With a reputation for rigour, the American operatic training system has produced some of the most polished singers in the world. But who are the best American singers of all time? Here is our choice of eight. But who would be on your list?
Renée Fleming
First on our list of best American singers is Renée Fleming. Now in her sixties, Fleming is focusing mostly on concert work and presenting (her weekly web series in collaboration with the Kennedy Center exploring the intersection between music and neuroscience was widely viewed during the pandemic.) In its prime, however, hers was considered to be one of the most beautiful soprano voices in the world – perhaps even the most beautiful, widely admired for its fullness and warmth.
Born in 1959 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, Fleming grew up in a happy suburban household, learning to sing from her music teacher parents. As a music student at the State University of New York, she flirted with the idea of becoming a jazz musician, and sang for a time with a jazz trio in a bar. But the lure of opera singing proved too great: winning a Fulbright scholarship, she went on to spend three years in Germany, working with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf among others, before furthering her studies at the Juilliard School.
Her big break came in 1988 when she won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions at age 29. It wasn’t long before she had risen to the very top of her profession, making her name in a huge range of operatic repertoire. Though it is possibly with the eponymous water sprite in Dvorák’s Rusalka – a role that she has reprised many times over the course of her career – that she has become most closely associated.
Thomas Hampson
Growing up in Spokane, Washington, Thomas Hampson cut his musical teeth singing in church with his two older sisters. He studied Political Science and Government at Eastern Washington State College before devoting himself to voice training at Fort Wright College.
An audition tour in Europe in the early 1980s won him a contract with the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf, where he sang for three years racking up roles of increasing size. Such a gentle and incremental career progression meant that, by the time Hampson was was invited to audition for Leonard Bernstein in the mid-1980s – a move that thrust him decisively into the limelight – he was well prepared for the reality of being an opera star.
And that’s what he became: one of the best American singers, as widely admired for his vocal polish as he was for the subtlety, integrity and intelligence of his interpretations. What has helped him throughout his career is his dedication to the three basic tools of his trade – voice, melody, and text – a dedication that he partly attributes to singing art song. ‘There’s not an opera singer on the planet who wouldn’t benefit from singing songs,’ he once said in an interview. As thoughtful in conversation as he is in his music-making, he remains one of the most highly respected of lyric baritones.
Joyce DiDonato
Some find her brand of music making a tad too steely. But there is no doubting the quality, finesse and power of Joyce DiDonato’s voice.
It’s a voice that has served the lyric soprano well, ever since she was a young girl in high school, with a passion for singing in musicals. That said, it did take her a while to reach her full operatic potential: In a 2016 interview with English mezzo-soprano Janet Baker, DiDonato revealed that from age 26 to 29 (around 1995–1998), she radically changed her vocal technique. ‘When a lot of my friends were getting covers at The Met and leading roles at [The New York] City Opera,… it wasn’t coming together for me. And I stopped and I said, “OK, let’s revamp.” …. And I was really bad for about a year and a half, because my teacher was taking away all the mechanism that I was using to sing. And it was the best thing that could have happened.’
She went on to attract a huge following on both sides of the pond, excelling, in particular, in music by Handel, Mozart and 19th-century Romantic composers.
Leontyne Price
Not only was Leontyne Price – now 96 – one of the most legendary American singers of her time, but she was instrumental in breaking down musical barriers, becoming the first African American woman to sing a leading role at La Scala in Milan.
Born in Mississippi, US, to a carpenter and a midwife, she displayed her musical talent from an early age, beginning piano lessons with a local pianist when she was three and a half. As a black woman in a highly segregated state, she initially embarked on the only available musical career path open to her: music education, studying at Central State University, a historically black school in Wilberforce, Ohio.
While there she participated in a masterclass with the renowned bass Paul Robeson, who, impressed by her voice, helped to help raise money that would allow her to study at the Juilliard. She went on to have a long and prolific career, widely praised for her warm and luscious voice, as well as her apparently effortless capacity to fill an opera house.
