Renée Fleming

Across her four decades in the public eye, Renée Fleming has balanced an adventurous career on the opera stage with forays into other cultural areas. Born in 1959 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, to two school music teachers, the legendary soprano’s polyglot musical tendencies became evident early in life. As an undergraduate at SUNY Potsdam, she contemplated becoming a jazz singer, but ultimately a passion for art song and light opera led her to the Eastman School of Music and Juilliard for graduate studies in the early 1980s. She spent her summers at the Aspen festival, taking on roles like the Marschallin in Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier (1911), which would later become one of her signatures. Since her 1986 professional debut in Salzburg, the range of classic and 20th-century roles and works that Fleming has made her own is startlingly broad, including operas and song cycles by Verdi, Dvořák, Britten, Berg, Corigliano and Previn. A central throughline in Fleming's career has also been her eagerness to debut works by new composers. Her résumé of high-profile performances off the opera stage is also extensive, including appearances on network television, at major government events and on Broadway. Never content to linger in her comfort zone, Fleming has also recorded several pop/rock albums and contributed songs to blockbuster films like The Shape of Water (2017) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).