Upward bound.(Viewpoint)(Editorial)

Many great Metropolitan Opera careers have begun with spectacular Metropolitan Opera debuts: the 1918 company premiere of La Forza del Destino that marked Rosa Ponselle's audacious leap from vaudeville to Verdi; Kirsten Flagstad's triumphant 1935 Sieglinde, which signaled the arrival of a Wagnerian goddess; the 1961 Il Trovatore Leonora that won Leontyne Price a forty-three-minute ovation; Kiri Te Kanawa's luminous, last-minute Desdemona in 1974.

Not so the career of Renee Fleming, who opens the Met season this month as Verdi's Violetta. Fleming's ascent to the top of her profession--and it is there she unquestionably resides--seemed to happen almost by stealth, the early years of her career marked as much by disappointment as by distinction. She was one of many gifted American sopranos who arrived on the opera scene in the mid-1980s, and for a while Fleming seemed unable to break out of the pack. Certainly, few present at Fleming's 1991 Met debut, as Mozart's Countess Almaviva, would have predicted superstardom for her. At my first Met experience of Fleming--the world premiere of The Ghosts of Versailles--I was struck by her rosy prettiness, her sweet, sure tone and her ability to hold her own in a cast that included Teresa Stratas, Hakan Hagegard, Graham Clark and Marilyn Home. But for me, the genuine star authority didn't appear until subsequent Fleming performances--the magisterial poise of her Desdemona in the Act I love duet, the dark cut of her attack as Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes. Then, in a 1996 Cosi Fan Tutte, I watched as Fleming's bravura "Per pieta" triggered a roar from the audience that threatened to rip the Met auditorium in half. Somehow, a star had been born when nobody was looking.

It ...