This week Alec talks with opera singer Renée Fleming, whose singing voice has been described as "double cream." Fleming remembers her professional debut -- “I was just jelly at the end of the first rehearsal” -- and celebrates her long association with The Metropolitan Opera. Fleming talks about performing and the challenges of being heard, without amplification, over an orchestra, but also about the pleasure of being in the audience “where I have literally been sobbing at the end” of an opera.
Music excerpts included in Here’s the Thing’s conversation with Renée Fleming (in order of appearance):
“Glück, das mir verblieb (Marietta’s Lied)” from Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt
(Live performance from the Met’s 125th Anniversary Gala, March 15, 2009; Conductor: James Levine)
“I’ll Be Seeing You” (Renée Fleming with the Eastman Jazz Ensemble/”Arranger’s Holiday” recorded Fall 1981 (archive tape courtesy Renée Fleming; special thanks to Ed Fleming)
"Contessa, perdono!" from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Houston Grand Opera. Conductor; Christoph Eschenbach. 1991
“Glück, das mir verblieb (Marietta’s Lied)” from Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt
(Live performance from the Met’s 125th Anniversary Gala, March 15, 2009; Conductor: James Levine)
“Dis-moi que je suis belle” from Massenet’s Thaïs
(Live Met performance, December 20th, 2008; Conductor: Jesús López-Cobos)
“Hab’ mir’s gelobt” from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier
(Live Met performance, January 9, 2010, with Susan Graham as Octavian and Christine Schäfer as Sophie; Conductor: Edo de Waart)
“Mio caro bene” from Handel’s Rodelinda
(Live Met performance, January 1, 2005; Conductor: Harry Bicket)
Finale from Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades
(Live Met performance, March 26, 2011; Conductor: Andris Nelsons)
Finale from Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro
(Live Met performance, February 12, 1994, with Dwayne Croft (Count Almaviva), Marie McLaughlin (Susanna), James Morris (Figaro), Jane Bunnell (Cherubino), François Loup (Dr. Bartolo), Judith Christin (Marcellina), Michel Sénéchal (Don Basilio), James Courtney (Antonio), and Korliss Uecker (Barbarina); Conductor: Julius Rudel)
Special thanks this week to The Metropolitan Opera and the Houston Grand Opera for providing archival musical excerpts. In particular, thanks to Peter Clark, Mary Jo Heath, Brent Ness, Sam Neuman, Elena Park, and Claire Vince. And thanks to Paul Batsel at the Office of Renée Fleming.
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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Renee Fleming has a powerful effect on people. Conductor Sir George Shoalty described the opera singer's voice as double cream. Garrison Keeler said she made his nostrils twitch. New York chef Daniel Blue created a signature dessert to honor her. But Renee Fleming is down to earth. When the People's Diva, as she's been called, went to Paris to rehearse Handle's Alcina, one of her favorite roles, she spent most of the first week looking for playgrounds for her two young daughters. Renee grew up in Rochester, New York, where both her parents were high school music teachers. During the first two years of her life, while in her playpen, Renee would listen while her mother gave singing lessons. A few years later, Renee organized a barbershop trio with her younger sister and brother. One might say Renee Fleming was born into music. Often refer to myself as an indentured servant because we grew up with it. My parents were both We all sang all the time. You take a family cross country trip and be singing the road signs and in harmony, and I thought everybody did that. I just like, oh, well, this is what families do. Your friends would get in the car with your family and it was like throw on with these crazy flemings, exactly fleming and singing to the trees, missing to the exit signs, and and we talked about singing. Did you feel like this was your way to communicate with your own parents? Well, interestingly, my dad was a big jazz fan. My mother didn't bring music home much at all. She wanted to break from it when she came home. Other than when we performed, she prepared us. You know, I think her idea was that we would be the next one traps. You know. My father, thank god, put the kabushion then and said, I don't think so. Um. Let me guess your mother was the competitive one. She She was very type AI, you know, she's check and my my grandmother and my aunts were all like this. I mean they would come over and they just the work ethic was unbelievable. I think I work hard. No no, no no. They used to look at me and say, you know, Renee, you're you really need to step it up. You know, and I see myself doing the same thing with my two daughters, so I can't I sort of can't help it. But the music thing, you know, it was just so natural for us, and my way of rebelling against it was to find my own music. So I became a composer in middle school, started