The great singer turns 80 on March 6. By Mark McGinness
It was 29 July 1981, and only the bride shone brighter when Kiri Te Kanawa, looking like a bird of paradise, as incandescent as she sounded - put the Bright into Handel’s Let The Bright Seraphim as the Prince and new Princess of Wales signed the wedding register.
As the congregation of the Great and the Good at St Paul’s Cathedral - and an audience of 600 million - listened, Clive James recalled Kiri “singing a storm; she even managed to make you forget what may have been the only surviving example of Maori national dress”
This bird of paradise is 80 on Wednesday.
She guessed she was one-quarter Maori. Born in Gisborne on New Zealand's North Island on 6 March 1944, she was the natural daughter of young, unmarried waitress, Noeleen Rawstron & already wed Maori butcher, Jack Wawatai.
At five months, she was adopted (after a second look - they had wanted a son) by Nell (née Leece) and her third husband, Tom Te Kanawa. She became Kiri, in honour of Tom’s mother. Tom was a descendant of a warrior chieftain of the Maori wars in the 1820s, who, legend has it, ate his vanquished enemy; sharing him with an ally, Chief Wherowhero.
Nell, a great niece of Sir Arthur Sullivan, wanted a musical child and after twelve happy years in rural Gisborne, she led the family to Auckland and lessons with the legendary teacher, Sister Mary Leo.
Kiri’s recording of "The Nuns’ Chorus" was New Zealand’s first Gold Record. Another first, in the 1965 Mobil Song Quest, sent her to London where she attended the London Opera Centre and later lessons from the renowned Vera Rozsa.
On 1 December 1971, after a try-out in Santa Fe, she made a sensational debut at Covent Garden as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro. For The Financial Times’s Andrew Porter, ‘this was a Countess such as I have never heard before, not at Covent Garden, nor in Salzburg, nor in Vienna..”
The Times’ William Mann declared her glorious, ravishing “She looks and moves like a teenage goddess.”
Just a little over two years later, weeks before her expected New York debut, she created a sensation at the Met as Desdemona in Otello after Teresa Strata’s sudden indisposition. The New York Times’s Allen Hughes wrote of the star, “looking beautiful and ever so tragic as Desdemona and guiding her fresh, lovely voice through Verdi's music with the skill and authority of an established Metropolitan star.”
A year before The Wedding, she took the role of Amelia in the Royal Opera House’s production of Simon Boccanegra. The Spectator’s Rodney Milne wrote, “If Kiri Te Kanawa is underpraised it is her fault: her technique is so rock-sure that she makes hideously difficult music sound as easy as pie, and you have to keep reminding yourself all the time that she is not just singing well, but singing superbly well. She is a phenomenon.”
Bernard Levin all but lost his head over her. But Kiri kept her head and her cool – pacing herself - about 50 performances a year. Her staples: Mozart and Strauss, Verdi’s Amelia, Gounod’s Marguerite, Puccini’s Manon and Mimi. Her favourite was Strauss’s Arabella. She said she could listen to the last scene "forever".
She also played a key part in one of the most romantic scenes in modern cinema - Merchant Ivory’s Room with a View (1985) in the scene where George Emerson (Julian Sands) cups his hand around the beautiful face of the headstrong Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter) and kisses her as Kiri sings 'Chi il bel sign di Doretta' from Puccini’s La Rondine, as The Guardian's Charlotte Higgins puts it, filling “the warm afternoon air with shivery, delicate longing, a tiny epiphany of truth, of beauty, of love; you watch thinking that you just might explode from joy”.
She sang another Puccini aria, “O mio babbino caro”, in the film and it became a regular much-loved feature of her concerts. In 2013, she sang it again in a guest appearance as Dame Nellie Melba in an episode of Downton Abbey, after Cora Grantham intervened and over-ruled Carson and his Lordship who thought that the entertainer should eat in her room and only join the family after dinner. Something, one imagines the real Melba - and the real Dame Kiri would never have tolerated.
As for her recordings, reviewing West Side Story with Jose Carreras under Bernstein himself, Gramophone considered 'Te Kanawa may not be a soprano you'd cast as Maria on stage, yet the beauty of the voice, its combination of richness, delicacy and purity, brings out the musical strengths of Bernstein's inspiration". While she recorded some forty complete works, her ‘Four Last Songs’ by Strauss with Sir Georg Solti (1991), and her ‘Songs of the Auvergne’ by Canteloube with Jeffrey Tate (1983) are the Dame at her best.
