Of football, flags and Fleming
Do you think the National Anthem is difficult to sing? So does one of the greatest singers in the world.
This year’s Super Bowl was one of the worst ever, but the performance of the anthem was one of the best ever, thanks to opera star Renee Fleming, who was the voice of choice in the bicentennial year of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Francis Scott Key penned the lyrics to the song 200 years ago, joining them to a melody by a British composer. The tune’s range and the words’ convolutions make the anthem dicey to perform, as Fleming told The New York Times a few days before her performance in the New Jersey stadium that hosted football’s final game.
Fleming, who has sung the anthem before a World Series game and at a concert in England to mark Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee, admitted that “everyone has difficulty in the same place [in the song] because there are these inverted clauses.”
She cited, “Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,/O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming.” Singers can get hopelessly entangled in such phrases, Fleming said, noting they were “tough.”
The soprano admitted that “I go to sleep and I wake up doing this.” She meant mulling the many traps in Key’s twisted construction and odd vocabulary.
“The whole song” can trap singers, she said, even though “it’s only two minutes. It’s not like you have a three-hour-long opera to redeem yourself. There’s no perfect performance in opera, there just isn’t, but this [anthem] has to be perfect.”
Supporting her in the stadium were the New Jersey Symphony and a 32-voice choir. “I didn’t want to be by myself,” she told the Times.
Anticipating the many landmines of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Fleming joked that “everyone says, ‘Just have fun and enjoy it.’ I say, ‘I’ll have a blast at 6:30. I go on at 6:18.”
The result was something to salute. She did a superb job of presenting the National Anthem, as did those accompanying her, and she wisely followed the advice of another singer to “start low” because the finish – “land of the free” – involves a leap upward that derails lesser performers.
(Renee Fleming’s singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” can be viewed on YouTube.)