By Fran Laniado
On July 10, 2013, at a White House Ceremony, President Barack Obama presented soprano, Renee Fleming with America’s highest honor for an individual artist; the National Medal of Arts. This certainly wasn’t the first award that Fleming has received (Fleming is a four-time Grammy winner, who has also been awarded Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal; Sweden’s Polar Prize; the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur from the French government; Honorary Membership in the Royal Academy of Music; and honorary doctorates from Carnegie Mellon University; the Eastman School of Music and The Juilliard School), nor is it likely to be the last. But it is fitting that the artist known as “the people’s diva” should have a high honor from the government of her own country.
Fleming’s ascent in the opera world can be seen as a sort of fairy tale. Or it can be seen as the natural (if extraordinary!) fate of the daughter of two music teachers. But it wasn’t always easy. In fact, Fleming confesses to suffering from nerves and insecurity throughout her career.
Rise to the Top:
Certainly, her beginnings are humble enough. She grew up in Rochester, New York and attended the State University of New York (SUNY) at Potsdam. There she joined a jazz trio that performed in an off-campus bar. Fleming credits her jazz experience with allowing her a sense of freedom with music that she’s brought to her classical repertoire. Though jazz saxophonist Illinois Jaquet offered her the opportunity to tour with his big band, she declined in favor of continuing her graduate studies in music at The Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. When Fleming won a Fulbright scholarship, she traveled to Europe where she studied with legendary sopranos such as Joyce Arleen Auger and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. Upon her return to the United States, Fleming sang jazz gigs in order to fund her continued education at the Julliard School of Music. It was at the Julliard Opera Center that Fleming first began to appear in roles like Musetta in La Boheme.
Though she began her professional career while she was still a graduate student at Julliard performing in smaller concerts and concert series., Renee Fleming’s “big break” came two years later at the age of 29 when she won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions. That same year she sang for the first time what was to become one of her most famous roles; The Countess in The Marriage of Figero in her debut at the Huston Grand Opera. The following year she made her New York City Opera debut as Mimi in La Boheme. 1989 also marked Fleming’s first performance of Dvorak’s Rusalka, a role that she refers to as her “signature” role, which she has performed many times all around the world. Fleming was scheduled to make her Metropolitan Opera debut the following season, but she debuted 1990, earlier than planned, when she replaced a sick Felicity Lott as the Countess in The Marriage of Figero. Later that year she returned to the Metropolitan Opera to originate a role in an opera. She played Rosina in the world premiere of John Corigliano’s Ghosts of Versailles. Then Fleming made her Carnegie Hall debut with the New York City Opera Orchestra, performing the music of Ravel. She also played Rusalka once again, this time at the Huston Grand Opera, and appeared for the first time at the Tanglewood Music Festival, in Mozart’s Idomeneo. Other major “firsts” followed. Fleming traveled around the world performing to acclaim. In 1993 she made her New York City solo debut recital at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center.
Fleming, who considers performing in original works one of the most important things that an opera singer can do in terms of having a lasting impact on the art form, originated another role in John Kander’s Letter From Sullivan Ballou at the Seattle Opera’s Richard Tucker Awards ceremony. 1994 was another big year for Fleming who performed her first Desdemona in Otello at the Metropolitan Opera and then performed the role of Ellen Orford in Britten’s Peter Grimes, also at the Met. Next, she originated another role: Madame de Tourvel in the world premiere of Conrad Susa’s Dangerous Liaisons. In 1995 Fleming signed an exclusive recording contract with the London/Decca label. She was the first American singer in 31 years to do so!
In 1996 she sang the role of Donna Anna in Mozart’s Don Giovanni with the Paris Opera at the reopening at the Palais Garnier, conducted by Sir George Solti. Solti chose her as the recipient of the first-ever “Solti Prize” to be given to an outstanding younger singer. Solti said of Fleming that “In my long life, I have met maybe two sopranos with this quality of singing. The other was Renata Tebaldi”. The next few years saw Fleming going from one high to the next. In 1998 she originated the role of Blanche DuBois in the world premiere of Andre Previn’s Streetcar Named Desire.