writing songs and then I played piano, I played guitar. And what kind of music did you write, you're like, John, Yeah, it was sort of singer what we call now singer songwriter, But I also wrote art songs that I actually notated and wrote out that other people sang. In that time, women weren't particularly encouraged to be composers. In a different setting, that might have been the direction I would have gone in, because I loved it and it suited my temperament much better than performing. I was so shy. Performing was so far away from whoever he was. A specific opera, the first opera, if you can recall, because I remember the first movie I went to see in a movie theater. What was the first opera that you became you know, I would say, gosh, sure, Angelica. This is what I remember because my mother performed it and we were in the first row, and this is the Eastman Theater. So first of all, I was incredibly impressed by the theater, this massive chandelier, you know, all the velvet. I mean I took up violin because of the velvet in the case. So there were nothing if not superficial. I guess you know. I didn't really know anything about the story, but she was crying, and she was crying because she was singing about, you know, her her dead baby and wanting to be joined with her baby again. And you looking at her three children in front of her. Somehow, I think that really impressed me. Did you ever imagine at that time it mean the middle school and you're seeing this piece, that that would be a path for you, that you would end up where you are now. Gosh, no, nobody really asked kids in those days, what do you want exactly? What would you like to do? You just went along. I know so many people in my generation who applied to three colleges and never gave it much thought. And really, you know, the way we raised children now is worlds apart from how we were raised. How do you feel? How do you feel? My parents couldn't give a damn? How I felt no, really, the only thing I thought that I wanted to be was the president. So there was i'd say, a colonel of ambition there in the world I was in. It was, you know, doctor lawyer or a few of a more working class background, a job that gave you a security and a pension, the Long Island Railroad, the police department, the fire department. You know, you learned very quickly to choose from the menu. Actor was not on the menu, the men that was submitted to me. Well, I wanted to music again, like my parents, So that's another thing you did. You followed your parents because you couldn't think of anything else to do. And then when the singing became more interesting, and particularly jazz um, when I really found myself in through singing with it in a club every weekend for two and a half years. Then my parents got nervous. Oh, it's so hard, it's too competitive. What happens when you're you're writing songs, popular music or whatever, you know what you said, singer songwriter, whether it's Karl King or what have you, and you're singing jazz in nightclubs in Rochester, they're knowing Potsdam where I went to undergraduate school is Potsdam a hotbed of jazz. It's a college hotbed and the drinking age was twenty one. So yes, so we all spent a lot of time in clubs. In this particular Algiers Pub had very high quality jazz all the time. And the guys that I worked with are are all working musicians. It was an extraordinary education for me in many many ways. I mean, that's how we learned. That's how I was able to embrace performing good Because Illinois Ja KD heard me sing in pot Salmon said why don't you come on the road, we come to New York and cats Yes, it's great tenor saxophone player was really going to put me on the map as a jazz a singer. And I just knew I didn't have the courage. You could have been a popular singer. What where do you take the term you're saying, I'm going to operate? Is it now? Had I grown up in New York City, the singer songwriter thing might have opened, doors might have opened. I mean I sang on television in high school winning some talent show, literally playing a song that I wrote, making the decision to go on undergraduate school. That's sort of solidified. My graduate school was where so you went from you went back home. Yeah. Then I tried to pursue jazz then, and that didn't work. Despite the fact that Eastman had a phenomenal jazz department, I just couldn't get in. I couldn't break in. So, you know, it was really circumstance that pushed me towards classical music, and eventually I really embraced it. And the other thing is I realized it was much more suited to my temperament. I liked being in the practice room. I liked studying. I enjoyed wrestling with this instrumental harder. I don't know that it was harder, but it was more internal kind of cerebral work. You know. The interesting thing about jazz or anything popular, you see, it was a very personality driven and I just didn't have that. I think I do now. Interestingly, I've come out of my show. I mean when I tell people I was extremely shy that nobody