The Beautiful Voice is known for her improvisational skills both as an actress and as a musician (who can forget her “Over the Rainbow” or “O légère hirondelle?”) Now La Fleming has harnessed her spontaneity to create a variant text for her first public performance of a celebrated Puccini aria.

Manon ho studiato

UPDATE: The “variant text,” it turns out, is not the fruit of Ms. Fleming’s vivid fancy, but rather an actual alternative setting of the text. Puccini pundit Michael Kaye informs your doyenne:

Puccini revised “Sola perduta abbandonata” numerous times and Miss Fleming starts by singing the text from Puccini’s abandoned interim setting of the scene dating from 1894. She has not forgotten the words, they are in fact different in that version. However, the result in [Fleming’s current] performance is a conflation of versions of the aria.

Well, all La Cieca can say is that the different word-setting certainly sounds like she’s forgetting the words, which is as good a reason I can think of to perform the standard version. (I mean, given that the music doesn’t sound like much of anything in her voice anyway.) Perhaps the ideal solution would be for Ms. Fleming to follow the version of Manon Lescaut that was standard in the first decades of the twentieth century, i.e., when the aria was entirely cut from the score.