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Renée Fleming has earned the title of "America's Soprano" through her performances of everything from Schubert to Broadway. Her exquisite sound can be heard on albums in a variety of styles, from complete recordings of Massenet's "Thaïs" and Dvôrak's "Rusalka" to operatic aria discs, a Broadway duet album with Bryn Terfel, and collaborations accompanied by Christoph Eschenbach as both pianist and conductor. They have recorded an album of Schubert songs as well as the work seen and heard in the broadcast, Richard Strauss' "Four Last Songs." Ms. Fleming stands as one of the reigning Strauss singers of our time.
GREAT PERFORMANCES: What was your first experience performing these "Four Last Songs"?
Renée Fleming: My first experience with was with Christoph Eschenbach and the Houston Symphony and we recorded them before we ever performed them, which is an unusual way to make a record, particularly with a piece that's this iconic and important. So I went absolutely obsessive about preparing them in such a way that I could hopefully present sort of a mature, or try to present a mature, interpretation because they are such important pieces. And so of course, Christoph Eschenbach helped me a great deal. I love the way he really shapes these pieces: he doesn't just pick a tempo; they are so musical, the way he does them.
GP: What sort of things did you do to prepare them, beyond just practicing? Did you talk to Mr. Eschenbach about them and the texts and that sort of thing?
RF: Oh, absolutely. I mean, he's German, of course, so the text was something he could help me a great deal on. Our musical relationship is so collaborative and so ingrained that, even then, we could, in a sense, just find the musical shapes together. We've always said that we influence each other mid-phrase, without having to talk about it. There's a sense of direction that we each pick up on and a sensitivity, in a way.
GP: His conducting background is in opera.
RF: He also had two women in his family who were both singers, so he really grew up singing and hearing sung music, so he has a tremendous sense for that kind of phrasing. I often think too that as a great concert pianist, to make a percussion instrument, which the piano is, into a musical instrument takes even more imagination than, say, someone who plays an instrument that's naturally musical. So he has all of those things going for him.
GP: Was it a big learning process doing that recording session, with the playbacks, saying "We like this, but we could do this better" or "We could change it and do it this way?"
RF: Oh, absolutely, also because it was one of my earliest recordings, and, in fact, in every recording, in every performance, and every opera production, I learn something, and in those days the learning curve was extremely steep. So every session ... the light bulbs were flashing every couple of minutes.
GP: Has your approach to these songs changed over time since that recording?
RF: They change all the time. I mean, really it depends on my state of mind at any given time how I perceive them. The beauty of this piece is that both the music and the poetry are somewhat enigmatic, so one can project one's own experience into the pieces. You know, they can be about stages of life; they can be about what they appear to be about, which are seasons and sleeping and beautiful experience in the mountains at dusk. ... And they can be invested with enormous sadness and regret. The music is not clear, there's a serenity and a calmness in the music, but they can also be utterly beautiful.
It's like [Strauss' song] "Morgen." "Morgen" is a microcosm of the "Four Last Songs," in my opinion. In "Morgen" there's also this sense of, Who are these people and what are they really experiencing? What were their lives like? [Strauss] had this real gift for making us work to understand the pieces ourselves as well.
GP: How do you approach communicating that enigmatic quality to an audience? Is it a matter of saying, "I feel this way," and then you communicate that? How does that work?
RF: No, I think that how I feel doesn't project as much as how I perform the pieces. What I try to do is give a really clear reading of the text. That's what I'm doing now with the pieces much more, even though these phrases are almost impossible to sing because they are so long and sometimes very sustained and all four songs have the same sorts of vocal challenges, which is high, sustained singing. So I try to, obviously, sing them as well as I can, but now I'm also trying to invest the text with as much meaning as I can, even amid the challenges of the tessitura. Beyond that, I think the fourth song is for me the most moving piece, which ends with this, perhaps, death, and that's the piece which never ceases to kind of put me in an altered state.
I always hope that the audience comes into the world of the pieces, because I know the first time I heard them, I didn't. The first time I heard the piece I was a student, and I was way too far away in this huge hall, and I really didn't get it. I remember that. I remember thinking, "Gosh, this is, you know, 20 minutes of music that all sounds the same. Oh, it's so slow," and now, I can't even imagine having that reaction! I know there'll be people in the audience who are coming from both worlds.
