The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer

by Renee Fleming

  In 1992, while I was pregnant with our first daughter, Amelia, I left New York for three months for engagements in England, at Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera. Though I was relieved that my career had taken off, I was under tremendous stress. I didn’t want to be away from Rick for so long a time, and I was anxious about all the work that faced me in my condition. As I was changing planes in Europe, the flight attendant took my carry-on bag but I was so sad that I didn’t think to get a claim check from her, and in this case the bag contained everything that was important to me, including the paperwork for the mortgage and the co-op application for an apartment we were hoping to buy in anticipation of the baby. The suitcase vanished. Every day I went back to the airline office to plead, but no one could find it, until, after a two-week-long detour to Saudi Arabia (where all stylish luggage longs to go, I suppose), it made its way to England and then, miraculously, to Glyndebourne, unharmed.

  Before the luggage was returned, I started to bleed in my fifth month of pregnancy. I was completely alone in an apartment fifteen miles outside the town of Lewes in the middle of nowhere. I used to think it was a good thing to cut myself off from people before an engagement because I would get more work done, studying scores and practicing in the evenings, or, in this case, answering the year’s worth of mail I’d brought with me, but now I know there is such a thing as too much isolation.

  The Glyndebourne administration found a general practitioner who made house calls, a service that’s still possible to find in rural England. He ordered me to lie down and not move, put my feet up, and stay in a horizontal position for five days, or I’d lose the baby. That meant no cooking, nothing but quick trips to the bathroom and then back to bed. The festival staff was remarkably gracious, sending someone to bring food and visit me every day. The experience would have been awful enough if I’d been in New York with Rick, home in my own bed, but to be so alone with the terror of perhaps losing my baby was nearly unbearable. I didn’t have the money to talk on the phone all day to my family and friends, so I just had to wait it out.

  In the end, we two bounced back, and I wound up performing until a few weeks before Amelia’s birth. The beauty of singing while pregnant is that the baby provides the support that the abdominal wall usually has to work much harder to offer. With pregnancy comes the lovely, buoyant pillow of a womb for the diaphragm to press against, which makes singing wonderfully easy up until the last few months, when there’s simply no more room for breath. However, as long as I was breathing intercostally, with the most horizontal opening of the rib cage possible and an open chest and back, I could get through everything by simply breathing more often than usual.

  The real challenge was singing again after I had the baby, but I didn’t have the luxury of time to regain the supportive abdominal strength I needed. I would have to do it on the job. When Amelia was a month old, I took her to Dallas to sing my first Tatyana in Eugene Onegin. Memorizing an opera in Russian is difficult under the best of circumstances, but now it seemed virtually impossible, since like every other new mother I had given up sleeping through the night. This was the time when I discovered that having an infant and memory are mutually exclusive, and in my case I also had no ability to concentrate for long periods of time, which is another essential component in memorization. The Russian conductor and largely Russian cast were understanding, and it was with this engagement that I began to forge a life on the road with young children in tow.

  After a quick trip back to New York, Amelia, my new nanny (a young singer), and I were off to Milan, where I made my La Scala debut as Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni. I was just learning how to travel with everything I needed: baby food, formula, diapers, a stroller, and soon a portable high chair, a jumper, and a walker. It was a true exercise in packing ingenuity to travel to a foreign country and set up shop with a baby for six weeks. Beverley used to call me the earth mother with a core of steel, and I think that pretty much described it.

  I didn’t have an especially enjoyable time at La Scala, due in large part to the house’s tradition of the Sala Gialla, the Yellow Salon. The Sala was a conference room in the theater where rehearsals were held. At that time, all of La Scala’s productions were double-cast, and ultimately there would be an A cast and a B cast. Normally, opera companies have understudies, or if a singer cancels, another singer is flown in at the last minute. When an opera is double-cast, the configuration is set and contracted long before anyone arrives. But at La Scala, Riccardo Muti, the house’s music director, would host rehearsals with both casts, at which everyone would get up and perform his part, in effect a sing-off, as Muti alternated between the two casts. There were the people who were clearly the big stars, and then the rest of us, who were jockeying for a position on the A team. Unfortunately, I was one of the youngsters, in a brilliant group that included Thomas Allen, Carol Vaness, Cecilia Bartoli, Vinson Cole, and the late Gösta Winbergh. Despite the tension that the circumstances created, I was thrilled by Muti’s talent. He was incredibly charismatic, and the sounds he could wrest from the orchestra were inspired.

