Heppner is on stage for three of the opera's four-and-a-half hours, his robust and rollicking arias soaring above the large Wagnerian orchestra and chorus. As the last thrilling chord is struck, the audience is on its feet, cheering and clapping. "Ben Heppner is a fantasy come true for Wagnerites," declares Bernard Holland of The New York Times.

For Ben Heppner himself, the applause still seems unreal. The youngest of nine children in a hard-working Mennonite farm family out of the Canadian West, only ten years ago he was looking for work in the want ads, unsure of his future.

His mother, Kae, on the other hand, had always felt Ben was born to sing. She was sure of it the morning the entire Heppner family was to sing in church--except for three-year-old Benny, who was too young. Ben, however, would not be put off. He stood up on the pew and, in a clear voice, sang with his older brothers and sisters.

Money was always scarce on the homestead in Dawson Creek, B.C., but Mother Kae managed to buy an organ so that eight-year-old Ben could have music lessons. Pastor William Brown got him playing the trumpet as well. In the children's choir, Ben's voice soared above everyone else's.

Ben was a big lad. At age 12, he weighed 200 pounds and stood slightly over six feet tall. And he was strong. Which was good because his father was now unable to work due to a back injury, and family finances were tight. Ben got an after-school job at a plant stacking cement blocks, and another job with a glazier replacing broken windows.

At South Peace Secondary School, other students didn't know Ben could sing until his final year, when he performed in the school concert. As he listened to them applaud wildly, Ben knew in his heart, "This is what I uas born to do." Later he would recognize that night in the spring of 1973 as a turning point, something he called an "altar" or "hallowed" place where God did something special in his life.

Ben played trumpet, tuba and eu~phonium in the high school band. The director, seeing the music flow from Ben, encouraged him: "You'd make a wonderful music teacher."

That would mean university training. First, Ben decided to take singing lessons at Canadian Bible College in Regina. He found a job at Dawson Creek railway station and soon had enough money saved for a year's instruction.

When he returned to Dawson Creek the next spring, Ben worked for the glass company again. In September, 1974, he flew to Vancouver with $800 in his pocket, enough for his first year at the University of British Columbia--if he was careful.

On his first Sunday in Vancouver, Ben found himself sitting in the Tenth Avenue Alliance Church, where he was captivated by the choir's fine baritone soloist, Phil Jenion, a UBC graduate. One evening after Jenion had sung in the service, Ben brazenly announced: "We are going to sing duets!"

Jenion was taken aback. But once Ben began to sing, he was struck by the quality and power of the younger man's voice. "Ben," Jenion told him, "I believe your mission in life is to sing." Soon they were singing at church events around British Columbia's Lower Mainland.

Ben's UBC voice teacher also recognized something special in Ben's singing and asked him one day: "Would you like a paying job? West Vancouver United Church needs a soloist."

To be paid for singing! Ben jumped at the chance and found that Vancouver provided many other paying opportunities for music students. At the end of that first year, he still had his $800 in the bank.

It soon dawned on Ben that teaching music might not be the only way he could make a living. Maybe he could sing for his bread and butter. But how would that square with the work ethic his parents had instilled in him? The important thing, his father had told him, was to work hard and do your job well. Enjoyment, especially from something as much fun as singing, didn't necessarily enter into it.

Music productions at UBC provided good training and great fun. As a kid, Ben had thought opera pretty silly; now he found it interesting. But not nearly as interesting as piano major Karen Pozzi from Crowsnest Pass.

Needing a language credit to graduate, Ben got a spot with The Tudor Singers of Montreal and moved east in 1978 so he could take French at McGill University.

God then intervened again, as Ben sees it, when in 1979 he entered the CBC Radio Talent Competition in Quebec City. To his amazement, he won. "I never should have won," he still claims. "I was too raw, too unfinished." Yet this success provided another "altar": a marker indicating that Ben was on the right path.

That same week, a triumphant Ben flew to Vancouver to graduate from UBC and to marry Karen, also graduating. They began life together as struggling musicians in Montreal.

Karen found some piano students while Ben, in addition to The Tudor Singers, sang Friday evenings in a synagogue and Sunday mornings in a Presbyterian church. A Canada Council grant enabled him to do extension studies with the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.

As he studied, Ben found himself falling in love with opera. In the fall of 1981, he and Karen piled their few possessions into a U-haul and with their baby daughter, Ashleigh, headed for the University of Toronto, where Ben enrolled in the opera division of the Faculty of Music.

At the start of his second year, Ben was invited to join the Canadian Opera Company's Ensemble Studio. This to the Heppners was a third "altar" in his career. With a 54-week contract, they wangled a mortgage on a modest townhouse in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. Karen added more piano students and took in boarders, and the future looked bright. But when the Ensemble contract ended, Ben's other singing engagements also seemed to dry up.

Ben couldn't figure it out. "God has given me a voice," he said to Karen, "so why am I being passed over?" He was desperate to establish a singing career.