Threatened by Stage Fright: Fleming’s “Dark night of the soul”
Then there was a snag. Or rather several. By the late 1990’s Fleming was at the height of her professional career. But while her professional life was going well her personal life was undergoing ups and downs. In 1989, when her career was just taking off, Fleming had married actor Rick Ross. Together they had two daughters; Amelia, born in 1992, and Sage, born in 1993. But by the late 1990’s the marriage was crumbling. Fleming escaped into her workload, taking on more than she could handle.
The already emotionally fragile Fleming was booed at the opening night of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia at La Scala in Italy. It’s hard to say why. It wasn’t a bad performance by any objective sense. But the show had undergone several difficulties. The tenor had dropped out and had to be replaced at the last minute. Frustration had built amongst the audience during the performance because the conductor had passed out at the podium and had to take an unscheduled 30-minute break. The booing began during Flemings closing scene and continued after it was over. “I began to shake and I shook for days,” she says. Despite the fact that Fleming continued her run in the role without incident, she calls it “the worst night of her operatic life”. However, when she returned to the United States her colleagues congratulated her. Naturally, Fleming was confused. Then she learned that she was far from the first singer to be booing on opening night at La Scala. It is a rite of passage that opera greats such as Pavoratti, Callas, Cabelle and many others have been on the receiving end of. Fleming could now count herself in good company!
Yet this incident and the stress in her personal life caused a year of crippling stage fright for Fleming. Though she never backed out of a performance, she suffered terribly.“Every cell in my body was screaming, No! I can’t do this!.., you feel as if you will die.”
Fleming was no stranger to pre-performance jitters. But this was something different. “We’re talking about deep, deep panic, and that every fiber of your being is saying, ‘I cannot be on that stage.'”
Looking back on the period from the distance of several years, Fleming believes that the anxiety she experienced was a combination of personal and professional stress that manifested itself as stage fright: “It was just a very difficult time. You know, the mind can only take so much and then it says, ‘OK, I don’t want to do this anymore. This is too much pressure.” She calls this period her “dark night of the soul”.
Yet no one on the outside would’ve known that anything was wrong. In 1999 she won her first Grammy award for her album “The Beautiful Voice”, and closed the year by performing at the White House Christmas Celebration for President Bill Clinton. That same year she appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera, and Covent Garden where she sang the role of the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier.
Fortunately, she was able to draw on support from those around her. “My voice teacher stood in my dressing room and walked me to the stage. And thank God, because in retrospect I think if I had somehow quit or said, ‘I’m just going to take some time off and get on top of this’, I’m not sure when and how I would have gone back,” she explains.
Eventually, Fleming’s life took on a more even keel. Her divorce was finalized in 2000 and she kept custody of her daughters, Amelia and Sage, raising them as a single mother. Does she still get nervous? Absolutely.“There are still high-pressure engagements and I’m very happy when they’re over”. But “I’m always comfortable once I get on stage. It’s the week or two in advance…when I suffer. And I’ve always had this strange coping mechanism, in a sense a sort of ‘deal’ with myself that if I suffer enough in advance, then I can perform well.”
Interestingly, a study of the psychology of opera singers done in the 1980s found that there is more performance anxiety amongst those who have voices in the higher registers. As a soprano Fleming definitely falls into that category. But why would tenors and sopranos be more prone to stage fright than, say, a mezzo or a baritone? Fleming speculates “I think it’s the level of risk. We who sing high have a great deal of risk, tenors most of all because the raison d’être really for a tenor is a brilliant high C or a brilliant high tone. And sopranos have the same pressure to a slightly lesser degree. But, you know, every voice type has difficulty.”