  At the very last rehearsal, I received a call from the artistic administrator, who said, “Maestro is concerned about you. He doesn’t want you to be booed and so he’s thinking you shouldn’t sing opening night.” In fact, I had already been informed that I was singing opening night, and, more to the point, I had been rehearsing with the first cast. I thought the situation through quickly and replied, “That’s okay, really, but I’m going to leave now. It’s better if I just go home to New York.” A great deal of back pedaling followed, and he promised that the maestro would call me. Muti did phone me and said the same thing, and again I said that this was demoralizing and that I would prefer just to get on the next plane. I had enough of a sense of myself by now to know that I probably wouldn’t embarrass the theater by singing Donna Elvira. I was part of an ensemble, and I knew the other artists in the cast and felt comfortable with them. In the end, they agreed to give me opening night, and I wasn’t booed. I did, however, slip on the stage and tumble backward within seconds of my first entrance. Fortunately, the Leporello was quick on his feet and managed to catch me, but I should have known right then where things were headed. American audiences love an underdog. If I’d tripped on my opening night at the Met they probably would have signed me to a lifetime contract merely because I was brave enough to pull myself together and go on. But European audiences are a bit less tolerant. When you slip in Italy, the audience thinks, Is this the best they could find?

  In 1993, I sang the title role in Rossini’s Armida at the Rossini Festival in Pesaro, Italy. Even though I had debuted in several Mozart productions in Europe, this was the moment the door finally opened for me there. It was a wonderful engagement; I was living in the beautiful town where Rossini had composed, and I was eating fresh fish and pushing my darling towheaded cherub in the stroller down to the beach every day to cries of “Che bella bambina!” The Armida had an especially imaginative production by Luca Ronconi, with striking costumes and wigs. (One cannot underestimate the contribution a good costume makes to how one feels in a role.) My character was made to look like a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Judy Jetson, complete with a futuristically swirled platinum-blond wig. I was particularly amused when Ildebrando d’Arcangelo, a young Italian bass, wore a mask molded from my features and a copy of my costume, and from the theater, my husband couldn’t tell us apart. I’m not sure which of us felt less flattered. At the final performance, the audience rained rose petals down on the stage—a dreamlike conclusion to a perfect run. I love the complete immersion in the work of a single composer that a festival allows. Whether Rossini in Pesaro, Wagner in Bayreuth, or Mozart in Salzburg, festivals appeal to the musicologist in me and give me the luxury of time to create an in-depth interpretation.

  One of my favorite things about the work I do is that it presents so many opportunities to grow. Sometimes, in a case like the Rossini Festival, that happens because of the circumstances in whi
ch I get to sing. At other times, I learn things about myself by exploring the character I’m portraying, as we all have a little of the Countess in us somewhere. And of course there is always something to be learned from the music itself. But perhaps the best education for a natural-born student is through a mentor, and in Sir Georg Solti I found both a wonderful teacher and a valued colleague.

  Solti had cast another soprano as Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte, but the role was too heavy for her and at the last minute she wisely stepped down. As had happened so many times before in my career, I benefited from someone else’s cancellation and my own ability to step up to the plate on short notice. Decca’s senior vice president of artists and repertoire, Evans Mirageas, had recommended me to Solti because he had faced a similar problem two summers before, when an unexpected vacancy came up in the role of Ilia in Idomeneo and he had summoned me to Tanglewood. He knew I worked well under pressure.

  When Solti called me, I was singing my first Desdemona in Otello at the Met, with Valery Gergiev conducting. I was in the second cast, and the Met generously released me from my final performances. I was grateful at the time, but even more grateful later when I realized how important the Così performances would be to me. I got off the plane to London at two o’clock in the morning, my time, went directly to Solti’s studio at nine a.m., and sang through the entire opera—not the kind of thing singers normally do, but now and then it’s good to know you can rise to the occasion. I was immediately struck by Solti’s intensity—not to mention the record thirty-two Grammys lining the windows of his studio. I felt inspired just being in his presence.

  We worked for three solid hours, there in the sun-drenched studio overlooking the lovely garden of his house, and Solti’s commanding presence and musicianship—not to mention the much-needed coffee sent down by his beautiful and supportive wife, Valerie—soon made jet lag a distant memory. And so began another of the central relationships in my career. My recording contract came about in large part because of Solti’s excitement about my voice, which he was to christen “double crème” in Paris, when we reopened the Paris Opera’s Palais Garnier in Don Giovanni after a long renovation—a nickname that has stayed with me to this day.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHALLENGE

