London - World-renowned New Zealand soprano Kiri Te Kanawa is to retire from the opera stage after a glittering 40-year career, the 65-year-old told London's Daily Telegraph newspaper Wednesday.

She told the Daily Telegraph the strain of performing full operas was "exhausting" and "becoming too much."

Her performance next April as the Marschallin in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier in Cologne, Germany, would be her last, she revealed.

"It will be my last. It's not as if I want to do it on a regular basis now, because it's exhausting. I think certainly our voices change; opera is mainly for young people."

In February, 2010, she will play the Duchess of Krakenthorpa in Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Te Kanawa has not sung opera since 2004 when she played in Samuel Barber's 1958 work Vanessa at the Los Angeles Opera.

At the time, it was widely believed to have been her operatic swansong, but this week the singer insisted she had never retired.

"The press retired me," she said. "I have not been singing opera very much but I still sing a lot of concerts."

The singer, of mixed Maori-Irish parenthood, rose to fame in the early 1970s and is fondly remembered in Britain for her performance at the wedding of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana in 1981. (dpa)