believes me. Now that's the thing that people have to overcome. Yes, exactly. You know, I found a lot of comedians to be extraordinarily serious and and draws withdrawn sometimes, So yeah, I think sometimes we overcome things by going after the very thing that really eludes us. So certainly in my case that was it. I would observe friends who were comfortable performing, and I would just try to act like them, So that was that worked. It's an impersonation. Someone said to me, how do you perform in the theater, Like why is the theater so soothing to you? And I say, because I know that for two and a half hours, you know exactly where I'm going to be, exactly what I'm going to say, exactly what you're going to say, and exactly how a roomful of people are going to react to what I say. And you don't feel performance pressure because I had terrible stage right. I do feel the pressure in rehearsal. I feel the pressure to unearthed, to get down to it and get the work done. And if I feel that we got the work done, then it's orgasmic, you know, Like I go out there and put it the only thing I'm like, well, how's everybody doing? You know, I'm like, really, I'm very happy, comfortable. Yeah, I think they're gonna like it. If I go out there and I'm a little bit hesitating because I'm thinking I don't think we got it. But you do two years at Eastman and the graduate degree there. Then what happens? And I went to Juilliard did POSTGRADU I could be a doctor or a lawyer who as long as I was Why Juilliard Juilliard at the time the American Opercenter, so now the Juilliard Opercenter. I believe it was a post graduate program. I was cast as Mozetta in Lubo m So I came here to sing a role. You get free lessons, coaching, all of the support that we couldn't otherwise afford. You know, you're a beginner. And I worked in rocket Feller Plaza for a law firm, pay my rent and everything, and it was a great year. It was a phenomenal year. Say to yourself, why didn't I do this sooner? Yeah? Yes, because I was so happy and I was running around the city like a maniac, so active. And then I took a full right grant studying in Germany and that was hard. Were you there in Frankfort? It was important. It was probably one of the most crucial pieces in my education because it was so challenging. Number One, I didn't speak a word of German. When I went there, I was in the whole schield for musique and was not accepted into the opera department, which was very disappointing to me at the time. I cried the whole way there, literally sobbing yes, and my boyfriend at the time, who became my husband, said well, you know, don't not go because of me, and I remember thinking, God, that would be the furthest thing from my mind. I was so kind of self possessed, but also clueless about the choices I was making. That's why I wrote a book for young singers, because if young singers are any one of them like I was, you just don't know what you're getting into. But I was also very lucky because that year turned out to be a very formative experience. I mean, learning to speak fluent German. How many languages do you speak fluently well? I studied French in high school like many of us did. That was, you know, the language. Paris is my second home, and I sang there every year for a long time, so my French is when I'm there, it picks up again and it's good. But German is even more fluent and consistent. During that year, you learned to speaking fluently in that one year. Well, you know, I love the study of learning and of memory, because what I've discovered is that at the end of that year my German was okay, it was good, you know. But every year, every time I go back, it gets better and I don't have to speak a word of German in between. So the brain, those neurons keep firing. Then you come back to Julia, Yes, and I come back to Juilliard. I tried to stay in Germany. I tried to stay there and get work. No one would have me, so I came back in my career started here. Then how well, I had a rough couple of years of sort of no man's land, which is very common with singers between education and the start of career. It's very common for all of us, really, all musicians, you know. And there's this catch twenty two where you can't get management unless they can go here, you perform, but you can't get a job if you don't get managed. In the acting world, okay, call me when you're in a show, and that's the manager you're trying to get. So competitions were the thing that helped me. And when the main competitions exactly for me. It was the men competition. It took me three times, but I finally won. All of a sudden the doors opened. But it took about a year and a half. I'd say things went slowly. And the first paid, legit professional job you have was doing what the first real engagement was in Houston Grand Opera, and it was the Marriage of Figaro, and that really put me on the map, and that described that so important. I had never sung the opera in Italian, I'd sung it in English. So I went to rehearse with really seasoned