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Perhaps that's why today, Bonney readily offers outsiders a glimpse behind stardom's shiny curtain. Sure, she concedes, AndrŽ Previn did write a song for her ("Miss Sallie Chisum Remembers Billy the Kid"), but she wants you to know why: because she asked him to. Sure, she says, her recital gowns are elegant, but consider what's behind them: a spreadsheet that ensures she doesn't wear the same dress twice in the same concert hall. And yes, her repertoire of more than 400 solo songs is impressive, but she'll tell you what's behind that, too: another spreadsheet tracking which pieces she's sung where, plus thousands of hours of memorizing lyrics in many languages by writing them out longhand, over and over. Music, once practiced, will stick in a singer's mind no matter what happens, Bonney says. Lyrics won't. If you haven't engraved them indelibly on your brain, they can be erased by a distraction as tiny as an audience member reaching for a tissue.

Bonney sees no wall between herself and the audience, no gap between high culture and real life. To her, it's all simple: Singing is a great job. Opera is a team sport. And neither is as fascinating as a single hole of golf. In her living room or onstage in Strauss's "Arabella," she's equally matter-of-fact. This year, at age 48, she played Zdenka, a woman in her 20s living as a boy. In both Paris and London, she won raves by acting the role with complete conviction: striding man-style in a dark suit and singing in German as naturally as if she were chatting in English about the weather.

The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, where Barbara Bonney played Angelica in "Orlando."

Offstage, she is the very model of the modern non-diva—reserved but not reticent, pleasant but nobody's pushover. On the morning after a Covent Garden performance, a diva might sleep late, head to a spa for some pampering and maintain a stoic silence to rest her voice. On a spring morning after she's sung Zdenka, Bonney rises early to play golf, comes home to make lunch and see her husband off on a business trip, then curls up on the couch and chats easily about her career. With her cropped hair and cropped denim pants, moccasins and striped T-shirt, she could be any resident of the leafy London suburbs, pausing at midlife to reflect. She has always followed her "inner pendulum," she's saying, and really, what's so surprising about where it's led her?

It's not that she diminishes her accomplishments. She gladly supplies a bio containing a staggering list of the composers she's sung (Mozart, Schubert, Bach, Schumann, Haydn, and anyone else you've ever heard of), top conductors she's worked with (Sir Georg Solti, Seiji Ozawa, Christopher Hogwood and Vladimir Ashkenazy, just for starters), and places she's performed (Vienna, Moscow, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo, New York and enough others to keep her away from home 11 months a year). Her discography goes on for pages—15 solo CDs and dozens more ensemble CDs of opera, sacred music and early music. Type "Barbara Bonney" into an Internet search engine, and you'll find 51,300 sites that mention her name. ("Really?" she asks. "How flattering. I've never tried it.") Radiant, the reviewers call her voice. Crystalline. Lyrical. Miraculous.

She enjoys the praise, relishes the calls from interesting artists proposing interesting projects. How about The Three Sopranos, to compete with The Three Tenors? Ugh; spare her the clichŽs. But three sopranos doing the Andrews Sisters—now that would be a blast. Fun projects take top priority at this "really good moment" in her life. "I've gone through a little of a funny patch of my voice changing a bit and me spreading myself too thin and not being able to cope as well as I wanted to," she says. "But now things are on the upswing. I feel very blessed, and old enough to appreciate it."

She figures she's earned her blessings the Yankee way: by working hard, treating people kindly and, above all, knowing her limitations. No conversation with Bonney proceeds far before she's made sure you understand the facts: She has a good voice, but it's not a big voice. Her voice has not "grown up" as she has; she has defied the pressure on all singers to force their sound beyond its natural size. Anyone who heard her sing in high school, she says, would recognize the way she sings today. Strauss and Mozart suit both her voice and her preference for work that's intellectually challenging. "The big, emotional stuff" of Italian opera sounds better with big, emotional voices, and now she has the clout to avoid it.

Barbara Bonney as Angelica (with Carmen Tilling) in "Orlando."

For the past two years, in fact, she avoided opera almost entirely. Tired of faceless audiences and "weird demands" from conductors, she chose instead to focus on her first love: solo recitals of lieder. The German word lieder simply means "songs," and lieder are essentially poems—usually bittersweet poems about love—set to music; Bonney describes them as the pop songs of their day. If anything can be more glowing than the reviews of her opera performances, it's the reviews of her solo recitals. "A lieder singer of rare intelligence and power," wrote one London critic. Bonney loves singing lieder because it allows her to communicate with individual audience members. Her recital-only schedule gave her the control she likes and the audience interaction she craves. Yet to her surprise, she found that it didn't fully compensate for the lost camaraderie of a whole opera company, or the inconvenience of moving to a different place each night.

So the big decision she'd spent years making turned out to be not quite what she wanted. This year she started edging back into opera—just enough to vary the mix. Adjustments are inevitable, she says serenely: Each path you choose brings gains and losses. If Bonney played Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," she might sum up one of her losses this way: There's no place that's home. Her speaking voice, with its accent that's not quite British but not entirely American, is the voice of someone who's been on the move since she left Durham nearly 30 years ago, who carries a U.S. passport but feels like a citizen of nowhere. Though she's been based in London for 12 years, she's not fully ready to call it home. The house she shares with her husband, Maurice Whitaker, a music manager, is lovely but not luxurious; it feels a bit like a time-share in which two hardworking travelers don't often manage to share time. Before London, Bonney lived in Sweden for eight years with her first husband, a Swedish baritone. She speaks the language, loves the people and looks the part, but still her suitcases felt more like home than Sweden did.

As she travels the world, she finds that among certain groups of music lovers—especially in Japan, which accounts for 60 percent of her CD sales—Barbara Bonney walking into a room is almost like Barbra Streisand walking into a room. Elsewhere, 95 percent of the time, she can shop for groceries and no one has a clue who she is. That's great for her privacy, but more and more she thinks it's not so great for the future of classical music. Increasingly it feels all wrong that "nobody would recognize Placido Domingo in a Burger King in Milwaukee."

As her rŽsumŽ expands, questions about the future of music loom larger. Classical music faces big trouble, she believes, unless the people who love it work harder to introduce it to new audiences. So she teaches at Tanglewood, serves on symphony boards, and helps find tomorrow's stars through the annual Cardiff Singer of the World competition. But Bonney speaks far more passionately about her master classes, in which she works with amateurs chosen by lottery to come onstage and sing.

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