Renée Fleming

Renée Lynn Fleming (born February 14, 1959) is an American opera singer and soprano. Fleming has a full lyric soprano voice. She has performed coloratura, lyric, and lighter spinto soprano operatic roles in Italian, German, French, Czech, and Russian, aside from her native English. She has also sung chansons, jazz and indie rock. She 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, the title role in Richard Strauss's Arabella, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, and the Countess in Capriccio.

A National Medal of Arts and Richard Tucker Award winner, she regularly performs in opera houses and concert halls worldwide. In 2008, she was awarded the Swedish Polar Music Prize for her services in music. In 2010, she took the title of 'Creative Consultant' to the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the first person to hold such a title with the company.

Conductor Sir Georg Solti said of Fleming, "In my long life, I have met maybe two sopranos with this quality of singing; the other was Renata Tebaldi."

A daughter of two music teachers, Fleming was born on February 14, 1959, in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Churchville, New York. She has great-grandparents who were born in Prague and later emigrated to the US. Fleming attended Churchville-Chili High School under the tutelage of Rob Goodling who taught orchestra, chorus, voice, theory/composition, and music history .