professionals, I mean people who were big opera stars already, and I was a beginner. You know. The first day of rehearsal Thomas Allen, in particular, Sir Thomas Allen, He's got such an intelligence and uh sophistication about his portrayal of all of these Mozart in here heroes. He's still performing I think at the Royal Opera. I was just jelly at the end of the first rehearsal because I thought I can't even keep up with him. Mozart Rich Sativa is really hard. Imagine doing very quick dialogue and a foreign language that you don't speak. Really and I learned. You know, when you're young, you just you just you do what you have to do to keep up. I lifted the car off my baby because I had to lift the car from my David exactly. And when you get these opportunities, you have to rise to the occasion and take a risk and get out there and really make it work, or you don't get the opportunity again. You know, it's so competitive the field. I think all my horseback riding and doing horse shows as a kid really prepared me for that. And when when the curtain, I don't need to be so molodramatic, but the world you live in that kind of lends itself this. When the curtain comes down and the shows, the first show is over, how did you feel? Well? You know, it's unfortunately too long ago from you hotely remember that, but you know, I can tell you there was a euphoria in those early experiences, a sense of happiness and relief when I would go from one engagement to the other. You know, our world, we never stop, so there's no sort of you do a project and then you take a break. It's just after that it's a blur. It's like It's all one big episode of a TV show to me, Now, yeh, what was it like doing? I'll go, God, don't you know? And when I watched the film, I remember events in my life at that time. A scene will come on and I'll go, I remember that day. That was the day of my contractor called me, tell me a pipe burst at my house in East Hampton. You know, I don't really do your roles and experiences. Somehow, if they didn't parallel your life, they were helpful in some way. Two things. One is more tangible than the other. Someone Melanie Griffith, years ago said to me that every role you play is the chance to bury that part of yourself that you don't like. And the other thing I find is that when God wants to make fun of me and to mock me, I'll get a script and what's going on with that character is exactly what's going on, right, And I'll read the script and it's almost God to say to me, see, stupid it looks when it's on paper. I have felt that a lot of times when I've been in any kind of conflict or struggle. Some how the repertoire that I'm performing has just coincidentally mirrored it in a way that's been healing. Let's say healing. This is Alec Baldwin and I'm talking with singer Renee Fleming. More in a minute. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing today with Renee Fleming and your work, because in my work it's not this way. You can't do what you do unless you summon up some reservoir of the deepest, deepest passion to sing these roles effectively. To think of a role you've you've performed where even you sat there and go, God, this is killing me. Well it came out of you, like you couldn't believe it came out of you. You know there, Well, there are two sides of it. One is the vocal. One one is this feeling that you know I'm in the right place at the right time to be singing this and and you know, well the voice is such an evolving instrument. So when I sang Tais, for instance, at the met some years ago, and had these spectacular costumes from Christian Loqua, you just thought the stars have aligned to make this role of suit me perfectly. Right now. I love singing in French. I love Massinee, the way it lies, the character, the fact that you know, the psychological drama and this opera where these two people completely changed places with each other. That was a case certainly where I just thought, you know, and I was going to do it again, and somebody stopped and said, do you want to sing it again in five years if it's not as good as it was this time? And I said, you're right, I'm not going to I'm not going to risk that. Oh it was. It was perfect. I mean it was. I couldn't do it better. So it's not very often I can say that I couldn't do it better. Someone else maybe could do it better. Different It was the best that I could do. But you said, there's two things, the voice and what else the voice and then also what you bring artistically to anything. You know, for instance, the Marshall Room right now, and Rosencovalier evolves all the time. For me, it's not a vocal issue. It's a it's an artistic issue. It's who she is, what she's grappling with. Is she manic, depressive? Is she's simply lonely. She's one of the most interesting characters in all of opera for women. I mean, how she was created by two men, I don't know, but I'm grateful to have her. You know the other thing, I don't know if you feel this squeeze, but you may. We're squeezed between what's kind of