Renée Fleming on Her Kennedy Center Honor

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: And now to the prize of a lifetime, even for the most star studded of performers. World renowned opera star Renee Fleming was awarded the prestigious 2023 Kennedy Center Honor, alongside Billy Crystal, Barry Gibb, Queen Latifah, and Dionne Warwick. The Grammy Award-Winning singer talks to Michel Martin about that meaningful moment, her illustrious career, and her surprising love of science.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Bianna. Renee Fleming, thank you so much for talking with us.

RENEE FLEMING, KENNEDY CENTER HONOREE AND GRAMMY AWARD-WINNING SINGER: Wonderful to be here, Michel. Thank you.

MARTIN: So, you’ve performed for the queen of England. You were President Obama’s singer of choice for his first inaugural ceremony. You received countless awards, the National Medal of Honor, a Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Award. So, now, here comes this Kennedy Center Honors. And you can be honest, but, I mean, is it just like one more day or what does something like that mean at this stage of your life?

FLEMING: Well, it’s really incredible for me because I’ve had such a long relationship with the Kennedy Center, participating in five of the honors, attending many more because I’m an adviser to them. And so, It’s the biggest deal. It is incredible. And frankly, all of us, we — I spent two days with the other honorees. We were just all shaking our heads in wonder, because there’s nothing higher in the U.S. that’s public. This is the one award that is the most meaningful to anybody who’s been in the performing arts or entertainment. So, I — I’m still pinching myself. And it was so exhilarating.

MARTIN: Can you explain for somebody who’s not in the performing arts why something like that is meaningful?

FLEMING: Well, it is — first of all, the Kennedy Center is our national center for the performing arts. So, it’s a national award. And it’s an award that brings us together with the president with — you know, it’s, — there’s nothing like it. There’s no other thing like it. And frankly, in the United States, we haven’t really been, I would say, celebrating, certainly, the performing arts as much as we used to. And so, this is it. This is really the pinnacle as far as being recognized goes. And Dionne Warwick said, it’s so great after all these years of giving, we finally get recognition. And so, it’s — I wouldn’t say finally because I’ve received more than my share of awards, as you said. It’s — but it’s – – there’s nothing better than this.

MARTIN: One of the things I noticed that — and I was wondering, and people will see this when the honors are aired, is that some of your signature pieces were performed not by your contemporaries, but by young artists and of color. And I was wondering if you had a hand in that and whether you did or didn’t? How did that feel?

FLEMING: Well, I put forth, you know, lists. I think this is part of everyone’s segment is that you sort of say, here’s who I know, who’s here I — who this is who I love, this is who I would love to participate in my segment. And I gave them a list of my favorite young sopranos and thinking maybe one would be available. And so, when I walked out and saw that they were all there, I just about fainted with joy. And these are women that I’ve celebrated, that I’ve — you know, anytime they call me, they want advice, I’m there for them. And they’re more. They’re definitely more people, but it’s a joy to give back in that way. And that’s, frankly, a tradition that belongs to the classical arts for years. I benefited from Leontyne Price, being a friend advising me, and many other singers as well. So, it’s — and I’m a nurturing person. You know, if you have children and do what I do, you do it because you need to, and you want to, and you want to really love these younger people. So, that also applies to younger artists. I love the tribute, frankly. And having Dove Cameron representing Light in the Piazza, which was an incredible, joyful experience for me, and Titus Burgess, and Susan Graham, who is a colleague. We’ve probably sang together more than anyone else. And Christine Baranski, a friend. Sigourney Weaver. I mean, it was — the segment was just — I thought it was absolutely perfect.

MARTIN: So, there’s a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about. One is I wanted to talk to you about how you’ve shaped your career. You’ve performed more than 60 roles. How did you decide? Do you remember? Can you just offer some insight about it? But how did you decide what roles you wanted to tackle?

FLEMING: Well, first of all, you can’t have success in our world if you’re not successful on the opera stage. So, that’s the key. That is really the focus in the early years of a career. And frankly, for many people, it’s their whole focus for their entire careers. But for me, choosing repertoire. In the beginning, it’s — you do what you’re offered and you try to make it work because, hey, you’ve got a job. And then, once you’re really successful or, you know, budding success, you can be a little more kind of particular about what it is you’d like to perform. You have to be quite in demand to make those choices. And then, when you really make it to the top, you’re overwhelmed. You’re overwhelmed with people requesting for you to do things, be places, collaborate, et cetera. And that’s when Leontyne Price helped me, because she really helped me under — gave me clarity on how to make those choices. So, it’s — and you have a team of people around kind of protecting you from bad reviews, protecting you from doing too much, et cetera. So, it’s — it becomes daunting, but it’s all from a position of plentitude, which is — I wish that everyone has that because that’s the miracle of it, is that suddenly you realize, I’m living my dream.

