Renee Fleming: American Opera Singing

Renee' Fleming was an American opera singer and a soprano who was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania and grew up in Rochester, New York. Fleming has a thorough lyric soprano voice and is mutually the most widely commended American singers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. She has a broad assortment of roles in her repertoire, and works to preserve a balance between Mozart roles, such as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro, with substantial ones such as Desdemona in Verdi's Otello, in order to preserve both nuance and power in her voice. She is an especially noted Ellen Orford, Rusalka, Amelia in Simon Boccanegra, and the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier. She created the role of the Countess in Corigliano's, The Ghosts of

While she dislikes the fact that singing became a chore, she later found the discipline that it instilled to be useful to her as a professional. In 1981, she graduated from the State University of New York at Potsdam with a degree in music education, and preserved her musical studies at the Eastman School of Music, which she acclaimed with granting her a strong academic and speculative background as well as ongoing vocal training.

From 1983 to 1987, she was enrolled in the American Opera Center at Juilliard, where she connected with Beverley Johnson, the voice teacher with whom she would continue to study throughout her career. Fleming also recalls with admiration the year she spent studying lieder with Arleen Auger, on a Fulbright Scholarship.

In 1986 she made her professional opera inception in Die Entüfhrung aus dem Serail in Salzburg. Singing Constanze, one of the most arduous roles in the soprano repertoire, made her acknowledge that her vocal technique still needed work, as did her self-confidence to perform in public. She worked on both with recommence determination, and two years later, in 1988, she won the Met National Council Auditions and the George London Prize (in the same week) and the Eleanor McCollum Competition in