For four decades that ‘lovely, luscious, lustrous’ voice floated between the great opera houses looking as beautiful as she sounded. The Gisborne girl who believed herself to be plain had blossomed and would be dressed exquisitely by Balmain, St Laurent, Versace. As The Times’ Richard Morrison quipped, “floating on wearing not so much a gown as an entire opera in silk & lace" as "an excitable gent" beside him gasped, "God, isn't she radiant!" She was in her sixtieth year.
Created a Dame in 1982 she remained a royal favourite; she participated in Prince Edward’s Grand Knockout Tournament in 1987; she performed before The Queen Mother; she sang at Camilla Parker Bowles’s fiftieth birthday party at Highgrove in 1997 and sang Happy (80th) Birthday to The late Queen in 2006. She was made a Companion of Honour in 2018 and a guest of the Sovereign at Sandringham in 2020.
She became an early doyenne of crossover. An American critic said her descent into pop was like ‘taking a 747 from Milwaukee to Chicago’ but in addition to her Maria for Bernstein, recordings of her South Pacific Nellie, her Lerner & Lowe Eliza, her Gershwin and Cole Porter are, to these ears, sublime.
In 1997 came a great blow – a telegram from her husband of thirty years, Des Park, an Australian mining engineer, long-time manager and father of their adopted son, Tom, and daughter, Antonia. He wanted a divorce; and soon remarried. She reassessed her life and career. She also came to identify with the scorned Donna Elvira, a role that had made a movie star of her in Joseph Losey’s film of Don Giovanni in 1979.
While Kiri continued to perform, she appeared in fewer full operas. She had, even in her best days, been criticised for a certain distance from the text. As The Guardian's Tim Ashley put it, "allowing tone and line to carry the sense of the music rather than rooting the meaning of a song or aria in its words" but her fans believed that for her creamy legato she could be forgiven anything.
Even three decades after her Covent Garden triumph as the Countess, The Independent's Roderic Dunnett marvelled at "the exquisite range of German lied and French chanson"; her melting last stanza of Berlioz's "Le Spectre de La Rose" and in Duparc's "Chanson triste", the glassy brittleness of her fading voice tinged with a lovely sensitivity."
Of course, the voice that Christina Patterson described as "the richest darkest chocolate mousse" inevitably lost some of its lushness.
Her last appearance in a major role was in 2010, when she sang the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier at the Cologne Opera.
On her seventieth birthday she swept onto the stage at Covent Garden and sang as the imperious Duchesse de Crackentorp in the Royal Opera’s revival of Donizetti’s military farce, La Fille du regiment, adding a Puccini arietta to what is traditionally a speaking part, having done so at The Met in 2010 and 2012 and then again in Vienna in 2013.
Her very last appearance onstage happened to be a concert in Ballarat, Victoria in October 2016, although she did not announce she had sung her last until September 2017.
By 2021, she had remarried and retired to Rawhiti, a remote estate near the Bay of Islands, on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island, to be close to a beloved grandson. Golf had long been a favourite recreation; and deep-sea fishing. When one Christmas about 15 years ago she caught a 217kg blue marlin in the Bay of Islands, The New Zealand Herald’s Noelle McCarthy proclaimed her “a cross between Maria Callas and The Old Man and the Sea.”
After Edmund Hilary, she was probably the most famous Kiwi on earth. Discussing a proposal to give names to New Zealand's two islands, one of the national papers suggested ‘Kiri’ and ‘Te Kanawa’.
She continues to oversee her foundation for young NZ singers and musicians, established in 2003. It has made more than 160 grants to 33 New Zealand singers. With her down-to-earth bluffness, she made no secret of her contempt for Britain’s Got Talent and the proliferation of instant stars from its off-spring and variants. There was no substitute for the long hard road towards perfection.
In deciding to cease performing she looked to the agelessness of Marilyn Munro. “She’s never going to change is she? And that’s what I want people to remember - there’s my voice, it’s never going to change…. I’m done, I've moved on and you're never going to hear another sound out of me, because that's what I want everyone to remember.”
After she gave her farewell recital in the United States, New Criterion’s Jay Nordlinger paid tribute, “She has come in for a lot of critical grief over the years; she has deserved some of it (or a little of it). But, you know what? She has been an extraordinary singer - and she sang extraordinarily as she bade farewell to New York. She sang better than some singers - actually, than most singers - do in their prime. I wish I could hear her again. And again.”
Happy Eightieth Birthday to a great Dame.