MARTIN: One of the other things that does sort of stand out about your career is that many of the famous divas that we know did not have kids, and you did and you chose to. And you know, that — you know, I just — look, I know people in the pop world who are basically told not to have kids because they wouldn’t be sexy. And I just wondered if that was ever said to you and how did you — obviously, you didn’t listen, but I’m curious about how you navigated that.

FLEMING: Well, honestly, Michel, it wasn’t said to me, but I know singers from the previous generation who had simply on their own realized that they couldn’t do it. You have to have a certain type of support, obviously, or have the financial ability to travel with a babysitter, so you’re not worried in every territory and every night who’s the stranger, who’s with my children while I’m performing? So — and I — you know, I had this kind of drive. And I’m going to make it work and I’m going to pack everything that we need in our four suitcases and not bring more and the — you know, my daughter’s actually — I learned something, which is that you are what they need when they’re small. You, maybe a few, you know, beloved toys. They’re so adaptable and so resilient children that they will make — they’ll make — they’re happy as long as they’re with you and they’re having a good time. So, I tried to make sure that was the case.

MARTIN: One of the things that people know you for is how you started to roam around across genres. I mean, I know you’ve talked about this a million times, you actually started out in jazz and at some point, you know, moved to opera. But then when you had this robust opera career and then you started to kind of move into other genre again, how did you know it was time and how did you do it?

FLEMING: Well, one of the things that happened was my discography was pretty full. I had already recorded the standard repertoire, my standard repertoire at least, in a number of recordings. And so, I just started thinking, well, I’m not going to repeat any of that. So, let me branch out. Now, I did have to push back on a lot of people who said, absolutely not, you should not branch out, you know, it’ll ruin your career. I did get that for doing other genre, and I ignored it. And just thought, it’s my life. And if I — you know, if it hurts me, it hurts my legacy, so be it, I want to enjoy what I’m doing.

MARTIN: So, I mean, you performed on Broadway. You put out a rock cover album and a jazz album. You were forming a jazz song on the soundtrack to the 2017 Oscar winning film, “The Shape of Water.” But how does it happen? Do you like — you’re just like walking down the street and you’re thinking, you know what I would really like to do, or like, how does that – – how does it work?

FLEMING: Well, certainly, the recordings are my decision, but many of them come to me, you know. So, Peter Mensch of Q Prime said, you know, we want to do this album with you, similar to what Midler had done. So, you know — and so, that was kind of really out there for me to look at indie rock music and make choices about some of the music that I wanted to record, but it was fascinating experience. And certainly, jazz and music theater starring in “Carousel,” you can’t go after these things, they have — you have to be offered. And so, those were fascinating. I mean, doing the play on Broadway, as short lived as it was, was more fun. So — and then even “Lord of the Rings,” I think, was probably the most famous of the soundtracks. And my daughter said to me recently, she said, mom, why aren’t you singing this? You’re the voice of Gollum in the end of the third film and you never sing it, and people would come just to hear it live. And I said, oh, I hadn’t thought of that. So, I started to kind of — I started performing it. But — so — but some young singers say, so, how did you get in — get these films? I said, well, this is not something you can pursue unless you find a way to meet a director or a music editor or something like that, and they just — you get asked, and it’s really fantastic.

MARTIN: One of the things that you have very much surfaced is the role of kind of the arts and mental health. And, you know, there’s so many things that used to have a stigma around them, still, in some ways, do have a stigma around them, but that you have been kind of working to both understand, to alleviate and to sort of champion. And I just want to — how did that all start?

FLEMING: Well, the arts and health intersection became interesting to me because I had my own issues. I had somatic pain over the years as a distraction from performance pressure. I’m not a natural performer. I had to really steel myself. I had stage fright. And so, that sort of is how I became interested in it. But then, when I met Frances Collins, who was the director of the National Institutes of Health for the last 12 years and said, hey, I’m at the Kennedy Center now. Can we provide a platform for arts and health? I think we could — our audience would love to know the science behind what it means to be listening to music or feeling emotion around the arts. And so, we’ve been doing this for five years now. But for mental health, I mean, you know, Vivek Murthy, our surgeon general, Dr. Murthy, has actually done, you know, in a recent study, you know, kind of a release stated that, I mean, it’s — music can actually create endorphins that are very healing around depression. It alleviates the depression that we feel and, you know, it’s a similar to going out into nature, to creating something artistic using your hands. I mean, it’s worked. It’s done wonders for veterans, for people. We’re not going to — we’re going to have a lot of anxiety and depression around climate. So, yes, there are so many different ways. There aren’t enough minutes to tell you how many ways that this can be helpful.

