When Hyunah Yu was a small girl in Seoul, South Korea, her mother, Jeung-Ja Park, made her take piano lessons. Yu hated them, absolutely hated them, she says. When her mother switched her from keyboard to a quarter-sized cello, she hated that, too. Her sister, Hyun-Sook Park, remembers that when the cello teacher came to their house, Hyunah would cry and hide in various rooms. After the family moved to the United States, Yu encountered a high school teacher who sparked an intense interest in biology, embryology, and genetics, and against her parents' wishes she decided to study science. They had hoped, even prayed that she would become a musician like Hyun-Sook, who was studying piano at Peabody. Instead, she earned an undergraduate degree in molecular biology and made plans for medical school.

Today, her parents would be forgiven for an ironic laugh at their daughter's burgeoning career as a soprano. After earning from Peabody bachelor's and master's degrees, plus a graduate performance diploma and an artist diploma, Yu appears poised for a major singing career. Last May, she made her operatic debut in Vienna, singing the title role of Mozart's unfinished and rarely performed Zaide, under the renowned and unconventional director Peter Sellars. She has been in the studio working on her first solo recording, which EMI plans to issue early next year. Four years after leaving Peabody, Yu's career is on a trajectory that leaves her at a momentary loss for how best to respond. She says, "I think 'amazed' is not adequate. It's unique in what happened and how it happened, the course [my life] has taken."

That course itself has been operatic, a narrative arc encompassing emigration, promise, tragedy, faith, and redemption, all backed by beautiful music. The little girl who hid from cello lessons has become an ebullient singer with a career on two continents, as capable with songs from the contemporary repertory as she is with Mozart and Bach. Stanley Cornett, her first vocal teacher at Peabody, speaks of the beauty of her voice and her rare ability when she sings to be uninhibited, unaffected, yet in complete control. "When she's at her best," he says, "her singing goes like a runaway train but never leaves the track." Says her current teacher, Benita Valente, "She is a gem."

Hyunah Yu—he pronounces her first name with emphasis on the first syllable, so that it almost sounds like "Hannah"—s a warm and chatty woman who laughs heartily and often. Any attempt to typographically represent her speech would require liberal use of italics, capital letters, and exclamation points. She has a quick mind and a fondness for self-deprecating stories. She likes to make fun of her own volubility. On our second meeting, she imagined my response to our previous conversation: "Oh my gosh, she was 'blah blah blah blah blah.'" At certain times, during a lull in conversation or waiting for an elevator, she will sometimes softly sing a scale, her eyes focused elsewhere.

She was born in Seoul 30-some years ago; like many singers and actresses, she feels the need to be discreet about her age. Her father, David J. Park, was a Presbyterian pastor who had been orphaned by the Korean War. During his own Korean military service, he was stationed in the office of a U.S. military chaplain, and there developed a lasting fondness for Western classical music that he brought to his family. Hyun-Sook remembers, "I knew my father was home if I heard music coming from the house." He would play classical records all day. Hyunah recalls him building stereo speakers and placing them in his children's bedrooms. "I would wake up to music, play to it, go to bed with it," she says. Her mother loved music, as well, and encouraged all her children to play. She played piano for each of them while they were still in her womb.

In 1981, David Park was invited to be pastor of a Korean Presbyterian church in Charlottesville, Virginia. He moved his family to the States, where the gabby Hyunah quickly picked up English. Her father's English was limited for a time, so when he toured other churches he would bring along his more fluent children and have Hyun-Sook play piano, Hyunah play cello and sing, and a third sister, Hyun-Kyung, play flute. After three years in Virginia, the family moved to Austin, Texas. There Hyunah became infatuated with science. "I was so interested," she says. "I thought 'you know what, I like this. I want to go into science.'" Her parents urged music. Yu describes her younger self as stubborn and self-absorbed, but she felt the depth of her parents' disappointment. To help resolve the conflict she prayed for guidance. She says, "I really felt a voice. I felt God telling me to be His hands." She took that to mean she should become a doctor. "That made sense," she says. "I thought doctors are God's hands." She selected molecular biology as her major at the University of Texas at Austin, and entered a pre-med program.

