Education Quote by Renee Fleming

A lot of artists mythologize their “training” as some lonely grind in a practice room. Renee Fleming flips that script: the real conservatory, she suggests, was domestic. “Discussed singing every night over the dinner table” isn’t a cute anecdote so much as a thesis about how taste gets built - casually, repeatedly, and with love. Dinner-table talk is where kids learn what counts as normal. If singing is treated like sports scores or politics, then ambition stops feeling like a weird personal obsession and starts reading as family business.

The line also does strategic cultural work. Classical music, especially opera, gets branded as elite - a world of tuxedos, gatekeepers, and special codes. Fleming’s framing quietly democratizes the path: her “tremendous music education” didn’t arrive only through institutions, it arrived through conversation. That’s a subtle rebuke to the idea that artistry is either pure genius or pure credentialism. It’s something closer to fluency: you absorb the language because it’s spoken around you.

There’s subtextual gratitude here, but not the sentimental kind. She’s pointing to a type of advantage that rarely gets counted: early access to sophisticated critique, to vocabulary, to confidence. It’s also a reminder that mentorship can be ambient. Not every kid gets a household where the arts are debated nightly, but Fleming makes a strong case that culture isn’t just consumed - it’s rehearsed, right there between bites.