‘Voice’ of an opera star

Those familiar with the volumes about life and art ostensibly written by female pop stars may not realize that other women who sing also like to inscribe their thoughts between hard covers. Consider, if you will, the diva as a woman of letters.

In the first half of the last century, books by opera singers were not uncommon. The great American soprano Geraldine Farrar -- beloved by Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II and the tenor Enrico Caruso -- wrote two autobiographies, the first when she was just 34. And, depending on how you count, Beverly Sills has penned three. Conversely, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, nearly 90, only recently broke her frustrating silence, though just in French for now. Some singers have supplemented their reminiscences with primers on technique or studies of the song literature. One thinks of the two great Lehmanns here, Lilli and Lotte, each of whom published regularly.

Renee Fleming’s first book, “The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer,” combines much biographical detail with generic remarks about forging a career in opera. And that split personality is its primary failing.

As the most famous American-born soprano of her generation, Fleming -- neither ingenue nor doyenne at 45 -- should have plenty to tell about her life thus far. She can stack occasional failures (“Lucrezia Borgia” at La Scala) against myriad successes (singing Mozart, Strauss and Handel on the world’s great stages). She has known plenty of the era’s leading musicians and observed their foibles. She is now divorced with two daughters. Indeed, she writes beguilingly when examining performance rituals, wryly listing soprano stereotypes and describing professional mishaps caused by outlandish costumes or sets.

Fleming is too well bred (and too politically savvy) to speak ill of others, but in discussing the best way to handle backstage visitors, she comes close, deliciously avenging a long-ago slight by the Dutch singer Elly Ameling, once her idol. On the few occasions when she does tell tales out of school, names are invariably omitted.

Yet such good-girl utterances are practically salacious compared with the bland musings, often pages long, that pass for advice to young singers. Fleming comments too broadly on technical questions (support, phrasing, pitch control, projection, etc.) and urges the obvious. The book is also larded with random homilies -- lamenting the decline of arts education in schools, pondering whether the standard repertory is over-recorded and weighing the Internet’s effect on classical music.

The writing ranges widely. Sometimes the language is simple, but too often Fleming tarts up her prose, using -- and sometimes misusing -- unnaturally fancy words. There are also repetition problems. It is bad enough to read that Dvorak’s “Song to the Moon” aria fits Fleming’s voice “like a glove,” but must the same cliche be applied to her role as Blanche DuBois? And just how often can the soprano feign surprise about landing yet another plum part?

Being an opera singer, Fleming naturally gushes, but it’s embarrassing to read such statements as, “I will never forget the first time I was laced up in a gown that had been worn by Kiri Te Kanawa.” Fleming’s first manager is quoted as calling her “the single most ambitious singer” he’d ever known, but that’s hardly news coming after her accounts of meeting Leontyne Price: “When I walked in the door, the first things I noticed were nineteen Grammys displayed on a table in the living room”; and Georg Solti: “I was immediately struck by Solti’s intensity -- not to mention the record thirty-two Grammys lining the windows of his studio.”

It is perhaps unfair to single out such sentences; one can find plenty of others in which Fleming sounds generous, even virtuous. Yet aside from setting down an official version of her path to stardom, why has Fleming written this book? There’s too much self-satisfaction and false modesty in these pages for pure altruism. Then again, why hold an opera singer to such high standards?

As Fleming emphasizes, classical music is as much a business as an art these days. “The Inner Voice” reflects that, making Fleming more of a Material Girl than she may realize.

David Mermelstein writes about classical music for The Times and other publications.