  BY 1995 I was taking on new roles at the insane pace of five to eight a year, and there was even one period in which I was scheduled to sing ten new roles in fourteen months. I had become a great procrastinator when it came to learning operas, not because I was lazy but because my schedule demanded that I learn one role after another in quick succession. Ultimately, the adrenaline of working under pressure became addictive and created a work habit that I still find tough to break. (My former manager Matthew Epstein’s pet name for me is Mother Courage.) When I was pregnant with our second daughter, Sage, I was engaged to sing my first Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier with Christoph Eschenbach in Houston. In this case I was really backed up and had to learn the Marschallin in two weeks, so that I could arrive in Houston and be onstage for a dress rehearsal the same day, since a previously scheduled Vienna engagement curtailed my availability. As I started to study the score, I was thinking it wouldn’t be impossibly daunting. After all, the Marschallin doesn’t sing at all in act 2, and makes her third-act entrance only toward the end of the opera, and of course I already knew the trio from concert performances.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t take into account how difficult act 1 was, how wordy, how conversational, how long. There was so much singing, and it was all so chromatic and rhythmically challenging. It was hard enough for me to understand it on the page, much less read it and memorize it. While in Vienna I had rented one of Plácido Domingo’s apartments, and if I close my eyes right now I can still see the wallpaper, the pictures on the walls, the piano, everything. The entire apartment is etched in my mind forever, because I ended up sitting in a chair all day, studying the score, sunup to sundown. By the time I got to Houston I knew it cold, and in this way began my love affair with one of the greatest characters ever created for a soprano. Strauss, anything in Russian or Czech—those parts are graven in my memory forever. Even roles that I haven’t sung very often over the course of my career I could sing again tomorrow, if they required painstaking attention the first time around. I appeared in Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw once as a student and then had to sing it again several years later on one day’s notice. I was surprised to find that I could conjure it up again in twenty-four hours. Repeating operas also helps to establish them in my memory. Not only could I still sing all three soprano roles in Don Giovanni (though I’d need a little warning to brush up on Zerlina), I could probably sing Leporello and Giovanni as well. If you perform in an opera often enough, everybody’s roles become familiar.

  Sage was born in August 1995, and again I sang until late in my pregnancy. I was engaged to open the Met in Otello with Plácido Domingo, which was an exciting opportunity, both for singing with him in his signature role and for opening the season, so two and a half weeks after she was born I pushed myself to begin rehearsals. Opening night came two weeks after that, and somehow I managed. I lived only five blocks away from the Met, which was enormously helpful, and rehearsals were not strenuous, given that we all knew the production, but the performances certainly were. Being in New York with Rick and my family there to help me made things much easier than having to scoop up the baby and run to Dallas, the way I did after Amelia was born. It also helped that I wasn’t learning a new role in Russian. But mostly it worked because I was young and energetic and had a very strong will.

  Having children has been an incredible gift to me. Only time will tell if my daughters will feel equally fortunate, but so far they seem to be happy, well-adjusted girls. It was easy when they were very young, because I simply packed them up and took them with me on the road. In the days when my schedule consisted almost entirely of opera, we’d simply travel to a new city and set up camp in an apartment, staying in the same place for a month or two. The girls thought of home as being wherever I, their current nanny, and their respective toys and paraphernalia were, and they didn’t seem to mind that it wasn’t a stationary place. Rick would visit, and when we returned to New York he would largely take over the nuts and bolts of care so as to have his time with them as well. It truly was the perfect existence. I had everything I wanted without the pain and guilt of leaving my children. I kept this up for as long as I could, even moving the girls to schools in Houston and Chicago for longer opera engagements. Amelia actually extended her kindergarten year in Paris, and two years later, both girls attended the bilingual school. Because the Paris school year lasts until the middle of July, it meant some extra weeks of work for them, but I wanted the girls to have as much exposure to another language as possible.

  Once Amelia entered the first grade and school became more demanding, I knew things had to change, as Rick and I both felt that the girls needed a solid education combined with a stable social life—no traveling tutors for us. Eventually, I switched over from what was almost entirely an opera schedule—which had me on the road for as much as ten months out of a year—to a schedule that balanced operas with concerts. I made a general commitment to sing opera only at the Met every season and in Europe in the summer, when the girls can come with me, with very few exceptions. The rest of the season, I take only short trips, typically three concerts in five days to a week, as opposed to an opera engagement, which requires three to six weeks’ rehearsal before six to ten performances—a commitment of up to two months. This system still presents a challenge, however, because operas are planned five or six years in advance, making it next to impossible to work around the school calendar and its treasured plays and dance recitals. Fortunately, concerts are scheduled much later than opera, so I sometimes have the flexibility to confirm a date just a year in advance. I feel tremendously fortunate to have both riches in my life: the satisfaction of a thrilling career combined with the sharing and unconditional love of a mother-daughter
relationship. Amelia and Sage know without a doubt that they come first, but they can also see firsthand the joy I experience in my work. It was this same kind of personal satisfaction I observed in my own mother’s life, and one that I hope my daughters will experience as well.

  But even as I was managing the scheduling and the girls, I wasn’t managing everything well. In the early part of 1998 Rick and I began to discuss divorce. Most people would look at us and assume that our marriage broke up because of my career, when in fact it was just the opposite. Rick and I had fallen in love when we were living in different countries, and while I was away so often we did very well. But once the girls were older and established, and I started staying home more with them, we were finally forced to confront the problems we had, which were not unlike the problems any other couple has. We’d grown apart.

  Feeling initially relieved that a step had been taken, I was completely unprepared for the havoc this was about to wreak on my life and sense of well-being. We had already been leading largely independent lives and remained devoted parents, so I naively thought that our separation wouldn’t really amount to too dramatic a change. My subconscious had other ideas, though, and was soon to knock me down—hard.