In the late 1970s, a college student singing with a jazz trio at an off-campus bar in upstate New York was invited by saxophonist Illinois Jacquet to tour with his big band. She turned him down to pursue graduate study in classical music. This deep dive follows Renée Fleming from that decision through Eastman, a Fulbright in Germany, and Juilliard, where she paid the bills singing jazz at night.

The episode explores how jazz phrasing and rubato gave her classical singing an unusual elasticity, why winning the Metropolitan Opera auditions at 29 was biologically well timed for a lyric soprano, and her last-minute 1991 Met debut as the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro. It then traces her crossover work and her later pivot into arts and health research with the National Institutes of Health.

• Sir Georg Solti's statement that he had  ...