Moreover, Ben and Karen now had three children; Lowell had been born in 1984, and Aaron in 1985. Ben began going through the Help Wanted ads. He worked in the mail rooms of two insurance companies and by the spring of 1987 was ready to give up his dream. "Karen, maybe I've been wrong about a singing career," Ben said. "You're the one with steady work. Maybe you should go full-time with your music, and I'll be a housedad."

"You were born to sing," Karen insisted. "Let's ask God to open a door so you can sing full-time."

They agreed to give it one year. Bolstered with another Canada Council grant, Ben threw himself into his music studies. But one dark Tuesday in the fall of 1987, as he and Karen sat at their kitchen table going over the bills, he said, "We can't go on this way." He phoned a friend, Larry Johnston, who had a business cleaning out burned houses. "Larry, do you need any helpers today?"

"Sure, Ben," his friend responded, "but this work is beneath you."

Ben, remembering some words of his father's, replied, "Larry, my dad taught me that all work is good."

He pulled on his grubbiest clothes and shovelled buckets of soggy plaster and charred guck. Come mid-afternoon, weary and frustrated, he was emptying another bucket into the dumpster when Johnston drove up in his Cadillac. Ben looked at him, crisp and neat in slacks and blazer, and at his own filthy, sopping-wet jeans and shirt. All work might have its dignity, but he decided his friend had a point after all.

The next day, Ben flew to New York for an appointment with a music consultant, under the Canada Council grant. The way to get the attention of opera companies, he was told, was to win a major competition. "And to do that you need more training with a first-rank vocal teacher and coach."

And so he promptly came under the rigorous direction of Bill and Dixie Neill in Toronto. Dixie was the new director of opera studies for the Canadian Opera Company's Ensemble Studio, Bill an internationally known tenor. Ben thought he knew about hard work, but now he was like an Olympic athlete in training.

Each day, he spent an hour working on his vocal technique with Bill, who had performed many of the great lyric tenor roles ideally suited to Ben. From Dixie, Ben learned how to sing idiomatically in Italian, French and German, and how to project on stage. Soon the Neills were pointing Ben towards the 34th annual Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions in New York.

On March 27, 1988, Ben found himself sitting in the famous opera house, awaiting his turn with 25 other nervous contestants who had survived the preliminaries. He was the only Canadian and, at 32, was older than most of them. He was also just plain scared. He felt very lucky to scrape into the finals.

The winners' concert two weeks later was a different story. To overcome his nervousness in the days leading up to it, Ben faced the darkened auditorium and in his mind sang through the concert pieces.

On April 10, at the end of his performance, the full house rose in a great wave of applause. Ben was awarded the inaugural Birgit Nilsson Prize, named for a renowned Swedish soprano. Instant recognition as a world-class artist was his.

Ben and Karen marked this as their fourth "altar". When they checked the calendar, the one-year period they'd set aside for developing Ben's full-time singing career was almost up.

In March, 1989, Ben sang Lohengrin with the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, then performed the same role at the Bolshoi in Moscow. The following season, he made his debut in most of Europe's major opera houses.

His first chance to sing at the Met in New York came unexpectedly when Luciano Pavarotti cancelled a December, 1991 engagement to sing the title role in Mozart's Idomeneo. Ben accepted an invitation from conductor James Levine to take it on, then called his mother in Edmonton.

"Mom, guess what? I'm going to be singing at the Met in December, and I want you to come."

She went, with her daughter Carol, but didn't seem impressed as they looked around the elegant hall before curtain time. "Does Ben have a good role?" she wanted to know.

"Well, yes, the lead," Carol replied.

When the curtain went up, Mother Kae searched the stage and in a loud whisper asked, "Where's Ben?" At last, Ben emerged from the wings in his glorious scarlet and gold costume with knee-length tunic and flowing cape. His mother's eyes grew wide in disbelief. "That's Ben all right--but he's wearing a dress!"

Mother Kae may have felt chagrin, but the evening was another triumph for her son. Only two years into his international career, Ben Heppner had sung in the five leading opera houses of the world: Milan's La Scala, The Vienna State Opera, London's Covent Garden, Munich's Bavarian State Opera and New York's Met. At 35, he was at the top.

The Heppners still live in Scarborough, in a house a little bigger than the one they mortgaged to the hilt 15 years ago. Ben gives some 50 performances a year and each spring plays housedad while Karen runs MusicFest, an annual competition for young musicians they initiated.

For all his global acclaim, Ben is still very much the boy from Dawson Creek. So much so that he's more than a little awed to be booked well into the next century on all the great opera stages of the world.

"I may have reached a pinnacle, but opera is like a mountain range of increasingly challenging roles," he insists, "with peak after peak to be scaled."

Toronto author Lois Neely first met Ben Heppner 15 years ago when he became the choir director at her church. Copyright 1997 by The Readers Digest Association (Canada) Ltd. Reprinted by permission from the July, 1997 issue of Reader's Digest.