Emma Marhefka, soprano, is a 2025 Grand Finals Winner of the Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition. Currently in her first year in the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, she made her Met Opera debut this season singing Papagena in The Magic Flute. This summer, she makes her role and company debut with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis singing Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Next season, she will return to the Met to sing Pamina in The Magic Flute and be featured in the company’s premiere of Kevin Puts’s Silent Night. Additionally in 2027, she will debut with Seattle Opera. 

Other career highlights include Musetta La bohème (Arizona Opera), Gretel Hansel and Gretel (Opera Montana), Sandrina La finta giardiniera (Arizona Opera), Younger Alyce Glory Denied (Knoxville Opera, Opera Roanoke), Frasquita Carmen (Des Moines Metro Opera), as well as Susanna Le nozze di Figaro, Mary Johnson Fellow Travelers, and The Vixen The Cunning Little Vixen. On the concert stage, Emma has appeared as the soprano soloist in Vivaldi’s Gloria with The New Choral Society and Arthur Honegger’s King David with The New York Choral Society at Alice Tully Hall.

She is an alumna of Arizona Opera’s Marion Roose Pullin Studio Artist Program, the Santa Fe Opera Apprentice Artist Program, the Wolf Trap Opera Studio, the Des Moines Metro Opera Apprentice Artist Program, and the Janiec Opera Company of the Brevard Music Center. She holds degrees in voice from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam. Emma is thrilled to be back in Brevard after her two seasons with the Janiec Opera Company in 2019 and 2021.