One day during her second year at St Mary’s, Kiri visited Sister Mary Leo’s room with a gift of handkerchiefs she had bought with a group of other girls. Sister Mary had invited her new discovery to sit down for a lengthy, intimate talk. Unlike most of the St Mary’s girls, Kiri had quickly overcome her fear of her mentor. ‘Kiri was confident and could communicate with her,’ recalled Elsa Grubisa. As she grew to understand her precocious new pupil, Sister Mary Leo had, in return, been ‘completely frank’ with Kiri. By now Sister Mary Leo recognised a gift as natural as anything she had encountered in her long career. She also understood how easily that talent could be squandered through indiscipline and over-confidence. ‘You have got a lot of ability, dear, and you’re going to have a lot of people giving you all the encouragement and praise in the world,’ she explained. She went on to explain why Kiri could not expect her to be anything other than her toughest taskmistress. ‘I’m going to be harder on you than anyone else, because it is better for you.’
Moments later, as she walked Kiri to the door, Leo revealed the real reason for her wanting their little tête-à-tête. ‘Now tell me, Kiri,’ she smiled. ‘Next term, would you like to go for competitions?’
At the dawn of the 1960s, with the exception of live commentaries on the All Blacks rugby test matches and the races of the Olympic middle-distance star Peter Snell, few radio programmes drew such avid audiences as the transmissions of the singing competitions that had by now proliferated all over New Zealand. Since the Mobil Petroleum Company had begun pouring sponsorship cash into the hugely popular Song Quest, so the smaller competitions held all over New Zealand became more popular and highly publicised. During the autumn and winter months provincial outposts like Tauranga and Te Awamutu, Te Aroha and Rotorua became the focus of intense interest among New Zealand’s music-loving public.
The aria contests helped many young singers develop into stars. Long player recordings of the winning competitors sold well. Recording contracts and overseas scholarships were commonplace for the feted few who made it on to the winner’s podium. Financially the rewards were considerable. The Mobil Song Quest first prize was £300. The purse at the most high profile of all Australasian contests, the Melbourne and Sydney Sun Arias, was £1,500, about double the average annual wage at the time. In short, the contests offered a stairway to stardom, a tantalising route to fame and fortune, in New Zealand terms at least. Perhaps most importantly, they offered New Zealanders an opportunity to overcome the inferiority complex they felt in comparison to the mother country, the ‘cultural cringe’ as Kiwis called it.
‘With rugby and horseracing, singing was the big thing in New Zealand at the time,’ recalled Diana Stuart. As a gifted soloist and cellist, Stuart was given a deeper than average insight into this competitive world. She often played in the orchestras accompanying the singing finalists. To the New Zealand public, the competitions seemed like genteel, elegant affairs contested between neatly groomed young ladies and gentlemen. The backstage reality was rather different. ‘The rivalry really was ferocious.’
Nowhere was the competition more intense than among the teachers themselves. Publicly Sister Mary Leo tut-tutted such petty jealousies. ‘I hate that competitive spirit,’ she told the New Zealand Weekly News once. ‘I tell all the girls: “Do your best. Don’t merely concentrate on winning, music is too beautiful, the voice is a gift they have been given, to give joy to other people.”’ The truth was no one hated losing more.
Sister Mary Leo’s main opposition invariably came from singers attached to a small group of rival teachers, the Drake family and Mary Pratt in Dunedin and a Madame Narev in Auckland. Her representatives were left in no doubt what was expected of them. ‘She would say things like: “I’m going to be very disappointed if you don’t do so and so,”’ recalled Diana Stuart. ‘She loathed losing.’
As Sister Mary Leo began preparing Kiri for her entry into this new world she quickly realised she had unearthed a natural born winner. Like every other Sister Leo girl Kiri found herself taught how to dress, pose and behave on stage.
‘She endeavoured to train them even in things like how to walk, how to look gracious, how to bow, how to accept applause,’ recalled Sister Mary Leo’s contemporary, Sister Mercienne, now the school’s archivist. ‘She would do her best to bring them to the point where they could make the most of themselves and stand up there like young queens and sing their hearts out.’
Perhaps Sister Mary Leo’s greatest gift, however, lay in her ability to teach girls to express their personalities in their singing. ‘She was not a flamboyant person herself, but she encouraged that in her singers because it is what you need on the stage. She was very good at drawing people out and getting them to express themselves,’ recalled Hannah Tatana.
Tatana had been educated at Queen Victoria’s, Auckland’s all Maori girls’ school, where she had come to the attention of Sister Mary Leo. By 1960, she was already being talked of as the first female classical star to emerge from the Maori population.
Tatana had first heard Kiri sing at a talent competition held at Taupo in the Christmas of 1960, where, with her brother, she had been asked to act as a judge. ‘Kiri sang “Ave Maria” and I was bowled over by her voice,’ she remembered.
Back at St Mary’s, she had taken a keen interest in her progress under Sister Mary Leo. ‘There was this wonderful sound that was new and so gorgeous and luscious that it gave the impression that with judicious choice of repertoire – which was something that Sister Mary Leo was good at – there was no limit to what she might achieve,’ she said.
As Kiri took her first tentative steps on to the competition circuit, her towering talent made an immediate impact. Kiri’s first important competition appearance came in her home city’s premier event, the Auckland Competitions, in 1960. She sang two songs, ‘When the Children Say Their Prayers’ and ‘Road to the Isles’, in the sixteen-year-old age group. She won with ease.
In March 1960, as Kiri celebrated her sixteenth birthday, her days within St Mary’s College itself were drawing to a close. By now she had been accepted for a year-long ATCL course at Auckland Business College. As far as Nell was concerned, her schooling there was subsidiary to her continuing education as a member of Sister Mary Leo’s 200-strong group of private, fee-paying students. Her Sisters at St Mary’s regarded Sister Mary Leo in much the same way Kiri’s family saw Nell Te Kanawa. ‘The other nuns quivered in her shadow,’ Kiri laughed later in life. To Kiri, her teacher was ‘a very grand lady – a “grande dame”. However, my mother was also a “grande dame”, who liked to command and demand everything so the two characters didn’t get on very well.’
Yet the two women had formed an alliance that was as formidable as it was unlikely. Nell had made no secret of her ambitions for Kiri. ‘It was mainly her mother’s wish and ambition on Kiri’s behalf which led her to devote herself chiefly to more serious music,’ Sister Mary Leo conceded later.
As Kiri continued her studies, however, she realised the financial cost of maintaining her embryonic career was considerable. The differing demands of the competitions and choir performances and her less formal wedding engagements required a well-stocked wardrobe. Resourceful as ever, Nell made a collection of full-length evening costumes, cocktail dresses and ballgowns. Her eyes were also eternally open to opportunities to acquire or borrow outfits that enhanced Kiri’s image. As Kiri reached the end of her studies at business college, emerging with an honours pass, Nell made it clear that she too would have to contribute to maintaining her lavish professional lifestyle. A succession of menial jobs followed, the first at the main telephone exchange in Auckland where Kiri began working from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day.
By May 1961 the Te Kanawa household was forced to find the money