Not All High Notes

Like the majestic soprano she is, Renee Fleming looked out at the beginning of the current opera season last September from the peak of a San Francisco hill. As she sat serenely in front of a picture window, she appeared to gaze down on her past struggles and present rivals, along with the low clouds skimming the bay and the gulls ducking under the Golden Gate Bridge. She seemed slightly wistful about being the most adored lyric soprano of the day.

“I’ve been climbing, climbing for so long, and suddenly people are telling me I’ve arrived,” Fleming said with a sigh. “It makes me think: What do I do now?”

Among a star soprano’s professional duties is to unravel onstage--by the end of most performances, she is usually either crazy or dead. Just two days earlier, Fleming had come apart as the fragile and haughty Blanche Du Bois in the world premiere of Andre Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the San Francisco Opera. Now, out of costume and wearing an impeccable pantsuit and her queenly, noncommittal smile, she was whole again, answering questions with polite efficiency and keeping one eye on her watch. As Blanche, she had made sure that despair showed through her character’s frayed veil of Southern dignity. Now, with equal skill, she couched whatever anxieties she may have been feeling about the grueling schedule of the next few months in the imperturbable demeanor of a corporate executive.

A little quailing would have been understandable. Immediately after “Streetcar,” she was off to New York to begin rehearsals for the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “The Marriage of Figaro” and a Carnegie Hall concert with the Berlin Philharmonic. A few weeks after that, Fleming was scheduled to sing her first Violetta in the Met’s new staging of “La Traviata”--an event that never materialized. This month, she sweeps across the country, giving recitals in Atlanta today and at the Music Center here on Wednesday, then alighting at Carnegie Hall for her recital debut there, with James Levine, on Jan. 27 and moving on to Europe in February. In March, she returns to New York and the Met, where she sings the title role in yet another new production: Carlisle Floyd’s “Susannah.”

At the Met she has, it seems, become the lady of the house. Such a deluxe season “is not that unusual for me,” she said matter-of-factly, pointing out that rather than scattering her operatic appearances across two continents, this time she was concentrating them close to her Connecticut home and her children’s school.

Still, 1998 was the best and worst of years for Fleming. Now firmly settled on opera’s peak, she has discovered that the winds can buffet. At a blighted opening-night performance of Donizetti’s “Lucrezia Borgia” at Milan’s La Scala in July, the tenor canceled, the conductor passed out and a claque of rowdy denizens of the balcony began inexplicably booing Fleming even before she started to sing.

“It reminded me of a hockey match,” recalls her sister, Rochelle Fleming. “A handful of people in the top balcony began whistling, and then the other half of the audience started shushing them, and at the end of every aria, they applauded and yelled. It was a contest to see who could outshout the others. I was sick to my stomach.”

Fleming finished the performance, then sang two more to prove she wasn’t cowed, and finally left. Two months later, under the glare of hype and in the hope of creating a magnificent new diva role, Fleming did her best to redeem Previn’s new opera, which critics, in a rare chorus of unanimity, found bland and spotty. (“ ‘Streetcar’ Derails” was the favorite headline all over the country.) Then, in November, came the announcement that Fleming was backing out of “La Traviata,” leaving Franco Zeffirelli’s glittering production devoid of major singers and giving satisfaction to the legions of opera-world whisperers who worried that she was heading for burnout.

Opinions and rumors were suddenly in ferment. By some accounts, Fleming had gotten the sense that Zeffirelli would swamp the singing in drapery and leave it to her to figure out how to pick her character’s way through the plushly upholstered furnishings. In other versions, she hadn’t had time to learn the role, couldn’t handle the first act’s lacework of coloratura, or was emotionally wracked by her divorce from her husband of nine years, actor Rick Ross.

The soprano herself stayed mute, allowed the Met to put out a terse statement attributing the cancellation to unspecified “family problems.”

The only dramas she is willing to act out in public are those that are set to music.

