Opera - Peter Conrad confesses to carrying a torch for the enchanting Renee Fleming

Georg Solti, a renowned connoisseur of ladies, announced in his eighties that he had begun one final, all-consummating affair. He had fallen in love, he said, with the voice of the soprano Renee Fleming. I have to say that I, too, carry a flaring torch for her.

Fleming is the kind of singer who opens her mouth and breathes out rainbows: arcs of iridescent sound that linger in the air - or at least in the astonished memory - long after the vibrations have died away. She can pause on a single note, as she did in the meditative monologue from Der Rosenkavalier at Covent Garden a few years ago, and create a sense of wondering suspension that leaves you feeling dizzy and light-headed. She can also elongate a note and then splinter it into a galaxy, as I heard her do in the cadenza of an aria from Don Giovanni at the Met in New York. Yet her virtuosity extends beyond such exalted refinements. In an encore at the Barbican last year, she frenetically scatted her way through Duke Ellington and Irving Mills's "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)", and on a recent disc of excerpts from musicals she belts out a lament called "All the Wasted Time" as maenadically as Tina Turner.

She alone redeemed the concert performance of Andre Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire at the Barbican in June. It's a tawdry apology for an opera: a film soundtrack that does little but noisily underscore the overfamiliar dialogue. The role of Blanche DuBois, written for Fleming and first performed by her in San Francisco in 1998, is difficult but unrewarding, with long passages of throaty ranting. Even so, Fleming's vocal poetry validated the character's sad, fragile fantasies. Blanche manufactures magic by fitting a paper lantern over a glaring bulb; Fleming achieved the same result with lighting effects you could hear but not see.

The utterance of the character's name became a testament. "DuBois," she sang, introducing herself to the nerdy Mitch: the notes streaked through the air and shone like falling stars, emblems of fugitive romance. Later, mocking the shouts of the randy soldiers on her lawn, she cried "Blanche", and made the sound curdle and sicken into ugliness. When she imitated the slithering of the saxophone or - using a Southern accent as rich as molasses - inflected words with a bluesy languor, the carnality Blanche tries to deny became shockingly audible. Blowsily drunk in the third act, she tugged at the tonality as if she were singing Alban Berg's Baudelairean rhapsody "Der Wein" (and I only wish she had been).

A worthier assignment followed at the Royal Opera House: a concert performance of Dvorak's Rusalka, gloriously conducted by Charles Mackerras. The opera is about a water nymph stranded between opposed elements: she leaves her clammy realm when she falls in love with a mortal; but she remains bloodless, unable to respond to human passion, and can achieve relief only by giving her prince a kiss that instantly kills him.

Arpeggios and swooning strings create a lunar haze around Rusalka as she sings her opening invocation to the moon. Fleming - bashful, fearful, guilt-ridden, yet teasingly coy and erotically curious - edged to the front of the empty stage, shivered inside her silk veil, and then, with a daring slowness that accentuated the character's pain but also transformed this suffering into beauty, performed her own moonlight sonata. The aria lasts about seven minutes, but it stops time: ecstasy has no duration.

Rusalka's bargain with the witch who outfits her with a human body compels her to stay mute while she remains on earth. The prince is mystified by her silence; Fleming apologetically clasped her expensive throat, like an opera singer not willing to risk her instrument by engaging in small talk. But Rusalka regains her voice by the third act, when she welcomes her desperate lover into that mortifying embrace. Here Fleming abandoned the shimmering, supernatural sound she used in her appeal to the moon, and produced a tone of frigid pallor, with high notes that stabbed like icicles. Then, uttering a remorseful prayer for mercy, she deserted the dead tenor and - as there was no lake for her to sink into on the dry, bare stage at Covent Garden - wandered off into a dark limbo as the orchestra struggled through the wrenching transition from grief to acceptance.

"I am only half human," Rusalka complains to the goblin who is her baleful godfather. The same might be said of Fleming herself: a woman who - with two adolescent children, a house in the genteel Connecticut suburbs and a canny business brain - is ordinary enough, except for the transfiguring gift she possesses. Rusalka wants to join the rest of us on the muddled, mucky earth. I am happy for Fleming to remain in the realm of spirits, along with priestesses like Bellini's Norma, sorceresses like Handel's Alcina and pantheistic mutants like Richard Strauss's Daphne (who turns into a tree, with vocal flourishes to represent her foliage). A diva's job is to be divine. God may have given up the ghost, but I have gladly exchanged him for this enchanting, consoling goddess.

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