Renée Fleming

Scofield: What a beautiful music you just seem to make effortlessly. Is that one of the keys of your success? You make it look easy?

Fleming: I think that’s what our training really tells us to do. We don’t want the audience worried for us, because that’s distracting from the actual piece itself. There’s so much joy in doing this. One of the things that I love most about music is how it brings people together. The fact that people will be in a performance space, and feel that they can put aside their worries, put aside the things that they’re concerned about and have a shared cultural experience.

Scofield: I think what’s so amazing about your career, Renée, is not only you have achieved that stature in the classical music field, but you have sung the National Anthem at the Super Bowl, and had become an iconic American singer for the general public as well. Does that give you an extra sense of pride in your profession?

Fleming: There have been so many events, and historically, at which a classical singer would typically be asked to perform and unite people together. And one of the things that I love about the scientific study of music, is one of the founding principles is that social cohesion is a very much a product of making music together. And this goes back to millennium really, starting with chanting or drumming or any number of activities that humans engaged in before modern history. And it’s still very much with us.

Scofield: I so agree with you, and support what you are doing with music education in the U.S. and many countries with budgets being cut back. I hope the efforts you are making can turn that trend around, and make music more important part of our educational system.

Fleming: Yes, absolutely. I think people are beginning to see the effects of it, not just music but the arts in general. Because children stay in school if they have something that really engages them that counts them as an individual, that helps in their development, that gives them a creative outlet and a voice. Certainly In Chicago, where I’ve worked a lot, where there’s tremendous amount of violence, the school board said to me, “Look, we’ve changed our mind on this. We think it’s important because the dropout rates are less when there’s arts in the schools.”

Scofield: How fascinating is that! And you were quite active in that conversation?

Fleming: Yes, fortunately along with Yo-Yo Ma and Damian Woetzel, who’s now leading The Juilliard School. It is no doubt, in my mind, that those of us who participate, we know this. For us, it’s an empirical understanding. But when science gets behind it, then it’s a whole other conversation.

Scofield: Well, this is such a fascinating topic, Renée, we could have a whole interview just about that. Nut let’s turn a little bit to Renée Fleming as the artist, and the enormously high artistic achievement that you have achieved to give you the voice that has established the clout, to be able to make the case effectively. The Countess from The Marriage of Figaro is another one of the top for you. Am I right about that?

Fleming: It was the role that introduced me to most of the great opera stages. As a young singer, I sang Mozart in the very beginning of my career for about a decade. So it was a very important role.

Scofield: Is there anything that you identify with her character? She’s a little bit of a sad figure. The role is somber, must be very moving, even melancholic. Does it have any special emotional connotation for you?

Fleming: I would say that’s only the case in the beginning, because she very quickly takes charge of the situation. I was lucky that my first Countess was in a production with Göran Järvefelt, a terrific Swedish director, and his entire production revolved around the fact that the Countess takes charge and turns the whole thing around. She’s the one who directs Anna and tells her what to do, and kind of thinks of this entire fourth act farce in a way that forces him to apologize. Certainly, when the curtain comes up on Act 2, you see a very sad woman, and the reason why I would say she is linked, and some of the Mozart characters are linked with the Strauss characters, because it’s not the music. It’s not even the vocal writing. But somehow it’s the depth of some of the women that inhabit these great pieces, and these are all operas that have an equally great librettist. That’s Mozart to Da Ponte, Strauss to Hofmannsthal for the most part. And that’s what makes a difference.

Scofield: It’s a really interesting experience for us in our generation, many people especially women are talking about powerful women, and the importance of women taking control. That opera going back for 200 years has so many examples of very powerful women, sung by very, very powerful sopranos and mezzo-sopranos like yourself. Is there a lesson for us in that today?

Fleming: I think history, and the history of culture is always a lesson. And this is one of the reasons why I think it’s important for people to have a connection to it. What would we be today, culturally speaking, without Shakespeare, or Bach, or some of these figures, writers, and humanists? I find that it instructs us really about what has changed, and unfortunately more often than not, what has not changed. This is why we go back to the Greeks all the time. It’s because it’s just shocking that two thousand years ago, we were dealing with some of the same issues.