The People’s Diva
In 2001, with the United States still reeling from the attacks of 9/11 only a month earlier, Fleming was asked to perform at a memorial ceremony at Ground Zero. Fleming was to perform “Amazing Grace”. It was one of those performances that Fleming worried about weeks in advance. In her autobiography she recalls “In the week leading up to that event, I had sung the song, again and again, trying to imprint it into the muscle memory of my throat so that when the time came to perform it, I would be able to get through to the end without crying”. However, in spite of that practice, looking out at the crowd Fleming knew “when I started to sing I’d have to look at the sky or I’d never maintain my composure”. She also speculates as to why she was asked to perform at the service: after all, classical singers, even famous ones, aren’t household names or recognizable faces to mainstream audiences. So why ask a classical singer to perform at a time of grief and mourning? She came up with several theories. The first is that “the tradition of music grounds us and connects us to one another through a sort of universal appreciation that transcends taste, particularly in songs such as ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘God Bless America’. Second, a trained voice has a kind of innate authority that transmits a sense of strength. We can be heard without a microphone. We sing with the entire body. The sounds we make emanate not just from the head, but from the whole heart and soul and, most important, the gut…”. Fleming has performed for large audiences many times before and since, yet this performance stands out in her memory. She recalls looking out at “nine thousand people crushed into a space that was impossibly small for them, filling up the streets, pressing shoulder to shoulder in every direction until they became one single line of sorrow”.
This is just one example of why, over the years, Fleming has earned the nickname “the people’s diva”. She makes artistic ventures outside the opera house or recital hall and participates in something that non-opera fans take part in. For example, in 2002, Fleming was hired to provide the vocals for Howard Shore’s soundtrack to Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Fleming has sung in many languages including English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Czech. However, this project presented her with a new challenge: singing in Elvish!
That same year, author Ann Patchett released a novel called Bel Canto about a group of terrorists taking a group of executives and people of high political standing hostage at a party at a private residence in an unnamed South American country. The novel explores the relationship between the hostages and the terrorists living in the house together for several months. One of the main characters of the book is an American operatic soprano, Roxane Cross, who was invited to sing at the event. As Patchett wrote, she imagined Roxane Cross having Fleming’s voice. Her music brings both terrorists and hostages together in it’s beauty. The novel was a best seller and Fleming helped Patchett promote it.
While she was providing the inspiration for Ann Patchett’s novel, Fleming was also at work on a literary project of her own. In 2005, Fleming released a book called The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer. Fleming describes this as less of an autobiography than a portrait of an artist at work. It’s the story of her artistic development. She recalls her education, describes how she interprets a score, studies lyrics in foreign languages, and engages with the character that she’s playing. She also describes some of the personal challenges she’s encountered along the way. There’s no insider gossip. Fleming touches on her personal life once or twice, mentioning her marriage and divorce and making it clear that though she loves her career, her daughters are by far her first priority. After their birth, she traveled with them, and when they started school she took more engagements in and around her home base of New York City and limiting travel to the summers so that her daughters could come with her.
One theme that runs through the book is an understanding of how fragile her stardom is. While she loves what she does, Fleming is always aware that all of the opportunities and experiences that her career has brought her comes down to “two little pieces of cartilage in my throat. These vocal chords- delicate, mysterious and slightly unpredictable- have taken me to unimaginable places”. She gives the reader a full understanding that the voice is an instrument: just as much as the piano or the violin or the flute. However, if a cello breaks the player can always get another. The singer doesn’t have that luxury. Fleming never forgets that if her voice goes, her career, and all that goes with it, is over. She gives aspiring singers advice on how to care for their voices, because glamor aside, that’s what it all comes down to.
Following the book’s release, Fleming continued to make herself accessible rather than aloof to the general public rather than just opera audiences. In 2006, she released a jazz album called “Haunted Heart”, that brought her back to her early roots as a jazz singer.
Fleming opened the 2008 Metropolitan Opera’s 125th anniversary season with a solo opening night gala. She was the first woman ever to do so. The 2008 season at the met was dedicated to Fleming who appeared in Verdi’s Otello as Desdemona and in the title role of Massenet’s Thais.
