Renée at the Super Bowl: The Ultimate Community Outreach Concert

When it comes to professional football, my personal knowledge is profoundly lacking. Sure, I know a thing or two about touchdowns and yard lines and quarterbacks, but if you were ever to put me in the middle of a recreational game, the result would be quite awful both for me and whichever unfortunate individuals comprised of my team. I possess shockingly little comprehension of the rules, and even less understanding as to how one might actually go about throwing a football (something which made high school gym class a rather painful experience, in more ways than one). So, it should come as little surprise that I barely gave Superbowl XLVIII a second thought as the roster of vying teams grew steadily smaller–that is, until word got out that Renée Fleming was to be singing the national anthem.

Like most professional musicians, I was very excited to hear that one of the world’s most renowned sopranos would be gracing the field, and as an Eastman student, I took pride in the fact that Fleming holds a degree from my school. How cool is that someone who once sang alone in the very same practice rooms I occupy daily had the opportunity to perform for a television audience of a hundred million Americans? Even Renée herself admitted that she had never anticipated being asked to perform at such a high-profile event, although considering her surreal talent, it goes without saying that the engagement was well-deserved.

What I found most intriguing about her appearance, however, was the obvious fact that she was an opera singer performing for an audience largely comprised of opera novices (and classical music novices, for that matter). As I tuned in to Fox on Sunday evening, I wondered how many of the millions of Americans watching had even heard of her before. Granted, Renée enjoys greater visibility than the average opera star, but all the same, she is lesser known in pop culture than most of the other Super Bowl performers. I supposed the average viewer reacted to her appearance much in the same way that I reacted to Queen Latifah’s, which was Wait…I know her from somewhere! (I had only ever seen Latifah in that rom-com with Steve Martin called “Bringing Down the House.”)

Finally, the big moment arrived. The U.S. color guard came out and did their thing (props to them for managing to unfold that industrial-sized flag), and the announcer invited the audience to “welcome Grammy Award winner and soprano superstar Renée Fleming.” “Soprano Superstar”? I thought to myself. I mean, sure, of course she is….but what about the fact that she’s an opera singer? Was the announcer fearful that the crowd might just start booing on principle?  But even if the unsuspecting national audience was unaware of Renee’s complete identity, they would experience the quality that accompanies such an identity soon enough. She (literally) knocked that thing out of the park. I seriously got chills towards the end, although that may have simply been the frigid Rochester winds seeping through my apartment windows. The six words spoken by the Fox commentator directly afterwards pretty much summed it up: “Never heard it sung any better.”

As I sat watching spellbound at my kitchen table, I couldn’t help but think of the CBS interview I had seen Renée give on the eve of the big game. Towards the end, reporter Jim Axelrod had remarked upon her status as an unknown amongst Sunday’s listeners, stating his uncertainty that “an overwhelming number of professional football fans have a working knowledge of opera.”

“This isn’t the Met–it’s MetLife,” he quipped to Renée, who laughed.

 “I am so thrilled to have this opportunity to be the ambassador for the music that I represent,” she responded. “Only a small percentage of people ultimately are going to love opera and classical music, but they should be exposed to it. So if I get this large audience and this opportunity to say, ‘see what you think’–that’s a gift.”

Those words were in the back of my mind as I watched a myriad of faces flashing across the television screen while Renée’s succulent tones reverberated from the speakers: members of the soon-to-be-victorious Seattle Seahawks, the soon-to-be-epically-clobbered Denver Broncos, and the 2nd Calvary Regiment serving in Afghanistan. How many of these people knew opera? I wondered. How many had been to the Met? Maybe some had–but I’m willing to be that a majority of them probably hadn’t. The same, as I speculated earlier, can probably be said for the third of America that was huddled around their television sets. Yet, in the literally thousands of comments that inundated social media immediately after the performance, the collective reaction was nothing short of awe and amazement, as evidenced in this Bleacher Report compilation. These people might never have heard “Song to the Moon,” Renée’s claim to fame from Dvořák’s “Rusalka,” but nobody could deny that this was a quality singer.

The comparisons between Renée and other recent Super Bowl singers, the question of whether it was appropriate for her to perform the anthem in 4/4 instead of 3/4, the fact that she got through it in a mere two minutes and three seconds, and other aspects of her performance have been discussed at length on other blogs, so I won’t get into those here. There’s a lot of insight to be gleaned from Renée’s foray into pop culture, but there is one takeaway that rises above the others: it is not classical music people have grown to dislike, but its constraining formalities. The audience could cheer, scream, and applaud all they wanted during the performance at MetLife; with the jumbotron and immense amplification, not even the “rockets red glare” that appropriately took flight in the midst of the anthem could have drowned out the penetrating sonority of Renee’s voice. Yet, if such a ruckus had transpired at the Met, it would have been a scandal to rival Bridgegate. Now, obviously we don’t all have the opportunity to take our talents to the Superbowl, but Renee’s appearance should be an ideal that we all aspire to; we might go as far as to consider it the ultimate community outreach concert. As she rightly stated, her engagement at the big game was a true gift, and the reality is that we all encounter many such “gifts” in the course of our professional lives–unprecedented, promising opportunities to share our musical gifts. All we need is to take advantage of them.