commercial and popular opera hits artistic. How was that changed in the opera world and you're during your career, Well, there are two parts to it, because there's one, there's there's the titles. And I wasn't born to sing unfortunately, Mad and Butterfly Tusca. You know, bo m. My voice isn't I'm not a lyrical spinto. I'm a lyric soprano, so my voice is too light for those parts. I'm fortunately, if I could sing those roles, then the success I've had with the public would have transferred over to the repertoire. Did you did you try to do them? No, that kind of assignation happens in your world. People that are experts, who are technical experts tell you that's not your repertoire, right well, and in trying to sing that repertoire, I would have harmed my voice, or at the at the very least just not been hurt. We're not amplified, and you know, that's a very important distinction between what we do and what everyone else does. So to try and build a career on titles that aren't sort of at the heart of the oposite people love is more challenging. On the other hand, the trend that I've seen since I started singing twenty years ago, you know, plus, is that people have been more interested in learning about pieces they didn't know and experiencing pieces they didn't know, as opposed to going to the umteen Zaida for instance. The other squeeze that I feel is virtuosity versus artistry, because people will go to opera, I mean the three tenors case in point, for thrills, for vocal, for the thrill of what the human voice is capable of producing, and for tenors and sopranos, and it's really for us. It's a high note. It's all about the high note. You know, are you going to break glass? Are you going to is it going to give us shivers? Are we going to cry? Because you've just throbbed on that high sea to kind of figure out how to program so that one gets some of that without you kind of really using up your principle and using up what it is that you have and or interesting them in music that doesn't have that, music that's more about poetry and prose, and in turning a phrase that's more subtle. I've gone back and forth between those two things my whole career. What's one of the more popular in your mind in your range, oh, traviata? I guess in the in the greatest tests category exactly. And what is one that you might have been doubtful about or at the very least indifferent about. That was you were approached and it turned out to be a wonderful experience, But there was more esoteric I think rode Linda Handles roteal Linda. I. You know, I was drawn to her because of the character, the story. She's a mother, she's courageous, she's strong. It's a masterpiece, this opera. It wasn't known they had never been done at the mat so some of these titles in a way, you know, being given this place that I've had it that meant for some time, also give me the opportunity to say what about this? Having done a lot of the standard repertoire that I could sing, and I've sung fifty four roles. You know, I've been saying fifty one. I was right. I recounted it was a miscount. Executive opening up. Yeah, you're so you're so unproductive, you're so lazy, exactly, French. I have opera audience has changed during your career. I think the challenge we face in opera in general, and I would say forget opera and classical music is really exposure. It used to be that we had exposure obviously in schools. We had exposure through churches and through our families. Every socially climbing family got a piano and felt that a musical education was part on arts education, was part of their children's, you know, the betterment of their lives. And that you know, it is what it is, it is, It is gone. It's just simply people don't feel it's relevant anymore. My heart when you say that, But it's true. But in the thirty plus years thirty three years now I've lived in Manhattan, I've never seen anything like the world of opera in terms of the devotion. And they don't have the money for these tickets. They don't have two hundred bucks to fifty seventy five. You know, some because the opera costs money. The sets, the sim the orchestra, the most expensive. It's the most expensive arts ticket that there is. And yet you see the people that are teachers, they put all their chips on this. They're like, oh, I have to come see Renee. How do you feel about that? Do you know? I find you listen the bloggers. The amount of investment, the emotional investment that people make in this art form. It's just it's it's way beyond any Yeah but that, but that's what I mean. It's off the charts. The passion for better for work. I think it's phenomenal. It's funny because I can't understand it. I'm too close and I'm too critical, obviously because it's my work. I mean, so when I go to the opera, I want to be swept away, and sometimes i am. I mean I've gone to the opera a couple of times where I have literally been sobbing at the end and just have to pull myself together. Oh yeah, pee Peekee, dumb kills me. Queen of Spades. I am always shocked