Photo by Martin Vloet, U-M Photo Services Wang

For Beijing-born Peiyi Wang, who sings the title role in La Cenerentola, Rossini's operative version of the Cinderella story, in the School of Music's spring production, the story is more than a fairy tale. It's autobiography.

"Her character is pretty close to mine," the 25-year-old mezzo-soprano admits. "I'm a girl who has a lot of dreams, very nice dreams. I'm quiet," she adds almost bashfully. "Actually, I talk very little."

Wang may not talk much, but when she sings, she can stop people in their tracks. Here's how the sylphid brunette with a mesmerizing voice scripted her own Cinderella-like transformation from an English-lit major at Peking University to a budding diva in one of America's premier music schools.

"It was a big set-up," Barbara Hilbish laughs as she recalls the story. She was in China with her husband, Thomas, professor emeritus of the School of Music, who had been commissioned by the Asian Council in New York to set up a doctoral program in conducting at the Beijing Conservatory. In 1998, on the last of Thomas's four visits to China, the Beijing Conservatory scheduled a sightseeing tour of the Great Wall for the Ann Arbor couple.

Photo by Thomas Hilbish

Wang and Barbara Hil- bish at the Great Wall of China, where it became clear that Wang was no ordinary tour guide. The Hilbishes played the fairy god- parents' role in Wang's Cinderella story.

Knowing the Hilbishes' connections, and knowing Wang's talent—and her desire to study voice in the United States—a teacher at the conservatory substituted Wang for the regular tour guide. Wang showed up at the Hilbishes' hotel with a stash of music, a car, a driver and Wang's mother, who sat in the back seat of the automobile snapping pictures of her daughter. They'd scarcely pulled away from the hotel before Wang "began talking to us about music and then singing passages of Schubert lieder and Italian opera—and I'm trying to look at the rice paddies," Hilbish remembers. By day's end, however, Wang had arranged to sing for the couple later in the week.

"As soon as she opened her mouth you could tell," recalls Thomas Hilbish of Wang's impromptu recital. As the former interim director of the University Musical Society Choral Union, he knows voices. But it wasn't just Wang's voice, he says, it was also her phrasing, and the clear fact that although she had studied formally only for two years, she had an instinctive grasp of technique-something she'd acquired in part by listening to recordings of her idol, the Italian mezzo Cecilia Bartoli.

The Hilbishes helped Wang apply to the top US conservatories and music schools and ultimately paved the way for her to obtain a full scholarship to Michigan. Without it she had no hope of studying abroad. So she'd conquered the Hilbishes and won a scholarship. But as in many good tales, our heroine faced a third and last trial.

The US Embassy in Beijing prized Chinese engineering and technology students over voice majors and twice rejected Wang's request for a visa. Told she could try just one more time, she enlisted the help of her American friends. Thomas Hilbish dispatched a letter to Stanley Harsha, the US cultural attaché in Beijing, proclaiming Wang's voice "world-class," and Harsha invited Wang to meet him.

"It says here you have a world-class voice," he told the singer when she arrived. "Let's hear it."