By Mark Swed

By the late 1980s, Dawn Upshaw-with her voice clear and sweet as a mountain stream-already had her fans. James Levine enthused about the young American soprano as the perfect, fresh Mozartean as she began singing small roles at the Metropolitan Opera in 1984. American composers recognized a good friend, not just in her advocacy of their music, but in her self-effacing purity of tone and word. In her first Nonesuch recording, released in 1989, John Harbison, whose Mirabai Songs were included, remarked in the CD's notes that "when we hear her sing, we hear above all the piece. . . . We are convinced that the radiance comes from the text, that the incandescence is the property of the melody." She had charm, and she was known to display a warm collegiality.

All of these are admirable qualities, the most admirable qualities a singer can possess. But they are not necessarily star qualities. Indeed, if there was a complaint about Upshaw a decade ago, it was the very transparency of her singing, its lack of, if not personality, at least of temperament.

Yet within a couple of years, this unpretentious Midwesterner could not walk down the streets of London without being recognized, especially once the Fleet Street tabloids decided she was Madonna, Nigel Kennedy, and Callas all rolled into one superstar phenomenon. However unlikely, she had become a certifiable celebrity. But she was, and has remained, an untypical and distinctively principled one. She is still an incandescent singer. She still sings American music with a direct American accent. She is still, by all accounts, opera's sweetheart. But Upshaw, now America's most versatile and important singer, has grown with each intriguing project. Ironically, while remaining true to text and melody, she has become one of the most easily recognizable of current classical voices. She serves as an excellent model for young singers. The 20th century has concluded, as far as American singing is concerned, with the decade of Dawn.

Upshaw's sudden fame was once considered a fluke, merely the right singer at the right place and right time. She was the soprano featured in the Nonesuch recording of Górecki's Symphony No. 3, which became an international sensation. This Polish symphony of slow, sorrowful songs for soprano and orchestra, written in 1976 had come to be associated with emotional, vibrato-laden singing, with heavy, thick sound. Upshaw has said that she resisted the puzzling invitation from Nonesuch to record it. But after a close look at the score, she realized that her calmer, more focused and neutral approach could bring a new purity to the long, still notes. The result was a performance not at all dispassionate, but so ethereally beautiful and calm that a listener could more easily absorb Górecki's deep message about the nature and transcendence of suffering. It was precisely these qualities that Harbison found so winning in Upshaw-the radiance that comes from the text, the incandescence of the melody-that alerted the world to both Górecki and the soprano.

Upshaw's career following the Górecki triumph has been one of astonishing growth and brave collaboration. She has willingly put herself in Peter Sellars' hands-a stunning Angel in the Salzburg production of Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise, a gripping Theodora in a staging of Handel's oratorio at Glyndebourne, a shockingly intense protagonist in semi-stagings of Bach cantatas in recital. But she has also gone to the other extreme, in Robert Wilson's gorgeously static production in Paris and Salzburg of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, here assuming static poses with arms and torso often at unusual angles and rarely showing physical expression, while singing with extraordinary poise. Upshaw was Susanna to Bryn Terfel's Figaro, when the popular Welsh baritone made his highly publicized Met debut in 1994 (it landed a picture of both singers on the front page of The New York Times). The cheery Terfel won the public, but the performance revolved around Upshaw, as she led the other characters into a sense of self-knowledge.

One of the seeming ironies of Upshaw's career has been that as a soprano who serves music, she, herself, has become an increasingly forceful presence. Her recordings crossing over into the Broadway repertory, for instance, strike us as surprisingly personal through the perfect marriage of text and tone. For the best of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Bernstein, Blitzstein, or Sondheim (and now Vernon Duke, to whom Upshaw has most recently turned) to seem genuine American art songs, they need to be sung seriously yet still remain vernacular. With lucid enunciation and subtle inflection, Upshaw has found the ideal balance.

Upshaw's devotion to new music is equally impressive for exactly the same reason, and American composers flock to her. She has, in recent seasons, turned to reviving worthy music from the 1960s, including George Crumb's Night of the Four Moons and Ancient Voices of Children (the latter as daringly staged by Bill T. Jones) and Lukas Foss' Time Cycle. And she is currently the soprano of choice for the creation of new music. For a millennium-celebration commission by the Salzburg Festival last summer, Philip Glass wrote the soprano part of his Symphony No. 5 ("Choral"), subtitled "Requiem, Bardo and Nirmanakaya," for Upshaw. Harbison saw her as Daisy Buchanan for his new opera, The Great Gatsby, at the Met. Esa-Pekka Salonen is writing an opera for her to be given at Aix-en-Provence in 2002.

As a preview of that project, with a still undetermined subject, Salonen composed a new orchestral song cycle for Upshaw entitled Five Images After Sappho, its text taken from fragments by the ancient Greek poet that follow the coming of age of a young girl. In this gorgeously lyrical, Ravelian music, one can hear a newly dramatic and engaging side emerging from a once uncompromising modernist. A singer's voice helps a composer find his own.

Upshaw, however, did not participate in the premiere of Salonen's songs, which was given in June at the Ojai Festival, outside Los Angeles. She had been waylaid by back surgery, and the late announcement of her cancellation seemed to forebode disaster for the festival. Upshaw, as both creative performer and audience draw, seemed indispensable. However, a young soprano, Laura Claycomb, replaced the indisposed Upshaw and sang the songs with beguiling directness. Music and singer were a hit, and a lesson was learned. Upshaw is not indispensable; she has risen higher than that. She is no longer just a great singer but an inspiration for greatness. We have her now at her prime, but we know we also have more. Her impact and example improve music.

Mark Swed is the music critic for the Los Angeles Times. He is also 20th-century editor for The Musical Quarterly and is writing a biography of John Cage for Simon & Schuster.