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Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, the opera star who sang at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, is to retire
The singer, who has performed around the world during her 40-year career, said she wanted to leave the stage because the discipline was "exhausting".
In April she will sing her last opera as the Marschallin in Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at the Cologne Opera in Germany.
The New Zealand soprano, 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 our voices change - opera is mainly for young people."
"The press retired me," she said. "I have not been singing opera very much but I still sing a lot of concerts."
Her "extremely busy" touring concert schedule includes performances in Sydney, Beijing, Spain and America in the coming months. She also spends a lot of time training what she calls the "future stars of opera", through the Solti Academy and her Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation.
"They come through the process very slowly. They are introduced into all aspects of it - the works, the diet, the body - the whole 10 years of it," she said. In September she will bring three of her proteges to London to perform at the Tower of London at the 12-day Tower Festival.
As a teenager Dame Kiri sang pop hits at clubs in New Zealand before winning a place at the London Opera Centre in 1968, aged 24. She was hailed as one of the leading international operatic sopranos of the 1970s and 1980s, singing in English, French, German, Italian and Russian. She was made a Dame Commander of The Order of the British Empire in 1982.
One of her most famous performances was at Prince Charles' 1981 wedding at St Paul's Cathedral when an estimated global audience of 600million people heard her sing Handel's "Let the Bright Seraphim".
Reader views (2)
Hope you Enjoy the concert at the Tower David, However I think you will find that Dame Kiri is not retiring from Concerts or Recitals. Only full length Operas.
Chris.
- Chris Carcary., Canberra, Australia.
i'm such a big fan of Dame Kiri. I'm taking my wife to see one of her last performances at the Tower Festival in London. i can't wait.
- David Hebe, London, UK