by that acapella men's course at the end, the way that operas composed, the music and Tchikovsky's final phrases. It just does something amazing to me. I still like living in New York? Or is your relationship? Do you know? I'm It's funny, I've never felt like New York is my home. But it's because we're no Mad's we you know, we're I'm very adaptable that way. I mean, I'm home wherever I am. You guys travel, and then then the classical music world of the symphonic as well as opera, you guys travel more all the time. Yeah, all the time. And so when I am home, I'm also inundated, you know when I because I'm gone so much. Yeah, so it's not so much fun to be here. Um, it will be when I get some rest. When you to do a show, when you're performing a piece, what's the day like for you? Do you have a ritual? A ritual? How do you have a ritual when you have little children? That's what I was really interested. My Yes, I am really consistent about getting up with my kids, no matter how late I've been up. So at seven am, I'm up, and the kids are seven. I only have one at home now, the others in college. So the one at home is sixteen and good times, right, good times. I have a sixteen year old. It's good times. Yes, yes, yes, it's you know, okay, it's another whole story, another whole story, mostly good, mostly great. What does she want to do? She want to be in the best. She wants to sing pop music, that's her real dream. And this kid sings all the time. So, um, what's your older one doing? She is in college and gender studies and she's not exactly sure what she wants to do with that yet. A very serious girl. She's in Boston, you know, very gifted, and we'll see. So what's the routine then? My routine is is not to leave the apartment. That really, that's it. I stay home, I stay off the phone. I mean, I'm phone phobic anyway. I almost never talk on the telephone. And my speaking voice is terrible for what I do. When you're on the phone, you automatically you don't hear your voice very often, and you automatically pressed just a little bit. It tires me. It's fatiguing. Um, and I get tense, and I don't know, it's it's all in my head. Really, it's totally uh, you know, it's it's it's a made up one less pressure to have and the other thing I do, I get a lot of work done. I'm actually very productive on performance days because that's when I you know, I sit there and I work email, you know, studying music whatever, and then you go to the theater and do you have us do do people in your future of like a warm up? You do? Is there a well I know nothing about vocal I try to vocalize earlier in the day because I find that it's better for me a little bit. Just kind of see where it's at. You know. Some dicies things drinking, certain things I have to be careful about. I love caffeine, you know, I would drink coffee all day and I have to be careful about that because it's dehydrating. So I'll have my typical so and you have to force fluids a little bit, which I hate to. So these are the boring things. Not really good people, I think are just interested in what kind of the discipline is complex? Yeah, most people can't control what they eat and drink. There's a little bit of that. Having the humidifier on, making sure it's a lot about you know, moisture. These are all mucous memoranes. The vocal folds are very sensitive and you want to go into that performance with them being super healthy and not dried out. We're the Olympians of singers, really, and you'll have a three to five hour long performance and that takes a lot of physical stamina. Yeah, it's a lot of physical stamina. Us you're emotionally all over the place, you know, as you said, it's a very but it's mainly the amount of sound we have to produce to be heard over the orchestra and the chorus in a huge hall. That's the thing that that is different. And if we sing well, if we sing technically well, we should be able to get up the next day and sound normal. You know, people will go to sports events and scream at you know, the other team or even there the people they like and their horse the next day. We can't do that. We're doing the same thing, but we're doing it in a trained way. And you know, it is a hard art form to get right. Is there all these elements and it's live, but when it's right, it's it's amazing. Renee Fleming says she's looking forward to getting some rest, although it's not clear when that will come. In addition to her busy performance schedule, she recently became the creative consultant for the Lyric Opera in Chicago. They just announced an upcoming world premier opera based on the bestseller Bell KNTO, and she's been advocating for more arts education in schools. It's not just for people to be consumers of the artists, for them to also participate, find the creative voices, and build confidence through participation. YE special thanks to the Metropolitan Opera and the Houston Grand Opera for providing archival excerpts of Bernade Fleming in performance. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing