Melba has her peach, Rossini his tournedos and now Fleming her La Diva Renée. According to those on the inside track in Manhattan – and where else on the planet right now could you eat your favourite celebrity – this new dessert is ‘a riotous concoction of pastries, nuts and cream topped with a thin sliver of chocolate.’ And on that sliver of chocolate there’s a screen-printed portrait of the diva. Some say that it’s not the lady but a page from the score of Der Rosenkavalier, the opera that turned this American soprano into a star on both sides of the Atlantic. However, in Tony Palmer’s film portrait of Renée Fleming it’s quite clearly the singer who’s the icing on the cake not the song. And when you take a close up you notice that there are flecks of real gold leaf in the lake of chocolate sauce which laps around the edges of La Diva Renée. How appropriate, for in the popular imagination this is artist whose vocal chords turn everything they touch to gold, be it Strauss’s Marschallin or Mozart’s Countess, her two most admired roles.

Meeting Fleming in a very aristocratic London hotel you can’t quite decide whether she is being the Marschallin or the Countess. That is until the smile bathes you in well-being. Never mind the dress and shoes which shout couture or the hair and make-up which whisper that art can triumph over nature. That great big golden smile as wide as the Hudson River and the gee whizz chuckle that floats along it – why this is just Renée from Rochester in upstate New York, the local girl who after a deal of hard graft made good in Houston and then New York and who with a little bit of help from her friends, including Georg Solti, had Europe at her feet too. Not that Renée from Rochester is an all-American innocent. The manager of one of America’s most honoured opera houses says that, like Renata Tebaldi, Fleming has ‘dimples of iron’. But as we talk about her new album ‘Bel Canto’, the only threat is of an instant sun tan from that smile.

‘People think of me primarily as a Strauss and Mozart singer [but] all of the roles on this disc with the exception of Semiramide I have sung complete and a couple of them in full stage productions.’ The roles in question being Amina in La sonnambula, Maria Padilla, Lucrezia Borgia and Imogene in Il pirata, which Fleming has just sung this season in a new production at the Met. ‘I always really knew I wanted to do my best in bel canto but it was singing Massenet’s Manon in 1997 that opened this entire repertoire to me in a new way. It was the first time that I was able to sing a role of that difficulty – that high – with real comfort. So I’d always loved the bel canto repertoire but I couldn’t sing it that well. Furthermore my voice is making the opposite journey from most voices. It’s gotten higher through my career as opposed to lower, thicker and heavier. Not that it’s just that my voice has changed in the right way for these roles but rather that my technique has improved as well – in my opinion!’

Fleming allows herself a little puff of pride. Though was it pride before a fall that caused the La Scala audience to give her Lucrezia Borgia the bird? ‘I wish I knew what it was about.’ Old fashioned anti-Americanism perhaps. ‘It was unpleasant but I was glad that I stayed. And I had the most wonderful phone calls afterwards and discussions with people like Mirella Freni and Renata Scotto. So that was wonderful to be admitted into that illustrious club. Leyla Gencer was so funny.’ (Fleming giggles conspiratorially – she’s rather a good giggler.) ‘She was there the whole time and at one point Lucrezia had really been her role. And she just said, “This nothing. I got it every night”. She was wonderful, a really tough no-nonsense woman.’

Fleming puts on her no-nonsense face again on as we return to the tough business of bel canto. She’s always been a committed jazz singer, regularly including Ellington in her recital programmes. ‘I always make the connection between jazz and bel canto. In Strauss the orchestra will come with you and you create a rubato together. In bel canto, on the other hand, the orchestra remains more stable and you have your rubato on top of that stretching and pulling the line every which way but ending up together exactly as you do in jazz.’

How can you not admire a singer who confesses, ‘I’m not the most brilliant cabaletta singer but I do my best. I enjoy it but it’s not where my strengths are. I love the long phrases and shaping them. That’s what really interests me.’ And it’s those long phrases which really interest her audience too. Renée Fleming spinning out a long Straussian legato makes grown critics weep. Was there anything more ravishing than her Four Last Songs at the BBC Proms a while back? The line soaring up through that most unforgiving of acoustics in the Albert Hall, the voice flecked with autumn golds. Time, it seemed, stood still. Then the doubts began to mutter. Could you actually hear the words? And wasn’t meaning being sacrificed on the altar of an all-purpose portamento? Was this really a one-size-fits-all-the-repertoire voice? And on the new bel canto recording the scenes from Bellini’s La sonnambula and Il pirata do indeed ebb and flow on a high tide of portamento.

Fleming is kind but firm when I ask about the proper use of portamento in the bel canto repertoire. (Was I imagining things or did the dimples twitch and freeze momentarily?) ‘Portamento is part of style and it’s completely necessary. One of the key things I got from Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in our week-long masterclass was that that she taught me the difference between a German and an Italian portamento. And it was so simple. One has vibrato and one doesn’t. The German does not… whereas one crescendos into Italian portamento with enormous vibrato, in say verismo. In bel canto I really think that it depends on the dramatic moment. It’s a matter of taste. I know that there are people who dislike it, but I think it’s wonderful and another expressive tool that we use to invest emotion in singing.’ Here the lesson ends, though you long to know what other ancient wisdom Schwarzkopf shared with her young American student during what was evidently not a particularly happy time for Fleming.

Fleming has had happier times with her more recent collaborators. Philip Gossett, the dean of bel canto studies, and Patrick Summers, her conductor on the new CD, both steer an easy course between a scholarly study of these scores and practical musicianship. And they encourage Fleming to take the same journey. ‘The intellectual side of music gives me great pleasure, although my family life doesn’t permit me the time to devote to it as much as I would like. But I’m always hopeful of working with people like Philip who can enlighten me.

