Kiri Te Kanawa has not joined FLAPSS and has not endorsed it. This page is a reference record assembled from published interviews and public remarks. Every answer below is a direct quotation with the source and date shown next to it.
Opera singer
New Zealand · b. 1944
Arts and letters
Before she became an internationally celebrated opera star, Kiri Te Kanawa struggled to earn money to pay for her singing lessons. She worked as a telephone operator and performed at weddings and in night clubs to save the money she needed to travel from New Zealand to London. From those hardscrabble beginnings, she rose to dazzle critics and audiences alike with her performances of the classic operatic works by legendary composers such as Mozart, Strauss, and Verdi.
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Totally. I’d say parents, brothers, sisters, and don’t go far beyond that for the moment. If you’ve had a long-term relationship with an agent, that’s a whole different thing, because that agent is there to care.
Yes, a major one, along with Sir Georg Solti. Because they’re both Hungarian, I used to call them the Hungarian mafia. He was always onto me. “Have you bring to Vera?” And then she’d say, “Georg, he won’t be liking this bit.” And between the two of them, there was this whish-whish-whish, like sword fighting, and I was being killed by the both of them. But I enjoyed every minute of it. It was good for me.
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