The 73-year-old soprano said that she had given her final performance a year ago but had not announced her retirement until now.
She said: “I don’t want to hear my voice. It is in the past.
“When I’m teaching young singers and hearing beautiful young fresh voices, I don’t want to put my voice next to theirs.”
The New Zealander, who made her name in 1971 by appearing as Countess Rosina Almaviva in The Marriage Of Figaro at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, said that it took her five years “to say the goodbye in my own mind.”
Dame Kiri, who appeared in TV drama Downton Abbey, made her last public performance in Ballarat near Melbourne in Australia last October.
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She said: “Before I’d gone on, I said, right, this is it. And that was the end.”
Even before then, she had hinted at retirement. In 2009 she said she had sung her last opera because the discipline was “exhausting”.
The star, who is of part-Maori ancestry, was often her harshest critic.
She said: “I never really achieved perfection of the 100 per cent that I would have liked to.
“I never actually came off stage saying, ‘I’ve really nailed it.’ Never. I always thought there was a mistake in it.
A worldwide television audience of 750 million people heard her sing Let the Bright Seraphim from Handel’s Samson at Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981.
She said: “I was told two or three months before, you will sing this song.
“Can you imagine holding that inside you for months and months, not being able to mention it to anyone?”
But after Diana’s death in a Paris car crash in 1997 Dame Kiri never sang it again.
She said: “I never wanted to. When she died, I felt that I should put that song away forever.”
During a hugely successful career, Dame Kiri, who appeared as Australian opera singer Dame Nellie Melba in ITV’s Downton Abbey in 2013, was also the first singer to perform the Rugby World Cup anthem World in Union in 1991.
She has criticised television talent shows such as Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor for providing instant fame without the necessary training to sustain careers.
She said in 2014: “These new singers last about five years and then the next tenor comes through.
“I hope I am not speaking out of turn here, but television talent shows have a lot to answer for: Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor.
“If you win, it is ‘zing’, there you are, and for five minutes you are famous.”
Her focus now is training future New Zealand stars of opera through her Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation.
She is also being honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the Gramophone Classical Music Awards.
She said: “It is very, very special.”