of Wales in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace on 20 December.
STOP PRESS
It was announced today that The Auckland Aotea Centre ASB Theatre will be known as the Kiri te Kanawa Theatre. On November 20 this year Dame Kiri will feature in a concert at the theatre with the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra and several rising opera singers.
29/04/06
