Kiri Te Kanawa To Retire From Opera (Wait, She’s Still Singing Opera?)
For 40 years, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa has enthralled opera audiences around the world. In 1981 she was heard by 600 million people when she sang at the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana. Now the New Zealand soprano is leaving the operatic stage because the discipline is “exhausting.” In April she will sing her last opera at the Cologne Opera in Germany. She will play the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier by Richard Strauss, a role she has made her own. In February, she will give her penultimate opera performance, playing the Duchess of Krakenthorpa in Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. It is normally a spoken role but she said she would surprise audiences by singing parts of it.