While at the university, she met Yeong-Ho Yu, a doctoral candidate in computer science. He was seven years her senior and a newly baptized member of her church. Every autumn, the church's youth group staged a play, and at the start of her sophomore year he asked her to help him with the music. "That was his way of spending some time with me alone," she says, grinning. She graduated from Texas in 1990 and they married the following year. When he was offered a job in Philadelphia by Boeing, they bought a house in North Wilmington, Delaware. In August 1992, she gave birth to a son, Daniel. Medical school would have to wait. She would drive down to Baltimore to see Hyun-Sook, and on three or four of these visits, at her sister's urging, she took private vocal lessons with Stanley Cornett.

On Valentine's Day of the following year, just weeks shy of their second wedding anniversary, Hyunah and Yeong strapped 5-month-old Daniel into his car seat and drove to Emmanuel Church in Philadelphia for an evening devotional service. All day Daniel had been cranky with a cold, but he fell asleep in the car. Yeong suggested to his wife that she go ahead into the church; he would stay in the car for a while to let the boy sleep. She recalls, "A friend of mine came into the middle of the rehearsal and said, 'Hyunah, I want you to come out.' I remember I said, 'No no no, the service is about to start.' He said, 'No, come out.' He sort of grabbed me and took me outside the room. And then he said, 'Yeong's been stabbed.'"

When Hyunah ran out of the church, she found police cars, milling people, and her husband dying on the pavement. The car and her son were gone. A pair of teenaged boys had shot Yeong point-blank in the heart—the small entrance wounds had misled Hyunah's distraught friend—and stolen the car with Daniel still strapped inside. Two hours later, Philadelphia police found the baby unharmed; the carjackers had left him, still strapped in his seat and covered by a blanket, beside a dumpster.

In the days that followed, Yu was overwhelmed with grief. "I was a little mad for a few months," she says. She could not stop crying. She frequently fainted. She was so distraught, her parents moved up from Atlanta, where they had been living, to be with her and look after Daniel. "She couldn't function," says Hyun-Sook, who was in Baltimore working toward a doctorate at Peabody.

Hyun-Sook saw her sister's emotional state and decided that Hyunah had to pour herself into something. She needed to sing. "I thought she needed an outlet to express that grief and despair," Hyun-Sook says. She convinced Hyunah to audition for Peabody in May, three months after the murder, and helped her prepare an audition program of Purcell, Mozart, and Fauré. Through Hyun-Sook and Cornett, the conservatory's voice faculty knew her story, and they heard someone who'd had almost no formal training

and knew almost nothing of music theory or vocal technique, but who had charisma and an extraordinary natural expressiveness. The conservatory admitted her, and as a single mother in her mid-20s she became a college freshman all over again.

When I look back," she says, "I think I was not [at Peabody] to learn how to make a living, not at all. It was to get into music, and to live. Music has the power to make a difference, to comfort and to heal, and to uplift. To transport you to another place where you feel safe."

The Peabody faculty embraced her. "I was overwhelmed by the extent to which they made me feel important," she says. "They were so warm. You could feel it." She joined Cornett's vocal studio. "When I first heard her," he says, "she was very shy, self-effacing, timid in her approach to singing. She was shy about her high range and not that aware of technique and how it worked. We spent a lot of time examining what she was doing well naturally, so she could move to an even more refined level and do the difficult things that were not natural to her." She needed work on her range, on vocal color, on breathing. But she was spirited and intelligent and she responded well to instruction. And, says Cornett, "She was as musical as anybody I have ever taught."

Cornett applied an amalgam of traditional Italian bel canto technique and a more modern, more scientific approach. He worked on subtle adjustments of the muscles that control inhalation and exhalation. Her voice naturally had wonderful colors, he says, but they concentrated on how to control the balance between a silvery, shining tone and a complementary and richer vocal depth. Cornett delved into the physics of singing and found the former molecular biology student receptive to that approach. For the first year, she commuted 90 minutes each way from her house in North Wilmington, and two years after Yeong's murder she had to endure the trial of his two assailants, who were convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. At times she thought about quitting, but people at Peabody, especially Associate Dean Of Student Affairs Emily Frank, would not let her. She persevered, and with the help of some credits applied from Texas, she completed a bachelor's degree at Peabody in three years, then stayed for more.

What she found most hard was singing songs about longing, sadness, or love. She says, "I'd drag them out and before the first note I was crying. I thought, I cannot do this. It's too painful." John Shirley-Quirk of the vocal faculty would see her in the hallway and say, "Hyunah, the next time I hear you, I want to hear you sing a sad song." She says, "I couldn't do it. It was too painful, I couldn't sing, I would choke up. And even one, two, three, four years later I just couldn't do it. I have an e-mail from John saying, 'Hyunah, to become a complete artist, as I believe you are, you have to sing emotionally painful parts.'" He would not let her slide by with an easier, shallower coloratura repertory.

