Opera - Peter Conrad marvels at the many incarnations of the divine Renee Fleming

Opera, indulging its love affair with the female voice, has always been fascinated by that many-sided mythical being, the eternal woman. Because operatic composers are usually male, most of their heroines can be classified as either whores or Madonnas. But what if sexual ardour and a consoling maternal purity are combined in a single figure, such as Verdi's reformed courtesan Violetta in La Traviata? The psychological enigma is intensified by the role's contradictory vocal demands. Violetta the party girl has to sing her way through a showy, flighty, coloratura tirade; but when she falls in love, she must find a voice that is more truly impassioned, weighted by a desperate yearning. Sacrifice and sickness require a different sound: thready, grave, yet capable of febrile elation as she imagines her own resurrection and blesses the world that has rejected her.

Violetta is a part reserved for the finest and bravest sopranos. This season at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, after years of fearful hesitation, Renee Fleming took it on.

Dumas in La Dame aux Camelias, the novel Verdi adapted, exonerates the fallen woman by quoting the "sublime pardon" Christ extended to Mary Magdalene, forgiving her sins because she has loved so generously; Fleming, whose voice combines ripe sensuality with soulful delicacy, made the character's goodness audible in the beauty of her singing.

At Violetta's giddy party, Fleming was reserved, isolated by the consumptive illness she tried to conceal (even though her breathy gasps betrayed its symptoms) and by her shy, shamed attraction to the naive Alfredo of Ramon Vargas. Her first hectic aria was not a showpiece but a genuinely worried soliloquy in which she hesitated between cynical hedonism and vulnerable sincerity, with a poised, protracted trill as the emblem of her indecision. Threatened by her lover's father, she acquired a stern, indignant moral authority, and the baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, initially implacable, softened into melodious sympathy with her: the human voice, in Verdi's operas, can achieve small redemptive miracles.

When Violetta renounced her own happiness, Fleming spun out the crisis in arcs of shining, transfigured sound. Her lyrical appeals - first to the society that exploits and hypocritically accuses her, then to the cruel God who decrees her premature death - extended beyond self-pity and, like the anguished prayers of the soprano in Verdi's Requiem, pleaded on behalf of suffering, downtrodden humanity. Abetted by the conducting of Valery Gergiev, she favoured tempos that were almost dangerously slow: her aim was to stop time, to show how moments of irreversible choice turn into eternities.

Fleming's performance of the last act, set in Violetta's shuttered sickroom, was harrowing. She looked gaunt and pallid; the voice with which she called her servant was croaky, and the trills in her brief duet with the tenor sounded like death rattles. The delusion of renewed happiness provoked a sunburst of joy as she cried "Rinasce". Rebirth was followed instantly by death: this is Verdi's abrupt verdict on the consolations of religion.

Having expired in New York, Fleming promptly rallied and crossed the ocean for a concert tour that, concluding at the Royal Festival Hall, offered glimpses of some other female archetypes, Violetta's sacred and profane sisters. The callow hero of La Dame aux Camelias presents his mistress with a copy of Prevost's novel Manon Lescaut, which describes the go-getting career of another hoyden, banished to a penal colony in Louisiana for moral turpitude. Fleming sang Manon's praise of pleasure from Massenet's opera, and added to it some jazzy, licentious inventions of her own: delicious vocal slides and slithers, and a cascade of giggles capped by dazzling D flats. In a different emotional register, she gave a wrenching account of Desdemona's final scene from Verdi's Otello. The ballad about the willow tree sounded disconsolate, its repeated refrain a cry of helpless despair, and although Fleming's voice flowered from muttered speech to beatific song in the "Ave Maria", her last, exhaled breath succumbed to silence and quaking dread.

In the finale of Strauss's Capriccio - an opera about opera, in which the heroine is a muse with a dual attachment to a poet and a composer - Fleming first listened intently to the orchestra's pensive prelude and then, in a flood of silvery moonlit tone, pondered the competing claims of words and music. An encore from Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur, supposedly delivered off stage by an actress performing Racine at the Comedie Francaise, returned to this rivalry. The dramatist, Adriana says, gives me words, and my breath transforms them; Fleming illustrated the process by producing from somewhere inside herself a cloud of brilliance that swelled, diminished and evaporated with teasing slowness. Opera, when this well sung, is poetry etherealised. And great sopranos, come to think of it, are Madonnas whose immaculate conception is the super- natural sound they make.

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