The art of dying beautifully

During the second intermission of “La Traviata” at the Metropolitan Opera the other night, conversation turned inevitably to Renee Fleming. She opened the Met season by singing Violetta, Verdi’s beloved courtesan, and the vast majority of reviews were ecstatic. Fleming was compared to Maria Callas and in some circles deemed even more impressive. The Met has a huge hit on its hands. While waiting for me to pick up tickets at the box office, a friend said that a man desperate to get into the sold-out house had just offered $1,000 for her seat.

Yet neither my friend, who teaches at Juilliard, nor a colleague we ran into in the lobby was convinced by Fleming. She made lovely sounds and emoted all over the stage, but the colleague, an expert on opera performance, felt Fleming never gave the impression of a Violetta who had been around. His companion, the widow of a well-known composer, thought Fleming naive and in need of a good director. My friend, who has more years of opera-going experience than I, was bothered by the glamorous soprano’s rhythmic sloppiness.

Such comments might seem overly harsh for a singer in as glorious voice as the popular Fleming was that night. It was evident from her ambitious performance that she really did want to bring something fresh to the role. The lavish Franco Zeffirelli production was created five years ago for what was to be her first Violetta, but she had second thoughts about the role and canceled. She felt she wasn’t yet ready to encompass the demands of impersonating Verdi’s consumptive, high-class courtesan, who gives up everything for love and then sadly returns to her former life, giving up love for love.

Finally, at 44, Fleming felt ready. And her liberties with rhythm might have been intentional, her way to reveal abandon. Not only did the impassioned conductor, Valery Gergiev, not seem to mind, he actually egged her on.

But the sophisticated opera-goers I was talking with were quite right. Listen to Callas in her live 1955 recording with Carlo Maria Giulini and, sure enough, this incomparably compelling singer was musically fastidious; it was her attention to detail that provided such intensity. Fleming has been around -- she just hasn’t been paying enough attention.

It so happened that, in Boston the night before, I had encountered another major American diva, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, trying out a new role for the first time in a concert performance of “Pelleas and Melisande” given by the Boston Symphony in the acoustically revered Symphony Hall. Hunt Lieberson, a mezzo-soprano, is also in her prime and is as dramatically incisive a singer as can be found on the lyric stage. Her Melisande was alive to every changing emotion in Debussy’s flickeringly mysterious score.

Still, the mesmerizing Hunt Lieberson wasn’t an ideal Melisande. No one could accuse her of sleepwalking through the role as less imaginative singers have, mistaking the alluring, enigmatic, fragile princess of Maurice Maeterlinck’s libretto for an airhead. Instead, she was fascinatingly direct in revealing the character as an elusive femme fatale. But her robust, feeling Melisande had perhaps been around just a little bit too long.

Fleming and Hunt Lieberson represent opposite operatic poles. The booklet covers of their new CDs show as much. For her Decca disc, “By Request,” Fleming entices buyers for a greatest-hits collection by vacuously peering out of heavily made-up eyes like some blemish-free operatic Barbie doll, every strand of auburn hair carefully styled. Obviously, she -- or at least her record company -- does not want us to think she is any more serious than a Hollywood soap opera actress hawking Rolexes (which Fleming also does).

By contrast, Hunt Lieberson’s black-and-white photo on the booklet of her new Nonesuch recording of two profound Bach cantatas is that of an attractive woman with searching eyes and long, thick hair. The mezzo, who is 49, does not try to disguise her age. She has the look of a spiritual guide, and you feel as though you can trust her to know something about death and the deepest reaches of consolation, which are the concern of the cantatas. Her performances contain some of the most moving Bach singing on record.

Fleming’s Violetta and Hunt Lieberson’s Melisande did not exist in a vacuum. Fleming had the benefit of a fine cast and a white-hot conductor, but she was the centerpiece of a tasteless, ornate production and had apparently been given little meaningful theatrical direction. Hunt Lieberson was also joined by an exceptional cast. But with Bernard Haitink’s grimly determined conducting and singers stationed at music stands, she had little chance of bringing Debussy’s atmospheric drama to life.

Not surprisingly, tasteless glamour won over audiences more easily than dullness. For the curtain call of “Traviata,” the ovation from a rapt Met crowd of more than 4,000 was explosive. By midpoint in “Pelleas,” the much smaller Symphony Hall was scandalously uninhabited, half the audience having already gone home (or to sports bars around nearby Fenway Park -- it was the night of the last playoff game between the Yankees and the Red Sox).

