Renée Fleming would like her devotees everywhere to know that the reports of her retirement have been greatly exaggerated.
Opera Legend Renée Fleming Isn’t Ready for Retirement
Fleming’s performance as the Marschallin in the Metropolitan Opera’s Der Rosenkavalier is only a prelude to upcoming recitals, concerts, and new work—a sign that the singer won’t be leaving the limelight any time soon.
By Amy Fine Collins, Vanity Fair
Opera Legend Renée Fleming Isn’t Ready for Retirement
Fleming’s performance as the Marschallin in the Metropolitan Opera’s Der Rosenkavalier is only a prelude to upcoming recitals, concerts, and new work—a sign that the singer won’t be leaving the limelight any time soon.
Renée Fleming would like her devotees everywhere to know that the reports of her retirement have been greatly exaggerated. “The rumor has taken on a life of its own,” reflects the lyric soprano, who in her illustrious, itinerant career has sung everywhere from Buckingham Palace’s balcony for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee to New Jersey’s Meadowlands for Super Bowl XLVIII—and has, along the way, accumulated a cornucopia of prestigious awards, from the National Medal of Arts to a Légion d’Honneur.
The polyglot performer will in fact “continue to sing full-time,” she says, but will be cycling out of her repertoire of stage roles to concentrate on recitals and concerts, and to explore new work. “Everything is about timing,” she says. “I have had a wonderful time onstage.” Though Fleming’s creamy voice hasn’t grown heavier or darker, she feels that, at 58, she is probably too mature for her signature characters, “except maybe the Marschallin,” heroine of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. “But I have done her so often!”
Even so, she is giving the frisky, aristocratic Marschallin one more magnificent shot. Debuting at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera House this month, the opulent new production of Der Rosenkavalier, directed by Robert Carsen, premiered in London last December to sellout crowds. “It’s risqué, sexual,” Fleming says. Carsen, who has moved the action to 1911 Vienna, deftly “straddles the line between audience appreciation and critical acclaim,” Fleming notes.
But Der Rosenkavalier is only one of many strings currently embellishing the diva’s bow. She has just recorded Julianne Moore’s singing voice for the upcoming drama Bel Canto. “Julianne sat 10 feet in front of me in the studio,” she recalls, where the actress scrutinized Fleming’s every movement so that the lip-synching in the film would be accurate. The luminous mother of two daughters is also the first creative consultant to Chicago’s Lyric Opera and artistic adviser-at-large (along with Yo-Yo Ma and Q-Tip) to the Kennedy Center, where she is helping to spearhead a multi-disciplinary initiative to examine the ameliorative effects of music on the brain. One of Fleming’s longtime missions has been to expand opera’s demographics through such democratizing channels as the Met’s Live in HD transmissions (“the best thing to happen to opera since supertitles”), her unconventional CDs, and a live-streaming arts platform called nRapt, to be launched this year. Yet, with all these escalating obligations, her chief priority remains—emphatically—“touring nonstop indefinitely.”