If you thought online trolls only targeted pop stars, think again. Opera star Renee Fleming, fresh off her superb Super Bowl performance, tells us there’s an “unhappy climate” in the entertainment world that affects many accomplished female performers. “I would call this the era of the blogger,” said Fleming by phone from New York, ahead of her sold-out performance at this month’s Abu Dhabi Festival. “It is very much directed at women and I don’t know why that is. There’s something that’s happening, some sort of backlash. There’s a sort of spirit of contempt towards successful women in the field. So I would like to see it die down.”
The American, one of the opera world’s leading sopranos, was the first woman to solo headline an opening night gala at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, breaking a 125-year precedent. She performs at the Abu Dhabi Festival’s opera gala on March 23, with the Dresden Philharmonic and tenor Michael Schade.
Although she tweets, Fleming says she doesn’t know if she’s been a victim of internet criticism because “I stay away from the world altogether. I have people that let me know what’s being said. But you see it also with Madonna. Regardless of whatever you think about her music and her performing, she really does take a lot of negativity, and I don’t see that directed at men, at all. Think of the men who are performing decades longer, and they are celebrated.”
Her Super Bowl performance of the US national anthem, a spot usually reserved for pop stars (it’s been sung in the past by the likes of Alicia Keys, Christina Aguilera, Diana Ross and Cher) was however, universally applauded.
“I thought it was interesting that it was press worthy. Because it was such a departure, it was news,” says Fleming. “I can’t even tell you how thrilling it was. These kinds of events require a tremendous amount of mental preparation. Physical preparation as well, but mental preparation is the most important because you have to be comfortable, focused and ready for the pressure. It’s a huge amount of pressure. There’s the performance pressure — it’s only a two-minute long piece — but there’s this sense of expectation. And I also felt responsible for classical music. I felt that if they were going to step way outside of the norm in asking me to do it, then I wanted to represent our world well.”
The world of opera — its history, actually — will be celebrated at her performance next week, she says, with pieces that “go from Mozart to Handel to Verdi to Massenet, and some lighter things at the end as well”.
“I’m thrilled because I am sharing [the performance] with my colleague Michael Schader, an Austrian tenor that I have done a lot of work with mostly in Vienna. We’ve tried to make a programme that would be very entertaining and have a lot of variety.”
At the end of the year, the 2013 Grammy winner will release a Christmas album with a strong jazz influence. “It’s going to be very light and enjoyable,” a measure of her versatility and love of all kinds of music, from classical to jazz to bluegrass. (A day after her Star-Spangled Banner performance, bluegrass star and comedian Steve Martin was among her congratulatory tweeters.)
Another friend? Fleming spoke of Vera Wang, who designed her coatdress for the Super Bowl and whose New York Fashion Week show Fleming was due to attend after our interview. “We’re very good friends. We have a lot in common and we met through friends of ours, and we share our passion for our work, and we also have two daughters,” she said.
