A Rotary Scholar’s book encourages children to live their dreams
For her eighth birthday, Janet Chvatal had a date with the devil. “My mother took me to my first opera when I was 8 years old,” a grown-up Chvatal explains. “It was Goethe’s Faust, the French version by Charles Gounod. It was so intense, with Marguerite taken down to hell and the devils dancing around — and then she sings to the heavens and is released because she’s a pure soul. It was a visual and aural extravaganza, the likes of which I had never seen. All I wanted to do from then on was be involved somehow in the arts.”
Her Ambassadorial Scholarship helped prepare Janet Chvatal, an honorary member of the Rotary Club of Beaverton, for her musical career.
Image credit: Jürgen Schall
Born in Florida, Chvatal grew up in Beaverton, Oregon, and though she fulfilled her hope of a life in the arts, things didn’t go exactly as planned. “I dreamed of being a concert pianist,” she says. “And then I got into high school and discovered that classical pianists have to practice 10 to 12 hours a day. Singers, however, can only practice four to five hours. So I decided, I think I’ll be a singer instead.”
A straight-A student and a self-described “Streber” — a German word that Chvatal defines as someone who strives to excel — she strode resolutely toward her goal. After winning several competitions in high school, she was invited to attend an exclusive vocalization workshop in California along with other top teenagers from around the country. “I was sure that I was going to be a little fish in a big pond,” confesses Chvatal. Instead she turned out to be one of the workshop’s most promising students.
With her sights set on attending a college with a top program for vocal study, Chvatal knew one thing for sure. “I wanted to get out of town as soon as possible,” she says. “I hadn’t yet fully appreciated what Beaverton had given to me.” That realization would come with time.
In 1986, Chvatal concluded four years of studies at one of those top schools — Boston University College of Fine Arts — which she attended on scholarship and graduated summa cum laude. (“My Streber instinct was still there.”) While at Boston, she took workshops with the Belgian bass baritone José van Dam and the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Chvatal says they both imparted the same message: “Girl, you must get to Europe!”
Janet Chvatal
- Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship, University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, 1987
- The Phantom of the Opera, Vienna debut, 1990
- The Wish Prince Project, 2019-present. Learn more
What they didn’t say was how she might accomplish that financially. “Between my junior and senior year in college, I began applying for scholarships,” says Chvatal. “I thought about the Fulbright — and then I discovered the Rotary Club of Beaverton.” With help from club member and future district governor Larry Huot (who died in 1998), Chvatal secured a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship. With that, she was able to continue her studies at her school of choice: Die Hochschule fuer Musik und Darstellende Kunst (University of Music and Performing Arts) in Vienna.
“It was a quantum leap into a new world,” Chvatal says. “I was able to continue my dream of honing my talent there. It provided the final stage of learning that I needed to master my craft. I don’t know how I would have done it without Rotary. I’ve been a fan and deep appreciator ever since.”
Janet Chvatal stars as Christine Daaé in The Phantom of the Opera
Courtesy of Janet Chvatal
As a professional singer, Chvatal continued to excel. In 1990, she made her debut in Vienna as Christine Daaé in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, and she followed that with more leading roles in operas and musical theater, as well as a masterful string of recordings. She also raised two children, Cypress Joseph and Naia Leone, who are both Rotary Youth Leadership Awards grads. (“It changed their lives,” says their mother.)
Today Chvatal lives in Füssen, a German city in the Bavarian Alps watched over by Neuschwanstein Castle, the fairy-tale structure that inspired Sleeping Beauty’s castle in Disneyland. “It’s an extraordinary place to live,” she says, “and I am so blessed to now make my permanent home there.”
But Chvatal hadn’t forgotten Beaverton. “From the moment I learned the term Service Above Self,” she says, “it has remained one of the beautiful, haunting voices inside my mind.” Now she began to wonder how she could “put tools into the hands of children so they could live their dreams and reach their goals.”
In Germany, Chvatal wrote and produced Der Schwanenprinz; from that musical sprang a book called, in its English edition, The Wish Prince. The enchanting fairy tale encourages children to live their dreams; a 15-page addendum, which highlights “5 Crown Steps,” demonstrates how, with the help of a parent or a trusted friend, children can make those dreams come true. To date, Chvatal has given away about 20,000 copies of her book, including 5,000 that she is presenting to children under the auspices of the Wish Prince Project, an endeavor she launched in 2019 with her old friends, the Rotary Club of Beaverton.
Today, on her return visits to Beaverton, Chvatal visits grade-school classrooms with Rotary members. Clad in a traditional Bavarian dirndl, she goes through the book with the young students; she even sings them her song about the Wish Prince. Finally, she turns to the last pages of her book and relates a lesson from her life. “I tell the students that I wanted to tell a story, but that you never do anything alone,” says Chvatal. “You always need help, and these are the people who helped me reach my dream of writing this book for you.”
First names on the book’s list: three Beaverton Rotarians — Ralph Shoffner, Doug Taylor, and Maureen Wheeler — as well as a shoutout to the whole club, which, by sponsoring Chvatal’s Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship, launched the Streber-striving soprano’s career and helped make her dreams come true.
This story originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.