‘The interesting thing is that when this music was rediscovered 30 or 40 years ago by all of the great bel canto singers who have inspired me, the music itself wasn’t really deemed to have any tremendous integrity. People didn’t trust it very much. So when I go back and listen to their recordings I am still shocked by the cuts that were made…and sometimes in the strangest and most shocking ways by today’s standards.’

And not just cuts but corrupt performance practices that had crept into print in scores went unspotted for nearly a century and a half. Fleming and her collaborators have unpicked a fascinating puzzle about Amina’s cabaletta ‘Ah, non giunge’ in La sonnambula. The version in the score is decorated and not the original unadorned version. But just to muddy the musical water further, both Bellini’s original and the decorated cabaletta are in ‘his own hand… which is why I chose to still do the second version’.

So is it helpful to have scholarship at your side when you are preparing a role? Fleming takes a deep breath as if to fill her lungs with enough air for one of those seemingly endless melodic lines that have become her trademark. This is going to be an answer about singing in the practice room not burning midnight oil in musical archives. ‘Now this repertoire is much more time consuming to put together than almost any other repertoire because of the embellishments at the repeat of the first theme, because of the cadenzas, and because of the coordination in the duets and trios in terms of our decoration: it’s immensely time consuming for all of us to make a plan that is stylistically correct but which really fits the voice. And sometimes you don’t know until you keep trying. It’s trial and error. Ideally, if I were a specialist in this repertoire I would improvise. And having a jazz background I’m sure that I would try to do that because I used to sing scat. But today I haven’t developed that skill enough in this repertoire to trust myself. I mean I would get a third of a way through a cadenza and then forget where I started from harmonically, And I’d think “Oh my gosh how do I get back there?”’

On her new disc, Fleming seems to be suggesting a little ornamentation goes a long way. Expect no fireworks in ‘Bel raggio lusinghier’ from Semiramide, for example, but be grateful that every written note is given its value. ‘I used to make the mistake of putting everything including the kitchen into the decoration. When I look back at what I wrote in my late twenties into some of the repertoire, I think, “That was insane, I know I couldn’t have sung that”. What I would do is just squeak my way through and hope for the best. What I’ve learnt now is that it’s more important to tailor-make the decoration to your own strengths. In my case I have a tremendous ease in the lower part of my range which can be used to tremendously dramatic effect but which doesn’t really cost me too much vocally. It enables me to get through without making the audience say, “My God. She’s going to die. Isn’t she?” But it’s still exciting.’

When it comes to characterising bel canto roles there’s not a lot for a singing actress to hold onto. ‘You’re given a basic story and that’s it. You have to kind of make it up for yourself, who this person is. It’s not like playing the Marschallin. I always bring it down to whatever emotion is being expressed. And very often it’s some sort of longing or loss. The men are always dealing with vengeance and lust and we’re always dealing with loss which is the most plaintive kind of thing.’

Above all it’s surely the voice that carries the character? ‘I’d love to have the leeway to create a different sound for each character, a different voice altogether. Certainly the greatest challenge on this new disc was finding that sleepwalking character for Amina. I try to make it into something very dreamy and very childlike. And that has to be different for when she’s awake which has to be a little more vibrant… This is fun. This is the real work of an interpretive artist and some of the greatest composers don’t give us this much space. Debussy and Strauss have marked every single little decision. They have taken all of that choice away from us or much of it, [but] in bel canto it’s a clean slate.’

Recently Renée Fleming has been writing rather less opera engagements into her diary, spreading herself between recitals and concert appearances as well as the opera house. But there was a new Thaïs in Chicago this autumn and after Il pirata there’s her first Traviata at the Met later in the season. (‘That piece has such history and so much weight. When I even say the word Violetta I suddenly feel I’ve just gained 300lbs! And I think, “My goodness what am going to say about her?”.’) Opera, she adds, means more travelling which means less time at home with her two daughters. But it’s also a common sense way of giving the voice a longer life.

Together we mourn the loss of national styles of singing (Fleming is an admirer of Ninon Vallin who, with George Thill, exemplifies the French style of singing that was the hallmark of the opéra comique up until the middle of last century.) ‘I think the jet-setting that today’s world has enabled us to do has unfortunately created a globalisation of musical styles.’ Fleming remembers her first Marguerite in Faust in Paris and feeling proud of the head tones that she’d produced for her first performance. ‘The treasured director of the French opera came back stage… He didn’t even wait and let me rest on my laurels for five minutes but said straight out ‘It’s really wrong, Renée. It’s just too sentimental. You’ve just got to clean it up!’ I’m going to get on my little platform now, but I think it’s a real shame that the size of opera houses in the Western world now combined with the increasing volume of sound from the orchestra is really killing off the head voice as a tool of a healthy way of singing, not to mention as a matter of style.’

That leads us back to past singers and, paradoxically, on to a discussion about how important it is for singers to tackle new music, André Previn’s A Streetcar named Desire, for example, in which Fleming created the part of Blanche Dubois. (‘André writes wonderfully for the voice. Music that fits the voice so well.’) And just when Blanche had banished all thoughts of the Marschallin, Fleming drifts an utterly Straussian thought over our conversation. ‘This voice is an instrument that’s part of our bodies that we have very little control over – involuntary muscles affected by emotions and health and by so many variables… And the voice is so fragile. You know, things happen to us all the time. And I think, “Oh, my God, this is it. It’s been fun but it’s floating away…”’ Is that perchance a tear? The smile is wistful now with the merest hint of September to it. I wonder if the girl from Rochester wakes at night and walks through her rooms stopping the clocks?

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