Each to her own quest

In the end, Fleming’s and Hunt Lieberson’s performances may have revealed more about the making and marketing of modern opera singers than they did about the operas. Both divas happen to be exceptionally fine musicians. Each has an impressive obsession with perfection. But each has gone her own way.

For Fleming, that quest is toward pure, creamy beauty. One of her CDs is titled “The Beautiful Voice.” Another is “Bel Canto,” the Italian term for beautiful singing. Beauty has become her trademark, but she is not as shallow as her airbrushed photos make her look. In “La Traviata,” she worked extremely hard to transcend mere prettiness of voice. Alone on stage at the end of the first act, Violetta, attracted to Alfredo -- whom she has just met at one of the endless string of meaningless parties that are her life -- dreams of opening herself to the world through love, then rejects that as folly, a luxury that is not hers.

In this famous aria, Fleming put a stress on each syllable of text. Yet she also strove for a seamless phrasing, rounded silvery tone and soaring, perfectly tuned, utterly beguiling high notes. She stood in studied midlife-crisis meditation as she dreamed; she maniacally flung a champagne glass into the fireplace as she, you might say, undertook the lightening-up process.

Her death throes a couple of hours later were equally banal. She was up; she was down; she was up again, down again. She was sad; Alfredo returned; she was overjoyed; etc. Anyone who tried that hard to die would be a suicide.

It wasn’t entirely Fleming’s fault. The Zeffirelli production, which was given to Laurie Feldman to direct, was so overblown visually that it cried out for overacting. Her Alfredo, tenor Ramon Vargas, sang very well, but his stage presence was uninspired. Only the Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky (as Alfredo’s father) proved a commanding yet elegant presence, even under these theatrically absurd conditions. The Met itself didn’t help; the house is too large for much sense of intimate theater, and its tickets are too expensive to allow artistic management to take many chances.

Hunt Lieberson’s death as Melisande was more touching. Life left her mysteriously, and one felt in her studied, calm final lines the huge difference between even the slightest thread of life and its extinction. Lieberson’s magnificence begins in her voice. It is a thick, immense sound but one that can be finely focused. On its own, it overwhelms, especially when heard in an acoustic environment as responsive as that of Symphony Hall.

Unlike Fleming, Hunt Lieberson does not so much add emotion to her wonderful sound as find the sound for each emotion. She also engages entirely with her surroundings, and it was unfortunate that she could not have been in a setting where she might have further developed her character, especially given the frightful violence of Gerald Finley’s Golaud, Melisande’s husband; the mercurial quality of Simon Keenlyside’s Pelleas; the haunting depth of Nathalie Stutzmann’s Genevieve (Pelleas’ mother); and the wistful pronouncements of John Tomlinson’s tottering, ancient King Arkel. Ultimately, Hunt Lieberson overcompensated for Haitink’s thankless, hard-edged conducting and the oddly colorless Boston Symphony.

An unforgettable death from Hunt Lieberson was the one she enacted in the Bach cantatas that are on her new CD (“I Have Enough” and “My Heart Swims in Blood”) when she sang them in a staging by Peter Sellars a couple of years ago. Then, she was a dying woman, hooked up to life-saving devices, slowly letting go and sharing with her horrified but spellbound listeners a gradual feeling of liberation. The mezzo so internalized the essence of that staging that she was nearly as theatrically convincing last month when she sang the second cantata with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.

In fact, Hunt Lieberson is something of a product of Sellars, who helped encourage her to put down her viola and become an opera singer 18 years ago. From the start, as a gun-toting teenager full of furious revenge in Sellars’ production of Handel’s “Julius Caesar,” Hunt Lieberson (then Lorraine Hunt) has been the model Sellars singer, able to draw herself deeper and deeper into her characters. Even at the Met, she has the ability to cut that huge house down to size. I wonder how many people felt as I did last winter when she appeared as Dido in a new Francesca Zambello production of Berlioz’s “The Trojans.” I could have sworn she was singing directly to me.

The art critic Arthur C. Danto ended an article, “The Abuse of Beauty,” in a recent issue of the journal Daedalus by concluding that beauty is “one mode among many through which thoughts are presented in art to human sensibility -- disgust, horror, sublimity and sexuality are still others.... Room for them all must be found in an adequate definition of art.”

Despite the disappointment of the Boston “Pelleas,” Hunt Lieberson, today’s best example of the singer as complete artist, regularly finds such room. Fleming commands beauty and sublimity. As in her latest photos, any suggestion of sexuality, disgust and horror has been airbrushed out of her performances, and it doesn’t look as though she is in any hurry to accommodate them. If she changes her mind, she too may become great.

Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.