By Christina Binkley
At home on a private island off the coast of Maine, Alan Fletcher’s phone rang unexpectedly in the fall of 2018. Fletcher, president and chief executive of the renowned Aspen Music Festival and School, answered to the voice of one of the world’s most famous sopranos, Renée Fleming.
Fleming explained that she was pursuing her third act, so to speak, as she expected to wind down performing in her 60s. In addition to her work at the intersections of music, neuroscience, and wellness, she wished to teach. She had been in talks with another summer music festival, but her heart was in Aspen, where she had studied in the 1980s with then-director of opera, the late Edward Berkeley.
“My entire career, my escape fantasy when I was feeling under pressure was to go to Aspen and become a masseuse,” Fleming says.
The Aspen Music Festival is among the world’s most prestigious summer music events—alongside those in Verbier, Switzerland, and Salzburg, Austria. It’s a place where students come to perform and learn from world greats, as well as bike and hike in the mountains, as Fleming once did.
Fletcher eagerly arranged a teaching role, which was announced the following August as Fleming began serving as the festival’s co-artistic director. She quickly raised the caliber of students vying to enroll, Fletcher says, and ensured that the 14-or-so Renée Fleming scholars can attend with their costs fully covered. This summer, she will also make her directorial debut at the Aspen Music Festival, when she will helm performances of Mozart’s raucous, sometimes raunchy opera Così fan tutte.
Photography by Diego Redel
Fletcher, it’s worth noting, says he is so perplexed and intrigued by Fleming’s choice for her directorial opera debut that he is planning to attend her rehearsals to get a glimpse of her plan. “Così is one of the most difficult operas to stage,” he says. “It’s full of misogyny. You have to have a gimmick to let the audience off the hook. The music is so beautiful, and the story is so sordid.”
This audience may wish to hold on to their seats. The opera, written in 1789, centers on two engaged couples whose disguises and infidelities lead to a tragic end, with the “fair sex” taking the blame. Così fan tutti translates to “So Do They All” using the feminine plural, indicating that it’s generalizing about women.
Fleming is taking the tale into the 1980s and the advent of World Wrestling Entertainment. “I’m thinking of it as a coming-of-age story,” she says. “Wrestling is opera. It’s also fake.”
Why that era for this story? “In 1980, people weren’t as enlightened as they are now,” Fleming says politely.
Now known as the “people’s diva,” Fleming has performed with Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli as well as Sting, Lou Reed, and Michael Bolton. She has won five Grammy Awards, a National Medal of Arts, and France’s Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. She also sang the national anthem at the 2014 Super Bowl.
Fleming raised two daughters as a single mother after a divorce in 2000. A male writer who interviewed her for British newspaper The Observer in 2010 wrote that “her career makes any other permanent relationship unlikely: few men are willing to dwindle into a consort, smiling from the sidelines as the diva is mobbed by worshippers.”
Despite this cynical (and sexist) presumption, Fleming married a successful Washington, D.C., corporate attorney, Timothy Jessell, the following year. He shows no signs of “dwindling,” but he is, she notes, looking forward to spending more time with her someday.
She’s prevailed over misogynists, yet today’s world hasn’t evolved as Fleming anticipated. “We’re still living in a sexist world,” she said in January. “I just came back from the World Economic Forum in Davos. It was a sea of men in black suits. I thought in my lifetime there would be more women.”
Operatic parts do dwindle for sopranos when they reach middle age. “Once you’re not the ingenue anymore, there are very few roles,” Fleming says. Yet, at 66, she continues to perform at a grueling pace, scheduled for years out. “I’m doing too many jobs, now,” she says. What would she cut? “I don’t know.”
That’s because she has adventurous musical appetites—and because composers are eager to write parts for her, though they must avoid strenuous high C and B notes and lengthy passaggios. When she and Fletcher considered working together, she suggested a concerto built around Appalachian folk music. “I sent him 40 songs,” she says, for inspiration. She performed it this winter at Lincoln Center in New York City on her birthday, Valentine’s Day, with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet.
“I’ve been very fortunate to be singing this long,” she says. “I didn’t expect it.”
Fleming begins each Aspen season in August with student auditions for the following summer. “The teaching is very, very charismatic,” says Fletcher, who is down to earth in describing her own performance travails and how she solved them. That includes costuming: When a student arrived to perform an aria in “terrifying” high heels, Fletcher recalls, “Renée told her to take them off.”
“Once in a while I’ll make a comment on someone wearing spike heels,” Fleming says. “I’ll say, you look like you’re perched up there.”
Fleming’s return to Aspen in 2021, the first in-person season after COVID, reunited her with her former director, Edward Berkeley, to produce The Magic Flute nearly 40 years after they met. “His first summer teaching was my first summer at Aspen,” Fleming says. “That’s how long he had been there—the duration of my career.”
Berkeley died at home of a heart attack shortly before curtain time in 2021. With 2,000 ticket holders making their way to the theater, it was Fleming who gathered the production in a room, thinking more like a director than a diva, and displaying what she can offer a new generation.
“Someone said, ‘well, we can’t go on,’” Fletcher says, “and Renée said, ‘no that is exactly what we will do. We will give this show our all. That is what Ed would want, and that’s what the world expects from us.’”
Fleming insists the decision to proceed was made with the festival’s leadership, but acknowledges she felt it was the only course of action. “‘The show must go on’ is a real thing,” she says, “and we have the capacity for putting on blinders and doing what we need to do.”
“Everybody who was there,” Fletcher recalls, “says it was one of the great performance moments they ever saw.”