MARTIN: Is there anything you worry about particularly when it comes to your first love, which is opera?

FLEMING: I do. I do worry.

MARTIN: Do you worry that opera is kind of losing its place, its footing?

FLEMING: I’m worried because it’s the most expensive of the classical art forms. It — you have — you know, people — hundreds of people working on a given night to make a large opera production come off. The chorus, the singers, soloists and the orchestra, and everyone backstage. The costumes, the sets, it’s very expensive. And if you don’t have philanthropic support for it, and if you’re not selling out every ticket, and some of these houses are actually really too big now, from when they were built, 4,000 seats, 3,000 seats was appropriate, but it’s not now that there are performing arts venues on every other block in New York City. They’re everywhere. So, there are a lot of challenges, I would say. There’s a diehard audience, and there are young people coming in droves. I mean, the hours that we premiered last year at the Met, a huge percentage of attendees were in the Opera House for the first time because they wanted to see this title.

MARTIN: Yes. Tell me about that. I mean, you talked to my colleague, Christiane Amanpour, about that last year when it premiered.

FLEMING: Yes.

MARTIN: The hours — you know, it was based on — I guess the original source material was Virginia Woolf’s, kind of, “Mrs. Galloway.”

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MARTIN: My understanding from looking at the data is that something like 40 percent of the audience had never gone to an opera before.

FLEMING: Yes.

MARTIN: Why do you think they — what do you think was attractive to them.

FLEMING: It had to be the title. I mean, it could be there were three leading sopranos in the three main roles. I mean, Kelley O’Hara comes from Broadway. So, we’re mixing genre again. But it’s — but I think it’s enough people knew, they also probably knew that there were subject matter in this piece, whether LGBTQ issues, suicide, certainly mental health. You know, there were relevant subjects in the operas, and I — this is why I keep saying, we need more new work that speaks to issues that we’re concerned about right now. We can be moved by it, we can be excited by it, but it has, it really should be more, more about what it is we care about, you know. So, it’s happening. There’s so much new work. For instance, Terrence Blanchard has brought two extraordinary pieces to the Met, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” “Champion.” Malcolm X was just very successful. LA Opera has a piece on Frida Kahlo that’s completely sold out. And Rhiannon Giddens wrote a gorgeous piece that won a Pulitzer Prize for — called “Omer.” So, are — people who aren’t typically in the opera world are creating works that people want to see.

MARTIN: And I understand that the hours were so successful that the Mets bringing it back again next year.

FLEMING: Right. Yes.

MARTIN: So — which I — my understanding is almost never happens. Is that —

FLEMING: Not this quickly. The turnaround for that company is four years. I mean, it’s a long time. So, I don’t know how Peter Gelb did it. He moved heaven and earth to make sure that we could all — and we’re all doing it, the same cast. So, yes. That’s quite a Herculean feat. But I’m glad it’s coming back. And it’ll be interesting to see what kind of audience we get this time around.

MARTIN: So, you’re doing “The Hours” again. You’re reprising that role. What’s next?

FLEMING: I’m working with National Geographic. And I won a Grammy this past year for “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene.” It was a pandemic project because nature saved me for that year and a half I was out of work. So, I said, I want tour this piece, but I want tour it with media. And it’s a stunning 30-minute film that I performed to. And so, I can do it with piano or orchestra, and I think I’m going to bring this to many, many cities in the next year and a half. And it’s really about — it’s largely about loving the planet and finding ways to protect it. And we share their initiatives and we encourage audience members, and we’re not beating them over the head with the bad news that we see every day, but it’s in there. It’s in there. Because that’s the Anthropocene part. It’s what we’ve done to the planet.

MARTIN: Before we let you go, do you have any — just like, you know, the off chance it’s perhaps some up and coming artists are listening to our conversation, do you have some advice for them?

FLEMING: Well, I just announced actually with Johns Hopkins and the Aspen Institute grants for collaborations between artists and young scientists, and it’s a really fabulous opportunity for those of you interested in combining this creative mind. Sciences is creative and very — a very similar way to art and artists. We all are having a hypothesis. We’re thinking about what we want to say to the audience, what we want to do and create and make and we can do it together. So, that’s one exciting thing. But for young performers and artists in general, I would just say, we’ve never needed you more than we need you now.

MARTIN: Renee Fleming, thank you so much for talking with us.

FLEMING: Thank you, Michel.