The Misslin guide. (A Singer's Diary).(Patricia Misslin)

When Renee Fleming was invited to give a master class at the Manhattan School of Music, she said, "Why do you want me? You have Pat Misslin." Patricia Misslin, who launched some of her undergraduate students into glorious careers, is like a secret weapon: hers is the name resumes don't feature, lurking behind the ones they do.

The Fitchburg, Massachusetts native, whose childhood memories center around a kitchen coffee pot, folk instruments and Bach cantatas after church, is on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music and New England Conservatory. But many of her triumphs, notably Renee Fleming, Margaret Lattimore and Stephanie Blythe, are from her days with undergrad music-education and English majors at SUNY Potsdam's Crane School of Music, which she calls her laboratory. That's where she "taught whatever walked in the door," learned to imitate brass and woodwind instruments as a way of improving breath control and moved from her own singing plans into a life of teaching.

There is no "Misslin Method" other than hard work: scales, 8 A.M. lessons, grubby college-student jobs, practice, study and more scales; for Misslin's part, imagination, a perfect ear and all sorts of support. "I hate mystique -- if you produce, you get better and better students," she says, assessing a teaching life that began in her early twenties. "Do not worship me. You pay for service." Like Miss Jean Brodie pointing out that "educate" comes from the Latin "to draw out," the better Misslin thinks her students will become, the more she draws out -- of herself and of them. She listens to their lives, meets their lovers, offers lodging, finds them jobs to put food on the table. As their careers take off, she gets herself to their Tanglewood performances or recording sessions here and abroad, and for Fleming, Lattimore, Blythe and Alexandra Deshorties (who came to Misslin as her Potsdam years were ending and continued with her at Manhattan School), she goes to hear them at the Met.

Last fall she gave a master class at Columbia University's Teachers College; three women brought opera arias, and one did "Et exultavit" from Bach's Magnificat. After recommending the Barenreiter score over Peters, Misslin jumped to the other end of the erudition spectrum and asked the student to scat the text. The student looked blank. Misslin joyfully demonstrated -- still nothing. "You probably never played a plastic comb with wax paper," she grumbled. "Farm kids did that." (The previous student was ordered to practice Handel's "Iris Hence Away" without opening her mouth.)

Misslin spots future winners by how hard they're willing to work. "If I feel musicianship, pitch and rhythm, I can smell talent," she said. "Pretty quickly, the ones who have talent would say the work makes it easier. These girls [the ones at the Met] worked harder than any others I ever had. They didn't come from over-sophisticated opera backgrounds. Anything I'd suggest, they'd work on. The ones that really want it -- I have time for them."

Undergrad days, she reflected on a recent visit to her New York apartment, are "when people get ideas of themselves. To be a singer, you have to be a musician first. I taught music, not just voice. I drove them crazy with rhythm and structure. We would look at a Rossini aria or a Schubert song, and I would ask, `How many other ways could he have resolved this?' Then they had to think to see that composers made good choices for that style, or that poem."

For Misslin, the nucleus of technique is the scale: first a three-note scale, then a ...