The 2009-10 Metropolitan Opera season opened with famed Director Luc Bondy’s new staging of Puccini’s classic opera Tosca. And what a beautiful addition to the evening made Renée Fleming, one of the genre’s queens. She epitomized grace; she was patient with the press and in good spirits. It was a struggle not to be a little awed, and I’m not a follower of opera. From Wikipedia:
Renée Fleming (born February 14, 1959) is a Grammy Award winning American soprano specializing in opera and lieder. Fleming has a full lyric soprano voice.
She has sung roles in Italian, German, French, Czech, and Russian, aside from her native English. She also speaks fluent German and French, along with limited Italian. Her signature roles include Countess Almaviva in Mozart‘s Le nozze di Figaro, Desdemona in Verdi‘s Otello, Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata, the title role in Dvořák‘s Rusalka, the title role in Massenet‘s Manon, the title role in Massenet’s Thaïs, and the Marschallin in Richard Strauss‘ Der Rosenkavalier and the title heroine in Arabella.
A Richard Tucker Award winner, she regularly performs in opera houses and concert halls worldwide. In 2008 she was awarded the Swedish Polar Prize for her services in music. Renowned conductor Sir George Solti said of Fleming, “In my long life, I have met maybe two sopranos with this quality of singing, the other was Renata Tebaldi.”
Below are photographs I took of Fleming for the Creative Commons under the 3.0 attribution license. They are now available on Wikipedia, where editors and fans alike can help decide the best for the lead of her article (the first is the current at publication).
This is how you can take part in Wikipedia. Voice an opinion on the one you prefer by clicking on the photo.
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Renee is awesomely good looking. Because she has studied at the Eastman School and Juliaard in New York City and her background at home growing up in a mucical family she is a pleasure to behold; physical, spiritual and universal beauty. I vote for Renee Fleming 100% always. If I ever met her in person I would fall in love for the millionth time.
Dennis Dooley in San Diego, California.
I am so proud to be in her fan club
I wanted a photo of Renëe Fleming to illustrate the events-schedule item for a nonprofit opera organization’s chartered bus trip to see her in concert. But I was irritated by the image-use restriction stated on the Web-site of the logical source: the concert’s host, known as Opera Tampa. It demands that “[a]ll photography is for accredited news media’s use only”. The possibility that there might be mutual benefit in allowing use of the image by nonprofit opera organizations elsewhere in the state, to provide extra publicity for Opera Tampa’s own ticket sales, seems not to have occurred to them.Ironically, it wasn’t until today–the day of the concert–that I did some idle rummaging around at Wikipedia, and found your photos and your blog. I’ve decided that for portraitish photos to be used in a Web-page table of upcoming events (“EVENTS” in menu stripe), I strongly prefer those taken from the subject’s eye level, and showing obvious signs of life in those eyes. So, I’ve inserted one of your photos of Ms. Fleming–the same one that Wikipedia chose, except that I mirrored it.Yes, her beauty is rather amazing for a 50-year-old
who’s had 2 children. But what little I know about opera indicates that singing and smoking habits are mutually exclusive, so her career eliminates a major source of damage to the skin.Consistent with your conditions of use, I included my best guess at a satisfactory credit line.The Web-site I created will be fading to black in about a month, so you have only 4 weeks, more-or-less, to satisfy any curiosity. Not that I expect _that_ to be any big deal. But thank you for your photographic contribution, regardless.
Twitter: davidshankbone
says:
Thank you, C. Phipps – it gives me a lot of joy to know that you found some use for the photo, and it looks great on your site. I tried to get different angles, particularly for websites in different languages that read right to left (such as some Asian languages) so that people had the opportunity to put the photo so that it was always staring at the text. But mirroring it works well, too, as one can see by your website. Best of luck to you.
David