Renee Fleming Quotes

My worry is that opera will become an historic art form as opposed to a living, breathing thing.

So much can be gained from watching other singers, seeing what they do and what they don't do, seeing how they look when they breathe, how wide they open their mouths for a high note.

I have a certain image that's more classic, and I'm happy to stay out of the fray.

With classical singing you have to put out so much air - you project, you emit force.

My mother was the worst kind of stage mother. She would make me and my younger sister and brother little duckling costumes and put us in kiddie shows.

I think singing is one of the most natural things that human beings do, but it's difficult.

Singers can also get away with a lot based on youth, strength and enthusiasm, only to find ten years later that what was once just a niggling problem has brought their careers to an end.

Very few opera singers in history have been able to cross into popular music.

Music enabled me as a fragile young person to give voice to emotions I could barely name, and how it enables me to give my voice the unique and mysterious power to speak to others.

For my own singing, I used to be attracted by the baroque, the flashier the better, but now I prefer a simpler, purer style.

I'm reserved, so I've always needed to find a way of opening up. Jazz helped me do that.

I listen to archival and historic recordings. I love watching singers. I learned a lot from watching videos.

Music was language in our house. It was air.....I feel certain that if I absorbed any lessons at all in the first months and years of my life, they must have been about the work that went into making a beautiful sound.

My parents discussed singing every night over the dinner table; I had a tremendous music education.

For a while it was hard for me to say no to work.

I don't want to be somebody who stands still and sings pretty. Each song is a world. Each song is a story. I don't achieve nearly what I want.

In a way, being an opera singer is like being a very romantic sixteen-year-old who falls in love with great passion and conviction every month.

The first thing I did when I made a little bit of money as a singer was to buy myself an amber necklace. This is often the way we put together our lives, adding the striking qualities of others into our own character.

A lot of performers don't want to leave the circuit, the European opera house circuit, partly because most singers don't sing many concerts, or at least not while they are in their prime.

Perfection often creates such a flawless surface that there's no place for the audience to enter into a piece, while the idiosyncrasies of individual style are like windows into the singer's heart.

Every singer eventually gets around to a Christmas disc.

While it's a fact that a voice begins with natural talent, any talent must be nurtured, cajoled, wrestled with pampered, challenged, and, at every turn, examined.

I want to get out of the major opera houses.

The more you put into it, the more you and the audience will get out of it.

There's no performance where I never have to think about setting up a phrase or making a technical adjustment while I'm performing.

One of my timesaving habits is to save all of my magazines and junk mail for airplane trips. I walk on the plane with a very heavy bundle, but by the time the trip is over, it can all be thrown away.

Contrary to the norm, as my technique improved my voice became higher.

A lot of bad behavior in singers is caused by nerves.

The student's job is to stay open-minded, to quell the knee-jerk defensiveness we all possess in the face of suggestions for improvement, and to maintain patience when faced with a process that is often slow, confusing, and frustrating.

I haven't really been able to transfer into that extraordinarily other worldly creature, other than I hope on stage.