Lawrence Brownlee
Although he grew up without much exposure to classical music, Lawrence Brownlee had a very musical upbringing, playing trumpet, guitar and drums and singing gospel music in church. As a child he would frequently sing in his sleep. But with three older sisters on ‘serious’ career paths – one studying medicine, one business, and one nursing – he initially felt that he ought to seek gainful employment by studying something like law.
In the end, music proved too enticing, as he revealed in an interview with The Times. “At 18 or 19 I said to my dad, ‘I’m going to give this thing a try.’ He said, ‘OK.’ He knew I wasn’t someone who played around.” He studied at Anderson University in Indiana and at the Jacobs School of Music, before making a name for himself as a specialist in Rossini and Bel Canto opera – widely admired for his vocal dexterity and brilliant timbre. Since then he has gone on to embrace a wide range of repertoire and roles, even playing Charlie Parker in Yardbird, an operatic biopic about the alto saxophone virtuoso.
Jessye Norman
Born in 1945, in Augusta, Georgia, Jessye Norman grew up singing gospel songs in her local church. Aged nine, she became hooked on the weekly radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, going on to take voice lessons and eventually embark on an opera performance programme at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Northern Michigan.
The racial barriers in 1960s America, however, meant that her operatic breakthrough came on the other side of the Atlantic. She won the Munich International music competition in 1968, making her operatic debut at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper the following year as Elisabeth in Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Although she spent the next decade singing in some of Europe’s most prestigious opera houses, not least La Scala and the Royal Opera House, it was not until 1983 that she made her debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. She went on to sing prolifically in the US, performing at major political events such as the second inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1997.
With the tone of a mezzo soprano but the range of a dramatic soprano, she took on a huge variety of roles, revelling in her capacity to evade categorisation. ‘I like so many different kinds of music that I’ve never allowed myself the limitations of one particular range,’ she said in one particular interview. She died in 2019 but her voice – once described by the New York critic Edward Rothstein as a ‘grand mansion of sound’ – remains the stuff of musical legend.
Robert Merrill
Regarded as one of the greatest Verdi baritones of his generation, as well as one of the greatest American singers generally, Robert Merrill was known for the security and strength of his sound – in addition to his good looks.
In many ways, he wasn’t the likeliest candidate for stardom. By his own account, he was an unhappy child: overweight, with a stutter. But his mother – a Jewish immigrant from Poland who allegedly had hoped to become a singer herself – was keen to encourage him to sing, moulding his voice before it broke into a baritone. His own decision to embark on serious vocal training came a little later, during his teenage years, after wandering into a Metropolitan Opera rehearsal of La Traviata, which left him transfixed with opera.
Winning joint first prize at the Metropolitan Opera auditions in 1944, he went on to sing many times at the Met, while also remaining active in the musical theatre circuit, appearing on television with artists such as Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye. He once commented: ‘I loved the kind of mass adulation I could get in the popular field. I love showbiz.’ He died in 2004.
Anthony Roth Costanzo
Concluding our list of the greatest American singers is Anthony Roth Costanzo. With a voice as powerful as it is precise and pure, Costanzo – now 41 – is one of American’s leading countertenors – and one of the busiest. Even during the pandemic, when the world ground to a halt, he was beavering away writing essays and setting up Bandwagon: a series of pop-up concerts performed from a pickup truck. In an interview with the New York Times, he revealed that while he considered himself to be an artist first and foremost ‘my brain exists in a world of engagement, marketing, education, press, leadership, fund-raising, collaboration, curation — all of those things.’
Born to professors of psychology at Duke University, Costanzo became seriously involved in the arts early on. He performed on Broadway and in Broadway national tours including A Christmas Carol, The Sound of Music, and Falsettos. He sang backup for Michael Jackson and the Olsen Twins, as well as a duet with Deborah Gibson. As for his opera career: that began while he was still a teenager, performing the role of Miles in Britten’s The Turn of the Screw.
Since graduating from Princeton University in 2004 with a degree in Music, he has performed in venues all over the world, in repertoire ranging from Handel’s Messiah to Orff’s Carmina Burana. But it is arguably in the field of contemporary music that he has gained most acclaim.