In 2009 Fleming tackled a new challenge: a solo work written especially for her by composer Henri Dutilleux. Le temps l’orloge (Time and the Clock) is a three-song cycle based on two poems by Jean Tardieu (“Le temps l’orloge”, and “Le masque”) and one by Robert Desnos (“Le dernier poeme”) , as well as Charles Baudelaire’s prose-poem “Enivrez-vous”. Dutileux explains that “I constantly thought of her voice’s character, of her power of lyrical expression” when writing the piece. Fleming first performed the work in 2007 but by 2009, Dutileaux had added an interlude as well as included a fourth poem. The premiere of the complete work took place in May 2009 at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris.
In 2010 Fleming crossed over from the classical world again and released an album that no one expected of her. “Dark Hope” covered songs by Leonard Cohen, Jefferson Airplane, Band of Horses, and more. When Fleming was first approached to record this music by her record label she was astonished. “I wondered what they were thinking – how they could possibly imagine my voice in this music. They gave me an Excel print-out with a list of possible titles. The only piece I’d ever heard of was Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, because I’d taken my kids to see Shrek” But it seems that Fleming is never one to shy away from a challenge. This particular challenge was difficult in ways that Fleming could never anticipate. The singing itself wasn’t hard. “Most of the singing on this disc is easier than speech. I just whispered into this enormous mic in the booth; the technology did the rest. I got incredibly frustrated because I wasn’t using my whole body. With classical singing you have to put out so much air – you project, you emit force. We add timbre to the text, we color it by using vibrato, and in the end, the words just become abstract sound. Here there’s none of that, so the voice had no physical support and at first couldn’t stay in tune – and I’m a fanatic about pitch!” Her early jazz training wasn’t something she could fall back on either. “ You’re not allowed to improvise either, the way you can in jazz. The words really matter you can’t scat like Ella! Those kids cared about what they were saying, and you have to respect that – the political protest in the Willy Mason song, or the nightmare about women being treated as devils in ‘With Twilight as My Guide’ [by the Mars Volta]. It needs a much more straitjacketed vocal technique. They had to police my diction, for instance – they wouldn’t let me use explosive consonants, so no dental sounds on d or t.” Essentially Fleming had to “unlearn” years of training a and a lifetime of hard work in order to be able to cover songs by Muse, Arcade Fire, and Death Cab for Cutie. The arranger and engineer on the record helped Fleming through the process. “I’m not a person who easily gives up control but he persuaded me to trust him. My mantra through it all was that I must be sounding bland, I didn’t think I was imposing myself, making an interpretation. He told me to wait for the finished product.” He was right. While a few purists grumbled, the album earned generally positive reviews.
2011 was a big year for Fleming in several ways. In March she appeared in the Grande Finale concert of the Youtube Symphony Orchestra along with the Sydney Children’s Choir. They performed Mozart’s “Caro Bel Idol Mio”. Within a week the concert had 33,000,000 online views! She also ventured into film once again, providing the singing voice of opera diva Bianca Castafiore in Steven Spielberg’s animated film The Adventures of Tintin. She can be heard on the film’s soundtrack singing “Juliette’s Walz” from Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette. In September of that same year, Fleming married corporate lawyer Tim Jessell. She and Jessell were set up on a blind date by none other than Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto!
In 2012 the newlywed Fleming performed at Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. She also recorded Alexandre Desplat’s theme song, “Still Dream” for the animated feature film Rise of the Guardians.
It’s interesting that someone plagued by performance anxiety has found the nerve to venture out of her comfort zone time and time again. Fleming could have had a successful career playing it safe in the staple roles where she began. Instead, she’s stretched herself artistically in unique ways. However, in spite of all her crossovers into the realm of mainstream focus, Fleming’s first love remains opera. “Other things can continue to happen, and it’s only an aside. My main work is in opera — that’s the substantial, satisfying part of what I do. I don’t intend to give up my day job.” She hopes in the future to take part in more original works. “Really, all I want to do is develop a new opera again. That’s totally my first priority artistically. Being involved in bringing something to life has got to be the highest artistic goal that we, as interpretative artists, can achieve.”