NEW YORK - "I think it's all downhill from there," Renee Fleming says in a perfect deadpan, referring to her unprecedented star turn on the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera's season last month, when she performed three acts from three different operas. She was the first soprano in the Met's century-plus history accorded such a distinction.
Each year seems to bring a fresh height for Fleming. Not since the sunny days of Beverly Sills has an American opera singer enjoyed so much popularity. And not since the brief, heady reign of Maria Callas has a soprano provided so much glamour to go with all the vocal appeal.
Already known for the many eye-catching gowns designed for her by just about every major couturier, she also graces a new fragrance from Coty: La Voce by Renee Fleming.
The 49-year-old soprano is now preparing for Washington National Opera's new production of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, a rarely encountered work being staged specifically for her and conducted by the company's general director, tenor Placido Domingo, no stranger to fame himself.
"I am looking forward tremendously to this," Domingo says. "I could see the first time I sang with her at the Met in Otello [1994] that Renee was a great singer, and she has grown into a great actress as well. She has such a sensibility to all different kinds of styles, such musicality and taste."
Those characteristics have made her a particularly hot property at the Met. That company's former general manager, Joe Volpe, planned the tripartite opening night for Fleming. His successor, Peter Gelb, "could have canceled it," she says, looking as beautiful and effortlessly elegant as ever, sipping coffee in a suite at her publicist's Manhattan office. "But he didn't. And I loved what Peter said at the party afterward: 'A glass ceiling for sopranos has been broken.' "
Given that this opening night was simulcast to hundreds of theaters across the country, Fleming's stock and stature couldn't help but rise.
"I tried not to think about the live broadcast and the history of the event," she says. "Don't laugh, but I was worried that I would trip and fall - and not gracefully, but right on my face."
The soprano endured a different kind of fall the last time she sang in Lucrezia. That was at La Scala in Milan 10 years ago, when she heard a chorus of boos.
Various conspiracy theories have floated in the opera world to account for that volatile night. Whatever the circumstances, the scandal does not appear to have left a permanent scar on the singer.