*

If people panicked at the thought of an absent Fleming, it is because she is the possessor of one of the most liquid and buttery sopranos on the lyric stage. That, combined with a nimble ease of phrasing and black-belt technique, allows her to sing equally well the slow, swan-like lines of Strauss and the scampering coloratura of Mozart and Donizetti. She is strongest when she is singing most softly: Fleming can make the knees tremble with a downy pianissimo, which wafts quietly to the farthest reaches of the vastest halls. That is how Previn’s “Streetcar” ends: After careening violently between decorum and irrationality, Blanche finally drifts offstage trailing a sad and delicate pianissimo like a lingering perfume.

“I very often took advantage of that,” says Previn, who wrote the role specifically for Fleming and claims to be her most besotted fan. “I would be thrilled to have her sing anything I was involved in. If she wanted to sing the title role in ‘Boris Godunov,’ that would be fine with me. She’s got the best voice in America right now.”

Fleming is gracious about such ardor, but she knows that, like all intoxicating love, it can also be directed at the undeserving--the molten young talents who get tossed into stardom before their skills have quite jelled. She is--first of all, she insists--a good professional singer with a solid resume, not some astral phenomenon.

“It’s not a fluke that I’m successful this year,” she says firmly. “My singing well now is based on real technique and real experience.”

Those words--”experience” and “technique”--are Fleming’s touchstones, and she returns to them again and again. Now 38, she was never a prodigy, and she made her ascent prudently and methodically, never trying to scale a new crest without first checking her equipment. It is no coincidence that her bedrock roles are rich in elegance and wisdom: the Marschallin from Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier,” for example, the veteran lover in whom dewy freshness has been replaced by melancholy embers; or the Countess in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro,” who reflects without bitterness on the way time can erode a marriage.

Fleming was born into her professionalism. Both her parents were music teachers in Rochester, N.Y., and Fleming spent her first two years gripping the rails of a playpen and listening to her mother give voice lessons in the home. Singing was dinner table conversation, putting on shows a family activity, music education the stuff that paid the bills.

“I never had to want to be a singer,” the soprano recalls. “It was just something I did, something I was successful at.”

Fleming was a shy, serious girl, a straight-A student who read through family vacations and found classroom interactions--not to mention public performing--a compulsory nightmare. “I don’t have a performer’s nature at all,” she says. “I’m studious; I was a bookworm. When I was a kid, one teacher called my parents concerned that I was too withdrawn. I still suffer a lot--I’m still miserable before I have to go on stage. But I adore singing.”

When other singers say they adore singing, what they are usually referring to is the vertiginous feeling of performing, or the exhilaration of connecting with a responsive audience, or the physical sense of potency that comes with issuing those unearthly sounds, or the sensual joy of making music in public. Fleming, though, is talking about music as a private experience, a form of scholastic solitude shared, at most, with a sympathetic pianist. “There’s nothing more fun,” she says earnestly, “than going into a practice room and learning a new piece.”

Even now, in an opera performance, Fleming does not spend the time between an exit and her next entrance the way her colleagues often do, playing cards, making phone calls, reading magazines or engaging in backstage horseplay. Instead, she stays closeted in her dressing room, “reviewing,” she explains, as if for an exam, and husbanding her concentration.

If shyness was an obstacle for the young Renee, it turned out to be the sort of fear that leads a person of Fleming’s intelligence and drive to make herself impregnable against humiliation. In college, at the State University of New York at Potsdam, Fleming decided not to avoid the agony of performing but to embrace it. “I really wanted to change,” she says. So she joined a jazz group that would put her on stage every week. In her senior year, saxophonist Illinois Jacquet came through on tour, heard her sing and tried to tempt her to come out on the road with him. Instead, she chose to get a master’s degree at the Eastman School of Music in her hometown of Rochester.

That tendency to resist the easy option seems to encapsulate Fleming’s approach to her work: Identify a weakness, crush it with practice and, when in doubt, study. “I took seminars [on stage fright]; I got to understand the psychology. I attended a lot of performances, and I learned to understand that the audience is not there to judge, but to be entertained.”

Out of that need to dominate herself, Fleming also developed a steel-tipped vocal technique. “The more mastery I have over the material,” she says, “the more confident I feel. It’s a battle.”

