CHICAGO – Romantic music filled the classroom at Roosevelt University as the young opera singers rehearsed “Cinderella,” their voices rising for the fairy tale princess’s dramatic entrance to the ballroom.

It was Sandra Marante’s moment. She was Cinderella, and the class turned to her.

But when she opened her mouth to sing, the words didn’t come out. Her face froze in what looked like a smile, her skin turned blue and she lost consciousness. She was having a seizure.

In the part of her brain that controls language, a mass of tangled blood vessels had started to bleed, triggering the seizure. The abnormality likely had been there since birth, but only then, with Marante at the start of a promising opera career, did the mass make its presence known.

That night, doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital told her that left untreated, it could be fatal. Surgery risked damaging her ability to memorize music or ever sing again.

Throughout the fall, as she underwent blood tests and brain scans, Marante relied on music to sustain her.

She knew it would work. Music had already healed her once before.

Marante, 25, can’t remember a time when she wasn’t performing. As a little girl, sitting in her car seat, she made up words to an Amy Grant song on the car radio.

In preschool, her classmates nicknamed her “Sandy Bandy Be-Bop,” and at 10 years old, she sang the national anthem before a Miami Dolphins game.

Beginning at 14, Marante was the lead singer at weddings, bar mitzvahs and other high-end events in the Miami area. She recorded pop albums in New York City and Sweden while working with an independent label.

“Her life is singing,” said her mother, Maria. “Music has always kept her going.”

That became even more true after one summer night in 2006.

Marante was 19 and on summer break from college when she went to an upscale restaurant and lounge to hear a friend perform. She took a seat on an ottoman, not realizing that someone had moved a tabletop candle onto the floor. Her long black linen dress draped over the candle and caught fire.

By the time her friends stomped out the flames, Marante had second- and third-degree burns on 35 percent of her body, including her right leg, back and ribs. She burned her right arm down to the nerves trying to get the dress off.

Marante spent a month and a half in intensive care and several more months at a rehabilitation institute. While in the hospital, taking pain medication every hour and bandaged so tightly that she couldn’t walk on her own, Marante passed the time watching TV.

Televised inspiration

One day while flipping through the channels, she stumbled on a PBS-TV documentary about the opera diva Maria Callas.

“She was beautiful,” Marante said. “She was feisty. And she was emotional. She wore Chanel every day.

“I was enamored by her and wanted to be just like her.”

Although her mother was a classical violinist, Marante knew little about classical music and had never been to an opera. But she had started to grow tired of the commercialization of pop music, and when she watched Callas on TV, “something clicked,” she said.

“I wanted to be a part of it,” she decided. And with Callas as her inspiration, she was determined to not let the burns derail her dreams.

Marante missed just one semester of college. She learned to sing opera music even though it required so much physical exertion that she would bleed through the bandages wrapped around her skin.

She had found her calling as a lyric soprano.

Unique soulfulness

At 5 feet 2 inches, Marante has the voice of a young girl when she speaks. But when she sings, she has a warm, deep, full sound. Her parents are Hungarian and Cuban, and her voice instructor said she brings a unique ethnic soulfulness to the music.

By the time she was at Roosevelt rehearsing “Cinderella” last fall, Marante had already shown promise as an opera performer.

She graduated from the New World School of the Arts at the University of Florida and had starring roles in summer programs, including in Tuscany, Italy, where she was Adina in “The Elixir of Love.”

That’s where she met Judith Haddon, a voice instructor with Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts. Marante decided to move to Chicago and enroll at Roosevelt’s music conservatory so she could work one-on-one with Haddon, who has performed with the Metropolitan Opera and on stages around the world.

Processing music

For the school’s production last fall, Marante was chosen for the leading role in “Cinderella” and embraced it so completely that she was “that character from beginning to end,” said her voice coach, Dana Brown.

But Marante collapsed during the first group rehearsal. The scans showed a golf-ball-size arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, in her right temporal lobe, the area of the brain responsible for functions related to memory, speech and music.

Northwestern neurosurgeon Dr. Bernard Bendok suggested Marante undergo MRI scans while listening to and thinking about opera music to identify which regions of the brain she used to process music. The “functional MRI” technique is typically used to assess a patient’s brain activity when speaking and moving, but not for something as specific as opera.

While in the MRI machine, Marante listened to several operas and visualized singing them.

The images showed that opera singing engaged many parts of her brain – like a symphony orchestra, Bendok said. It also showed that the mass was in a spot far enough from these areas that he could comfortably recommend surgery and plan for it in a way that would minimize risk to her speech.

“With Sandra, singing opera is such a complex function that there aren’t a lot of studies of what happens to opera singing with treatment of a brain lesion of any kind,” Bendok said. “We had concerns that were unique to her. It stretched our ability to examine the functions of the brain.

“Losing a part of your brain, your soul, memory, talent absolutely is a delicate situation.”

On Dec. 23, Marante underwent a six-hour surgery to remove the mass.

As she was on a gurney being wheeled to her recovery room, her head stapled from the bottom of her right ear to the back of her head, Marante reached out to her mother.

“I’m OK,” she whispered. “Listen, Mommy, I can sing.”

And in a barely audible voice, she launched into the Czech aria “Song to the Moon” from the “Rusalka” opera about the tragedy of losing your voice.

Strength from song

Marante has been determined not to let the brain trauma derail her last semester of graduate school. Bendok cleared her to sing several weeks ago after she sang for him in his clinic, and she has kept up with her classes and rehearsals despite anti-seizure medication drying out her throat.

Singing is strenuous exercise for her bruised brain, and she has battled headaches and exhaustion. When she first returned to singing at the end of January, she would fall asleep as soon as she got home from school.

But Marante said she gained her strength from song.

“Singing makes me strive to achieve any hard struggle,” Marante wrote after she was diagnosed with the brain malformation in September. “Music has always been my way of helping me stay positive throughout the toughest battles my body has dealt with.”