Shirley-Quirk also made an important introduction. Yu's professional career has proceeded through a fortunate string of people well met. Says Valente, "She's very sweet and very open, very easy to work with. The people she has sung for just want to take a chance on her, even though she hasn't had that much experience." In 1998, Shirley-Quirk received a call from Blanche Moyse, founder of the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont and a venerated specialist in Bach. Moyse was hunting for a soprano to sing Bach's St. Matthew Passion. Shirley-Quirk recommended Yu, and Moyse traveled to New York to hear her. Yu sang the "Aus Liebe" aria and Moyse hired her on the spot.

That summer, Moyse brought her to Marlboro, and there she met the festival's artistic directors, pianists Richard Goode and Mitsuko Uchida. Uchida nominated her for a fellowship with the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, which Yu describes as "the backbone of my career." When superstar soprano Dawn Upshaw caught a bad cold and cancelled an appearance with Goode at Carnegie Hall, he suggested Hyunah. She boarded a train for Manhattan on three hours' notice, sight-read the music in rehearsal, and performed the concert two days later. "My career would not be possible without the people God has placed in my life," she says. "It is not me. Beautiful voices are a dime a dozen. It is the people you meet who shape your life."

The people she meets seem always to want to help her. Says Roger Brunyate, director of Peabody Opera, "My feelings about her have deepened over the years, in part because she's such a careful and exquisite artist, but more than anything else because she is, I think, the most grateful person I've ever known. She's got this absolutely remarkable ability to make people who have helped her even in tiny ways feel that nothing she does could have happened without them. I've never known anything quite like it. It's an amazing human quality."

Her budding operatic career has been a similar story. Last year, the artistic management at Lincoln Center asked her to come to New York and sing Mozart for Peter Sellars. He would be staging Zaide at the Mostly Mozart Festival in August 2006, after performances in Vienna and London, and he wanted to hear her sing. On three days' notice, she auditioned. Afterward, they talked for 90 minutes, whereupon Sellars said, "I think this is it." She had won her first professional operatic role. She had just about adjusted to that idea when her telephone rang again. Lincoln Center was back on the line. After Zaide, Sellars would be

directing a new, as yet unwritten opera by John Adams, and he wanted her to sing for the composer. Adams heard her sing, then asked her to send him all the recordings she had of her voice, which he loaded into his iPod. He later sent her an e-mail praising the beauty of her voice and her musicality. She agreed to take the title role in Adams' new work, A Flowering Tree. (By mutual agreement, she later withdrew from the production as the role had moved in a different direction from the original concept.)

She is now working with EMI on the release of her debut disc on that label in the U.S., and in October, she will be in London for a photo shoot and interview with Gramaphone Magazine for its "One to Watch" section. When she checked her PDA for her departure date, she laughed. "Oh, I don't have the date here!" She shrugged and laughed again. "I just go where they tell me to go."

"Go" would be the appropriate verb for her life right now. As of September, she had been home to Baltimore for only about 10 weeks total in 2006. She'd been to Vienna, Amsterdam, London, Prague, and New York. She'd traveled to eight U.S. cities as part of the Musicians from Marlboro tour. Opening her billfold to pay for coffee after one of our conversations, she could only laugh because the wallet contained nothing but euros and British pounds. When on the road, she misses her son. (He usually he stays home with his grandparents, who now share a Baltimore house with him and Hyunah. Daniel is a piano student in the Preparatory.) She hates packing and unpacking, and she always has to fret about allergies and colds. Her recording session last June had to be cut short because of a cold she picked up in Baltimore. She admits that sometimes, just before a performance, she thinks, "There has to be an easier way to make a living."

But in the center of this whirl Hyunah Yu seems confident and serene. "I have been given something that is unique," she says. "Even though it's a very difficult and lonely journey, my faith helps me get through so many things that seem capable of breaking me into pieces. And God has brought so many beautiful people into my life." When asked if there is an elite concert venue at which she aspires to perform, she laughs and says no, that's not the point. "There is a purpose to why I am here," she says. "It's not always 100 percent clear how my life is to serve that purpose, but one thing I know for sure is the one who is in charge of my life knows exactly what He is doing, and He has a plan for me. So in a way, I have less burden on my shoulders. My job is to make the best of what I've been given."

Then, after a quick hug, she is gone, off to pack her suitcase yet again.