For a Wary Soprano, Slow And Steady Wins the Race

By Anthony Tommasini
Sept. 14, 1997

TODAY, AT 38, Renee Fleming may be the most sought-after lyric soprano of her
generation. Yet her rise was hardly meteoric, as was clear from a story the revered
conductor Sir Georg Solti related about Ms. Fleming shortly before his death from a
heart attack early this month.

It was the spring of 1994, and Solti was planning to conduct and record Mozart's
''Cosi Fan Tutte'' in London with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. The soprano
scheduled to sing Fiordiligi got sick and canceled. A colleague of the conductor's
from his days with the Chicago Symphony suggested Ms. Fleming. Solti had not heard
the name. Intrigued, he obtained a tape from the Metropolitan Opera of Ms. Fleming
as the Countess in Mozart's ''Marriage of Figaro.'' He was smitten.

''In my long life, I have met maybe two sopranos with this quality of singing,''
Mr. Solti said. ''The other was Renata Tebaldi.'' The performance took place; the
recording was made, and Ms. Fleming gained an admiring and influential colleague
who helped her reach her current prominence.

The extent of that prominence is especially evident at the moment. On Wednesday

evening, Ms. Fleming will sing Mozart's ''Exsultate Jubilate'' and three songs of
Richard Strauss with Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic in the opening
concert of the orchestra's season, to be televised live by PBS. And on Sept. 23,
she will sing the title role in Massenet's ''Manon'' at the Met during the first
week of its season.

That her career has developed slowly and steadily has been to her benefit; many
singers burst on the scene, are taken up by pushy managers and burn out their
voices before reaching Ms. Fleming's age. Yet even she made some mistakes along the
way

''For a while it was hard for me to say no to work,'' she said recently, showing a
visitor around the back yard of her bucolic home in Fairfield County, Connecticut.
(Out of concern for her daughters' privacy, she asked that the exact location not
be given.) ''I was singing too much, learning too many new roles.'' What saved her
from making harmful choices was an acute understanding of the nature of her voice,
which she calls a full lyric soprano.

THE DESIGNATION applies to a soprano with richness, carrying power and agility but
an essentially lyrical, creamy sound, someone like the Spanish soprano Victoria de
los Angeles, whom Ms. Fleming reveres, or the great American soprano Eleanor
Steber, to whom she has often been compared. Full lyrics of this classic type have
been rare.

I enjoy the more floaty, exposed, elegant singing,'' Ms. Fleming said. ''I don't
like to sing loud. People seem to understand this about my voice, so I don't get
too many ridiculous offers.''

Ms. Fleming comes by her keen knowledge of voice types and technique naturally:
both of her parents were voice teachers in Rochester, where she grew up.

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The Survivor
''I literally sat in the playpen while my mother taught voice for the first two
years of my life,'' she said. ''When I got older, we discussed singing every night
at dinner. So I felt a lot of pressure. My mother was the worst kind of stage
mother. She would make me and my younger sister and brother little duckling
costumes and put us in kiddie shows.''

Ms. Fleming says she was a ''good girl'' who wanted to please everyone. Drawn to
music early, she studied piano, started to compose at 14 and knew that she liked to
sing. Yet she was driven to rebel in her own sad way. ''I was stolid and stone-
faced,'' she said. ''I did everything grudgingly and became painfully shy.''

Then she got involved with a jazz trio while attending the State University of New
York at Potsdam, where she pursued a degree in music education. The group played
every weekend in a pub off campus, and Ms. Fleming had to work the audience and
tell jokes as well as sing.

Marrying Rick Ross, an actor, also helped her overcome her shyness. ''Rick
understands what it means to use your body expressively and project a role on
stage,'' she said. Talks about acting are as common at her dinner table now as
talks about singing used to be.

