Bravo, to Georgia State's Soprano!

Her black hair in a stylish bob and her green eyes behind thick modish frames, Maria Valdes looks every bit as cosmopolitan chic as her resume and passport would suggest. She speaks about symphony, about poetry, about Mozart, Schubert and Bach.

It all seems far away for a girl growing up in Marietta, Ga. And it is. She’s achieved a great deal in a very short time, the fruits of immense talent and a ferocious work ethic.

Before kindergarten came lessons in reading music, then piano and singing, recitals for her family and performances in the middle and high school choir. Her high school music teacher, Patricia Jacobson, could hear the purity and emotion when she sang. A former opera singer herself, Jacobson felt Valdes’ power, one that that could fill a hall. Opera singers don’t use amplification — all that sound is produced by their bodies and vocal cords — and what Jacobson was hearing from her student was opera.

Awards came early and consistently. All State in choir every year, and then Governor's Honors, which pointed her into the direction of becoming a soloist. As high school drew to a close, Valdes, gifted in math, exceptional in voice, had come to where two roads diverged.

She chose music and enrolled at Georgia State. The thought had crossed her mind, she said, to attend a music conservatory. But Georgia State's School of Music had advantages: The campus was near home, and it had tremendous faculty — many of whom are still working in the music industry — who could focus on its students.

She worked alongside "incredible, incredible" opera singers at Georgia State, she says, and studied under the Grammy-winning tenor and Associate Professor of Voice Richard Clement.

“He was so fresh in the field," Valdes says. "He really showed me what was happening.”

The years at GSU were spent in voice lessons and theater, learning what to expect at auditions and how to network when traveling to various opera houses.

"Opera is just like a play: costumes, acting, just set to music," Valdes says.

Some of the work was perfecting previous talent, and some was new: the acting, the foreign languages, for example. She took years of Italian and French, and studied a semester abroad her sophomore year in Italy, the birthplace of opera.

It was Clement who encouraged her to apply for the Merola Opera Program in San Francisco when everyone told her she was too young. She listened to Clement and was one of 30 accepted. At the close of the program, she was one of four selected to Merola's ultra-exclusive Adler fellowship to continue her training.

In Latin, “opera” means work. It’s not always about stage floors covered in roses and the cries of "bravo."

A year after the Adler fellowship, Valdes was rehearsing at the Lyric Opera House in Chicago. She was 26, a wunderkind, absurdly young for the role of Juliette in “Roméo et Juliette.”

As the understudy, Valdes came close to taking the stage. She was called to be ready and remembers how her mind turned the night before. But then the lead considered herself able to go on, and Valdes watched the performance.

In the long night she had discovered something about herself, though. She had stood at the edge of everything she had been preparing for since childhood, and "it showed me I was ready."

Now seven years into her opera career, she’s performed with the New York City Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, the Atlanta Opera and she’s currently in the San Francisco Bay Area rehearsing for a July performance of “Carmina Burana” with Symphony San Jose. The New York Times called her a “first-rate singing actress and a perfectly charming Gilda” (for her role as Gilda in the opera “Rigoletto”). The Georgia State Alumni Association honored her this past year as one of the university’s exceptional alumni under the age of 40.

The norm for her is hundreds of auditions for one or two parts.

“You get told no a lot,” she says. “The director will say, we can use you in two years. Maybe.”

She travels nine months a year, gives 50 or 60 performances and spends the rest of the time training and rehearsing. Such stakes reveal character.

“Life in the opera is exactly as you'd imagine,” she says. “It can be cutthroat.”

But the supports are there too; she has friends all around the world. Her Georgia State mentor Richard Clement is still part of her life, too. He’s proud of her progress and acknowledges the untapped growth that remains.

“In the next few years, I think her voice will mature to the point where she will be doing the repertoire she is ultimately meant to do,” he says.

And then, there is the pull of the stage itself. To Valdes, “it’s bigger than life”— a collaboration of many arts and a connection between people. The personalities of the different operas speak to her, whether the tragedy of “La Traviata” or the poignancy of “The Marriage of Figaro.”

She fills halls with a purity of sound and has done so at the highest level for nearly a decade.

Now in her early 30s, it begs the question: Does the hush of the audience and the opening swell of the strings still electrify?

“Completely,” she says. “Completely.”

Photos courtesy of Maria Valdes