Seen that way, “A Streetcar Named Desire” was an upper-level course in the one element of her stagecraft that critics have found lacking: raw emotion, a tool she seems bent on acquiring the way she would any other skill. “Mastering the voice and technique took me a long time,” she says, “and now that’s allowing me to push the expressive aspects. A beautiful voice is fabulous--for about three minutes. Then you’ve gotten it. If I just sang pear-shaped tones all night, it would be pretty boring”--an odd comment from the soprano who released a CD called, in fact, “The Beautiful Voice.”

If her college immersion in jazz taught Fleming the virtues of staring down her faults, it also taught her to be not spontaneous, exactly, but elastic. The bravura improvisations of scat singing have their counterpart in the florid roulades of bel canto, and if Fleming doesn’t actually make her cadenzas up on the spot every night, she knows how to give the impression that she is doing so.

“That kind of experience gives you enormous rhythmic flexibility,” says Previn, who, besides being an opera composer, a conductor and a Hollywood scorer, is also a jazz pianist. “She can sing ahead of, on or behind the beat, and it doesn’t bother her.

“We did a concert for [the AIDS benefit] Classical Action [in March 1997], and she sang Strauss’ ‘Four Last Songs,’ ” a set of shadowed orchestral lieder that is one of the sublime staples of her repertoire. “People wouldn’t let her get off the stage, so she said to me, ‘Listen, let’s move the piano out and do some Harold Arlen.’ I said: ‘After the “Four Last Songs”?’ She said, ‘Trust me. “Over the Rainbow,” E flat,’ and away we went.”

For now, Fleming keeps Arlen and Duke Ellington on hand for encores, but, in what has become almost every singer’s rite of crossover, she has plans to capitalize on her background in jazz with a CD of standards. “The kinds of vocal production are totally different, so even if I know the style, I can’t just pick up a microphone at the end of a lieder recital and start singing an octave lower. On a recording, I can, though--there’s time to switch.”

Fleming’s craftsmanly pride was as hard-won as her onstage poise. She was still a green graduate student and a Fulbright fellow in Germany in 1984 when she found herself in a master class with legendary soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf--a brutal, confidence-splintering week that nearly undid her. “The thing about a master class with a famous person is that you take that wisdom as etched in stone, and then that person’s not around to make sure you’re doing it right,” Fleming says, sounding grateful for the distance between her and the experience. “It took me two years to incorporate that week.”

By 1987, Fleming had degrees from Eastman and Juilliard and was suffering through the bleak disorientation of being an ex-student who was not yet a pro. “I remember sitting with her in my apartment in New York,” says Rochelle Fleming, “and she was crying her head out. She couldn’t get anyone on the phone. She just said, ‘Maybe I’ll do something else.’ ”

Hearing Renee Fleming now, it’s difficult to imagine anyone ignoring her then, when her tone could have been only a tick or two less lustrous and her inflections only slightly more flat. “Her voice was, from the beginning, a jewel,” says conductor and pianist Christoph Eschenbach, who first worked with her in 1988 and instantly became her paladin and protector. “She had nothing to change, just to develop. What moved steadily after that was the maturity. There were no cracks in the career, no crises in the voice.”

*

Indeed, the 1990s have been an all but seamless decade for Fleming, as her repertoire has moved outward from Mozart to Schubert, Verdi, Dvorak’s “Rusalka,” American opera and even a single, ill-advised dip into Wagner (she sang Eva in “Die Meistersinger” in Bayreuth in 1996). There are also not many unplanned minutes of her time in the next four years--one of the few aspects of her calling she finds distasteful. But, as her nonappearance in “Traviata” showed, a schedule book is no guarantee against the unexpected, nor does her present reign of opera’s mercurial kingdom come with any job security. Fleming never allows herself to forget that even a voice as tough and tempered as hers can be fickle, or that divadom is a fragile state of temporary grace.

“You can’t discount that the talent pool is constantly being replenished,” she says, with a muted smile and all the sapience of a true Marschallin.*

*

* Renee Fleming performs Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $11-$65. (323) 850-2000.