On an early June day in 1944, a lady asked Nell Te Kanawa in Gisborne, North Island, New Zealand, “Would you like a little baby?” The lady stood on Nell’s doorstep holding a 5-week old baby girl. Nell declined that day, but when the lady returned with the same baby three months later, she felt it was meant to be and agreed. The baby, who had a Maori father and Irish mother, ended up being adopted by a couple of the same heritage. They named her Kiri.
Decades later, more than 600 million people heard lyric soprano Kiri Te Kanawa sing the George Frideric Handel aria “Let the Bright Seraphim” at the 1981 globally televised wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Te Kanawa was honored as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire a year later.
An Early Talent
The soprano with the sparkling liquid high notes and warm, rich middle tones discovered her talent early. Her first public performance, on Gisborne’s radio station, was when she was 6. A singing teacher-nun gave Te Kanawa her first voice lessons at the Roman Catholic girls’ college she attended. But after studying at the London Opera Centre with Vera Rozsa, her opera career took flight, but not without trepidation.
A Magnificent Career
Her performance as the Countess in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera “The Marriage of Figaro” sent her career soaring. Te Kanawa’s stunning London debut was more than just a success. It “elicited such a fervent response that her triumph was reported internationally,” a 1974 New York Times article declared. She rode a wave of success from the Santa Fe Opera and Covent Garden, to Lyon and San Francisco, and then at Glyndebourne.But her career extended beyond comedies. On only a few hours’ notice, Te Kanawa sang her spectacularly successful 1974 New York Metropolitan Opera debut as Desdemona in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Otello.” Not expecting to sing that day, she went shopping. She jokingly told her roommate that if the Metropolitan Opera called, to tell them that. The Met called, and that’s what the roommate said. After another panicked call from her agent, Te Kanawa bundled into a taxi and arrived at the opera house just in the nick of time.
“It was past six o’clock at the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoon and time for everyone to clear out, … but most of the matinee audience was reluctant to leave. [It wanted to] register its cheering approval of the principals, … and one principal was a particular object of interest. … Miss Te Kanawa won the audience from the very beginning, and did not lose it.”
During all the revolutions of the Earth around the sun from 1974 till 2016, Te Kanawa sang opera, recitals, recorded albums—including Leonard Bernstein’s recording of “West Side Story"—and made a movie of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”
As the sun rose on New Year’s Day of the new millennium, it was greeted by Dame Kiri Te Kanawa on the beach of her hometown of Gisborne—the first city on the planet to see the rising sun. She sang the Maori song “Pokarekare Ana” and Richard Strauss’s “Morgen!”
A Private Life
The personable, but private, singer has a “secret” second husband and two adopted children. It’s no surprise that although Te Kanawa described feeling audience support as thrilling, she most enjoyed rehearsing with the cast. “After the curtain goes down, I would be just as happy to go home.”
