Crane School of Music Graduate Emma Marhefka ’21 Named Winner of 2025 Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition
Crane School of Music alumna Emma Marhefka ’21 was named a winner of the 2025 Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition (Photo credit: Natalie Powers/Met Opera).
Rising soprano Emma Marhefka ’21, an alumna of SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music, was chosen as a winner of the 2025 Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition.
Marhefka and the other four winners received the prestigious honor after competing in the finals on stage at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. This year, the five winners were sopranos Alissa Goretsky and Emma Marhefka, mezzo-sopranos Sadie Cheslak and Michelle Mariposa, and baritone Luke Sutliff.
Each winner will receive a $20,000 cash prize, and the prestige, exposure and networking opportunities that come with winning a renowned competition that has launched the careers of many of opera’s most well-known stars.
Marhefka joins the ranks of other esteemed winners, including fellow Crane School of Music alumni Renée Fleming ’81, Margaret Lattimore ’91 and Stephanie Blythe ’92. She was honored with the Patricia Misslin Award, a touching tribute to the late voice faculty member who nurtured the careers of the three Crane winners who came before Marhefka, among many other artists.
The singers each performed two arias on the Met stage, accompanied by the Met Orchestra and conducted by Maestro Karen Kamensek. For her winning performance, Marhefka chose selections from Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” and Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro.” Marhefka had advanced to the finals as the Rocky Mountain region winner.
A soprano originally from Allentown, Pa., Marhefka currently resides in Cincinnati. This season, she joined Arizona Opera as a Marion Roose Pullin Studio Artist, singing Musetta in “La Bohème,” the Priestess in “Aida” and Sandrina in Mozart’s “La Finta Giardiniera,” and later this year, she will sing Gretel in “Hänsel und Gretel” at Opera Montana, and Musetta at the Santa Fe Opera, where she returns as an apprentice singer. She has sung Lauretta in “Gianni Schicchi” at Opera Tampa, Younger Alyce in Tom Cipullo’s “Glory Denied” at Knoxville Opera and Opera Roanoke, and Frasquita in “Carmen” at Des Moines Metro Opera; covered Adina in “L’Elisir d’Amore” at the Santa Fe Opera; and been a young artist at Des Moines Metro Opera and Wolf Trap Opera. At the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, she appeared as Susanna in “Le Nozze di Figaro,” Mary Johnson in Gregory Spears’s “Fellow Travelers,” the Vixen in “The Cunning Little Vixen” and Sandrina.
As an undergraduate, she performed with the award-winning Crane Opera Ensemble, singing the role of Valeria in the world premiere of Cipullo’s new opera “Mayo” in 2018, which was commissioned as part of the Domenic J. Pellicciotti Opera Prize. A member of Crane Professor Emeritus Donald George’s voice studio, Marhefka also starred in a production of “Le Nozze di Figaro,” performed in the Student Honors Recital and was accepted into the Janiec Opera Company at the Brevard Music Center. She is a two-time winner of the Corbett Opera Scholarship Competition and a 2023 finalist in Houston Grand Opera’s Eleanor McCollum Competition.
The panel of judges included Michael Heaston, deputy general manager of the Metropolitan Opera; Gregory Henkel, managing director, artistic of the San Francisco Opera; Myra Huang, head of music, Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at the Metropolitan Opera; conductor Karen Kamensek; Brian Speck, artistic administrator of the Metropolitan Opera, and Melissa Wegner ’03, executive director, Laffont Competition and Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at the Metropolitan Opera.
About The Crane School of Music:
Founded in 1886, SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music has a long legacy of excellence in music education and performance. Life at Crane includes an incredible array of more than 300 recitals, lectures and concerts presented by faculty, students and guests each year. The Crane School of Music is the State University of New York’s only All-Steinway institution and was one of the first Yamaha Institutions of Excellence. For more information, please visit www.potsdam.edu/crane.
PHOTO 1: Emma Marhefka ’21 sang the role of Susanna in a production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” at SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music, which moved the story to a 1950s resort hotel (Photo credit: Jason Hunter/SUNY Potsdam).
PHOTO 2: Soprano Emma Marhefka ’21, who got her start at SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music, poses for a photo in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera, where she won the prestigious Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition (Photo credit: Muriel Steinke/Met Opera).
PHOTO 3: Emma Marhefka ’21 played the role of Valeria in the world premiere of Tom Cipullo’s opera “Mayo” at The Crane School of Music in 2018. The work was commissioned after winning the Pellicciotti Prize and received a full production by the Crane Opera Ensemble (Photo credit: Jason Hunter/SUNY Potsdam).
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