No Norma

Renee Fleming has decided to ditch plans to perform Bellini's opera "Norma" because the role "just didn't fit," her publicist said.

"The part just didn't fit as she had hoped it would after living with it," Fleming publicist Mary Lou Falcone said Thursday. "Sometimes you can sing it through, sing it through perfectly, it's not a problem. But I think that she lived with it and realized that when you infuse it with the drama and everything else that goes with it, it just wasn't the best choice for her."

Sad day for Sieglinde, but hope remains. With the kind of vocal fitness she's nurtured in the last decade, Sieglinde sees another full decade of peak Fleming. Sieglinde still believes that caution may have to give way to challenge, if she is to approach the highest pantheon of operatic legend. So it may still happen, people. But the reverence with which she has treated the supreme role of Norma is admirable, and itself worthy of worship. With every other divette singing every other role these days, it's remarkable to now find a Diva withdraw, at the height of her vocal health and influence, from a role that she ostensibly can sing, and sing better than any other active soprano of this generation. Brava diva.

(Fellow Fleming flappers, be sure to pepper the discussion developing at parterre with positive vibes.)

Latest word from Irminsul

Khaleem, opera maven and part-time sleuth, awoke Sieglinde early this morning with depressing news. Amidst the thick program notes for this weekend's BSO concerts, he and his cohorts found the jarring announcement, half-hidden in Renée Fleming's bio:

This August at Tanglewood, Ms. Fleming will sing the role of Tatiana opposite Ramón Vargas's Lensky and Peter Mattei's Onegin in a concert performance of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin with James Levine conducting the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra.

If you haven't dropped your laptop yet in utter despair and aren't wailing in the hallways or else searching for an instrument sharp enough to cut flesh, let me explain: Tatiana = wait, where's the Norma = Norma dropped? = Norma f*ckin dropped! = ok now proceed to searching for the sharp instrument.

We at Sieglinde's Diaries are hoping that she's only postponing the Norma, as she masterfully did with the Violetta earlier in her career. We've been following this thread from the very beginning, and wouldn't it just suck turnips if it all ended as a footnote. Yes, anyone who dares assume the role of Norma will be automatically filleted (Callas included, if she were to rise from the dead today); but Renée Fleming, we (still) believe, is the one artist that could triumph in the role amidst utmost expectations. However, she's also a cautious artist, unwilling to commit if she's not confident of victory. Bummer, huh.

Our vigil for the Fleming Norma recommences.

Whatever it was, it wasn't Norma

Yet I wet myself a few times during the opera just the same.

(So sorry, I've been occupied with other things lately. But still I made it to the season's last Papian Norma Friday, the Saturday matinee Zauberfloete, and then certainly last evening's--vulgar is too cordial a word--performance. Things I'll come around to blogging if I can't sleep one of these nights. Meanwhile, if you need further proof that hate comes from the same substance as love, I suggest attending one of these Guleghina Big Apple Circuses. )