She completed her training at the Juilliard School in New York, and her career
began in earnest. In 1989, she won the Richard Tucker Foundation Award, and made
her debuts at the New York City Opera and at Covent Garden in London. Her Met debut
came in 1991, as the Countess in ''Figaro.'' But she gained greater exposure at the
Met from singing, in a sense, the same role in the premiere of John Corigliano's
''Ghosts of Versailles,'' an operatic fantasy that picks up the Beaumarchais story
where Mozart's ''Figaro'' leaves off. The production was hugely popular and later
televised.

Debuts at other major houses followed. But her breakthrough season was 1995-96. She
opened the Met season as Desdemona in Verdi's ''Otello'' opposite Placido Domingo
in a televised production just five weeks after giving birth to her second
daughter. She sang with stamina and affecting expressivity, though her voice had a
darker hue, a result, she feels, of the extra weight she was still carrying.

That year the Solti recording of ''Cosi'' was released by Decca/London, and the
label signed her to an exclusive contract. She was the first American vocalist it
had taken on since Marilyn Horne, 31 years before.

Riding a high, Ms. Fleming made what she now considers a mistake: singing Eva in
Wagner's ''Meistersinger'' for her debut at the Bayreuth Festival in the summer of
1996. She was advised against it by her colleagues Solti and James Levine.

''What I told her, speaking like a father, which I could easily be to her, is that
she must not sing parts that are too heavy too soon,'' Solti said. ''Or sing too
much. She has listened, more or less, but it is hard to resist temptation,
especially when the whole world is coming to you.''

The chance to sing her first Wagner role at Bayreuth proved too attractive to turn
down, Ms. Fleming explained. ''Don't get me wrong, I had a ball at Bayreuth,
steeping myself in the history and tradition. But it was not right. The part is too
low for me. Projecting all those German words in the middle of my voice over a
thick orchestra was difficult. I'm not saying no to other Wagner, but I won't do
that role again.''

WHEN SHE RETURNED to the Met last fall for ''Cosi,'' she found every aspect of the
experience restorative: the music, Mr. Levine, her colleagues, the house. ''I
needed that 'Cosi' badly after Bayreuth, she said.''

She seems optimistic, too, about Manon, a touchstone role in French opera that she
bravely sang for the first time in Paris, last spring. ''I did that on purpose,''
she said. ''Five weeks of rehearsal with French coaches was invaluable. The opera
has spoken dialogue which, as you can imagine, was intimidating for an American.
During the first performance I was sure I heard someone laugh at my first spoken
line, but it was probably my paranoia.'' In fact, she won glowing reviews.

This will be the first ''Manon'' at the Met in 10 years. The title role is hard to
bring off. In the first act, Manon is a convent-bound girl of 15 from a solid
family in rural France. She ruins herself pursuing a dashing cavalier with class
but no money of his own, and a wily aristocrat with a fortune but no class. There
are opera-comique aspects to the work, but it ends in tragedy. And it is long. ''My
God, this opera is a French 'Gotterdammerung,' '' the soprano Birgit Nilsson once
told Beverly Sills, a leading Manon in her day.

Ms. Fleming turned to Ms. Sills for guidance. ''I cautioned Renee that if you start
out seductive, then you have nowhere to go,'' Ms. Sills said recently. ''You must
be a star-struck farm girl who has never seen the city. Unless you make her
charming at first, your audience is going to sit with this slutty, avaricious girl
for a long time and get bored.''

As for the Philharmonic, Ms. Fleming is looking forward to working with Mr. Masur,
whom she met only when they came together recently for publicity photos. Strauss
and Mozart should be mainstays of her repertory for years to come.

She is also pleased with her latest Decca/London release: scenes from operas by
Mozart, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Britten and Strauss, with the London Symphony
conducted by Solti. He approached her with the idea: the only time he ever recorded
an aria disk with a singer.

Ms. Fleming intends to do more recital work in the future and cut back somewhat on
opera. ''This is one way I can manage my family life,'' she explained. ''And, you
know, I can't wait to retire so I can teach. I guess teaching runs in the family.''

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 14, 1997, Section 2, Page 30 of
the National edition with the headline: For a Wary Soprano, Slow And Steady Wins
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