GP: How much attention are you able to give to the orchestrations that Strauss wrote, with all of the text-painting and musical imagery?
RF: Oh, a lot. Because I know the pieces so well and have performed them so often, at this point that's the most exciting thing for me, is to discover new things in the orchestration. There's a viola solo that I just recently discovered and I listen for that now. Beyond the flutes and the horns, of course the horn is ever-present in Strauss' writing in general, and the beautiful chromatic string writing.
I love Strauss. His music is exactly to my taste, and the fact that he loved the soprano voice and wrote extensively for a voice like mine is the icing on the cake.
GP: How much time, for a given performance like this Carnegie Hall concert, would you spend discussing these pieces with Christoph Eschenbach? Or is it an intuitive relationship by this point?
RF: No, we don't really discuss, not at this point. We've done the pieces so much. However, what's interesting about us is that every time we do them, they're different, but we don't need to talk about it. We just do it and we feel it, and we've grown as artists, and I certainly grow every time I work with him. We mold it in a different way, and I think that would be true if we did them every night for a month -- it would be different. That's the beauty of a live performance: it's never the same.
GP: Do you discuss tempos with him to make sure he doesn't go so slowly that you can't finish a phrase, or is that not an issue?
RF: No, it's an issue from time to time, and if there's a particular phrase that feels difficult I'll say, "Christoph, can you please move a little bit here because I'm having trouble singing this line?" and "How about if we stretch there?" And he will do the same. He'll say "Can you bring out this word?" or, "Let's take a little pause there," but it's very subtle. Most of it we project to each other while we're doing it.
GP: This is kind of a novice question that I'm sure some people wonder about: What do you think about when you're on stage and not singing?
RF: Well, in that piece I'm really singing the whole time! [Laughs.] Except for a couple of short interludes. But ideally, I'm listening and becoming inspired about the music. And as a singer, I'm almost always projecting a text, so I'm thinking about the text and what does it mean and what does it mean to me and where am I in my stage of life and how do I feel about death. It's about staying connected to the piece and the meaning of the piece. You won't find me thinking about my laundry. [Laughs.] Hopefully! Something would be really wrong if I was.
GP: Is it ever hard to identify with Strauss at the end of his life as he's writing these pieces about death, as a German man dying in the middle of the 20th century?
RF: Well, I do think about him a lot when I do the piece, too, because I think about what he experienced in between [the] two world wars. The amount of music he wrote and the kind of music he wrote during the Second World War, like "Capriccio," is very telling. It was clear that he was, in some way, maybe trying to send a subtle message that we have to stay connected to beauty, to life, to all things that are good in a time of extreme pain.
But I don't really know. Where I fail as a musician is in my musicological time. I wish I could say that I've read every book on Strauss, because then I'm sure I would have many more insights, but I haven't been able to find the time to.
GP: He had such a large role within the Nazi party, even, and I think it was only when a [Jewish] daughter-in-law's siblings were sent to a concentration camp that his eyes were opened to the whole horror of that.
RF: I know, and as a result [of being Jewish] his grandchildren were also beat up. [They were detained by the Gestapo.] I'm sure the message came home then. And he stayed, and I know he's criticized for that. But he was 74, and I really hesitate to judge; he may have thought that he could do more [than if he left]; he may have thought . . . I don't really know. There may be letters he wrote that would give an insight into his state of mind.
GP: [At the time] you could not leave to go the U.S. without an assured position, and as a collaborator he would have had a difficult time getting a position. Like you said, it was important to stay connected to beauty; that's a wonderful idea.
RF: There's a wonderful line from "Capriccio," which he wrote in 1941, which said that, and it's set on such a soaring phrase that I felt he really meant to make a statement with it: "Our thirsting hearts searching for beauty," that that's the only way we can stay connected to life. I always thought, I bet this was his credo at this time.
Interview by Marc Geelhoed for GREAT PERFORMANCES Online conducted in October 2004 (photo: Decca/Andrew Eccles).
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