The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer (review)

In an old Monty Python sketch, the perky host of a children's television show tells his young viewers how to play the flute. All it takes, he enthuses, is to blow on one end and wiggle your fingers up and down on the other. That pedagogic mission blithely accomplished, he then says (if memory serves) that next week he will explain how to achieve world peace.

Renée Fleming knows, of course, that it's not that easy to sing. As she says in The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer — which she describes as "the story of how I found my voice, of how I worked to shape it, and of how it, in turn, shaped me" (p. xvii) — "I've finally accepted the fact that singing takes ten minutes to explain and ten years to accomplish" (p. 41). But her breezy, almost Pollyannaish account of her rise from music teachers' daughter in Churchville, New York, to global operatic superstar makes every stress, every setback, every disappointment, every failure sound like a good career move and the best thing that could have happened to her.

Insufficiently well-off to afford a blue-chip music conservatory like Eastman or Juilliard, both of which she will later attend as a postgraduate student, she goes instead to the Crane School of Music at the State University of New York, Potsdam, where she gets much more instruction and experience than she would have received in more prestigious institutions. Potsdam also gives her the opportunity to develop her jazz-singer chops by warbling with a jazz trio every Sunday night for two and half years. After she chokes up during a Met National Council Auditions tryout, she gets a grip on herself and enrolls in Juilliard's American Opera Center artist-development program, where Beverley Johnson builds on the technical fundamentals her Potsdam mentor had taught her.

When Fleming accepts a Fulbright fellowship to study in Frankfurt, even though everyone except her sometime teacher Jan DeGaetani advises against it, she is shy, she hates being alone, and she speaks no German. Arleen Augér says that she will teach her but not help her professionally, "because really, you young singers are breathing down my neck." Her glass always more than half full, Fleming writes that "Of course, Arleen did help me professionally, not only by improving my voice but [also] by virtue of the fact that I could cite her as one of my major teachers" (p. 45). Failing to win various singing competitions in Germany or to secure any contracts there is likewise a godsend, because if she had taken the gold or landed some engagements, her technically unfinished voice would have been ground to dust by the rigors of the European repertory system.

Another silver-lined cloud on Fleming's relentlessly sunny weather map is being forced to forget every technical rule and expressive device she has learned and acquired (vibrato, portamento, legato, dynamics) to record ten minutes of choirboy-pure music in Elvish for the soundtrack of the third Lord of the Rings movie, The Return of the King. "Barely a month later, I recorded a disc of Handel arias and found to my delight that the experience of fine-tuning my ears to hear the tiniest change in vibrato and dynamics lent itself perfectly to the baroque style" (p. 126). The golden girl in one Elisabeth Schwarzkopf master class but a hopeless caterwauler the next? Fleming looks back fondly on the flinty Dame Elisabeth's confidence-shattering tutelage, because it deepens our indomitable author's approach to lieder singing and sends her on a two-year technical search "to find a sound that was beautiful. Until then, my sound had often been criticized as too bright, even strident" (p. 51). The Holy Grail of her search is the technique of "covering" a tone without swallowing it. But even when she has mastered it and become so much in demand in the...