Becoming one of the world's leading sopranos is really quite simple, Barbara Bonney '78 is explaining. First you leave UNH to spend your junior year in Salzburg, Austria, mostly because you love "The Sound of Music." You're a cellist, but you don't bring your cello because you can't afford to pay the freight.

Without the cello, you have more time for singing. A teacher in Salzburg sets up an audition at an opera company in Germany, so you try out. The job offer is a compliment, and you need the money, so you take it. Poof. You're an opera singer. You sing 40 roles in Darmstadt in four years, learning as you go, and then other offers start coming in. Next thing you know, it's 1984 and you're 28 years old. You're onstage at Covent Garden in London for the first time, awaiting your cue in a Strauss opera. Nervously, your eyes focus past the audience on one particular green Exit sign, and you think, "How did this happen?"

Barbara Bonney inhabits a world of gilded concert halls and international acclaim. Yet in her mind she's still a kid from Maine with a lobster license, a teenager putting herself through UNH by waitressing and teaching calligraphy. Onstage at Theatre Musical de Paris Chatelet, her perfectly styled hair gleams blond, her black gown glimmers with silver beads. Hands clasped before her as if ready to receive communion, she delivers Scandinavian art songs in a lyric soprano so pure that the audience barely dares breathe. Bonney looks so much at home among the cultural elite that J.R.*, a friend from UNH days, can't help feeling a little awestruck.

Yet Bonney is also so down-to-earth as to be, in J.R.'s words, "downright earthy." She speaks of the most rarefied topics in the most matter-of-fact way. Though she loves and champions early music performed on authentic instruments, she jokingly calls it "vegetarian music." When she proudly proclaims that she's acted in 65 operas without ever taking an acting lesson, she hoots: "They teach you how to sit in a chair and sing at the same time! Good God!" The earthy laugh is one reason that, on the rare occasions when they get together, J.R. still recognizes the girl she saw one '70s morning on the Bonney family farm in Maine. That Barbara Bonney was standing in the snow feeding the ducks—dressed not in beads but in Bean boots and a red union suit.

The route from the farm to the world's great stages was nowhere near mapped out when Bonney attended UNH, but her journey makes perfect sense to people who knew her then. "She wasn't somebody you had to do much to teach," says retired music professor Keith Polk, who directed Collegium Musicum and Canzona, two UNH groups in which Bonney sang. "Basically you'd just stand back and let it happen." Bonney never mentions that she has perfect pitch—the first thing other musicians remark upon when they talk about her. Neither does she dwell on the lean years in Europe. Friends, however, remember tales Bonney used to send in thin blue aerograms—stories of living in attic flats with no bathrooms, scrounging for food, singing every night with no time off and working odd day jobs to survive. Those years taught Bonney not just discipline but the artist's biggest secret: the effort it takes to look effortless.

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.

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.

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.

So far she has done 15 of these classes, some broadcast on BBC-TV. Together they form "the most incredible experience of my life," she says, one that frequently moves her to tears—both during the sessions and afterward, when she receives up to 500 e-mails. Music can be frustrating because it's invisible. But as she coaches ordinary people on their singing she can see them connecting with music's power and discovering their own. She's positive they'll take that power home and share it, and sometimes she's privileged to witness someone starting to change his life. In a recent class, a man came onstage and froze. There was no question of singing; he could not even turn to face the audience. Bonney ended up on the floor, hugging the man as he lay there until he summoned the courage to stand.

Whatever else her future may bring, Bonney is sure these classes will be part of it. As with many great passions, this one started accidentally. Halfway through a recital in Cologne, she lost her voice—bad news in any concert, but disastrous in this one, which was being broadcast live on radio. In the yawning silence, for no reason she can explain, she found herself asking, "Would anyone in the audience like to come up and sing?"

Her accompanist looked at her as if she were insane, and for a moment when no one moved, she thought she might be. Then an elderly woman inched onto the stage and, clutching her handbag, sang Schubert. The crowd went wild. Bonney coached her with a few basic tips. The woman sang again, more confidently, and the crowd went wilder. Suddenly 50 people had their hands in the air, eager to sing next, and Bonney had the beginnings of a new vocation.

Charting your life's course is really quite simple, Barbara Bonney is explaining. Stuff happens. You deal with it. Bring on the next stage.

* Editor's note: Name withheld on request.

Jane Harrigan, a professor of journalism at UNH, is a former managing editor of the Concord Monitor.