Michael Eric Repper’s history of unflagging devotion to a narrow set of passions dates back to the early 1990s when, as a 3-year-old, he snapped to attention the moment the orchestra kicked in at a classical music concert. By the time he had reached his early 20s, another of his select few passions was consuming him: his relationship with his girlfriend, Vanessa Rodrigues Moody.

Dr. Repper, now 33, became the youngest American to win a Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance this year, and Ms. Moody, 31, a lawyer with the global law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, met and began dating in April 2013 as students at Stanford.

Six months later, when she was a senior and he had graduated and moved to Baltimore to start a doctoral degree in music, neither was sure what would become of their budding romance. But on April 14, 2014, she called to tell him she had been diagnosed with a rare brain tumor the size of a tangerine and asked whether he wanted out of the relationship. Both knew then it was built to last.

“I was terrified,” Dr. Repper said. “But I was also all in.”

Dr. Repper grew up in Laguna Niguel, Calif., with a younger sister, Danielle. His mother, Dr. Claudia Repper, is an emergency room doctor. His father, David Repper, designs employee training programs for corporations. But his maternal grandmother, Marilyn Smith, was musical: She played piano and, before he had reached kindergarten, brought him to children’s concerts at the Pacific Symphony in Costa Mesa, Calif.

“There were a million kids running around at these concerts and many were not really paying attention,” he said. His grandmother noticed that, unlike his fellow preschoolers, “I was completely locked in.”

At 9, a mentor who identified him as a gifted pianist, whisked him off to Australia for a month of training. A year later, a violin teacher who was also a conductor taught him the basics of raising a baton. He was introduced to the trailblazing maestro Marin Alsop, artistic director and conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, at 13.

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At the time, “I was this weirdo kid interested in being a conductor, when most people don’t get into it until their 20s or 30s,” he said. “Marin was one of the best conductors in the history of music. She came up to me and said, ‘I want you to study with me.’ That was incredible.”

He did so throughout high school and college at Stanford, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 2012, through regular correspondence and whenever he and Ms. Alsop managed to be in the same city. When he met Ms. Moody through a student production of “Spring Awakening” in 2013 — he was a vocal director, she was an assistant producer — he was weeks away from earning a master’s degree in music, science and technology.

Ms. Moody remembers bonding with him toward the end of dress rehearsals. But it was at a cast party that migrated across campus and eventually landed at Dr. Repper’s apartment where she made the first move. But when she asked him for a date, he declined. “I was shy and nervous, and Vanessa was gorgeous,” he said.

He was also too busy to date. In addition to “Spring Awakening,” he was working with the Bay Area Educational Theater Company, conducting children’s shows. Ms. Moody, undeterred, rented a Zip car and showed up for an April 28 performance.

“That was a surprise,” Dr. Repper said. “I was like, ‘Oh, man, she’s serious — this unbelievably beautiful person wants to go on a date with me.’” A week later, over dinner at La Strada, a now-closed restaurant in Palo Alto, they were laying the groundwork for what would become the defining characteristic of their relationship: total honesty.

A shared bruschetta appetizer was the gateway: “I took a bite and he took a bite,” Ms. Moody said. “After a half a second of thought I said, ‘I’m going to be honest. I’m not a picky eater, but there are two things I don’t like, and they’re stringy cheese and mushrooms.’ That kind of set the tone for, we’re going to be very straightforward with each other.”

An extension of that directness came when she called to tell him about her tumor and asked his level of commitment. The emergency surgery she would undergo the same month, on April 25, 2014, carried the risk of killing her. “I wanted to know if it was something he could be a partner for, or what I could expect,” she said.

Ms. Moody grew up in Sarasota, Fla., where she developed a love of reading and the arts, including theater and poetry. “I always had my fingers in a million little buckets, trying to do all of them well, unlike Mike who’s so focused,” she said. Her parents, Valéria and Eric Moody, and younger brother, Kevin, saw the first signs of the suffering she would endure for years when she was in high school. Migraines followed her to Stanford.

The call to Dr. Repper about her diagnosis was as scary for her as it was for him. “I would have been crushed, surely,” she said, if he had taken her up on her offer to back out of the relationship. “We were well past ‘I love you’s.’” But the diagnosis, for her, had come as a relief. Her surgery at Stanford Medical Center promised a way out of what had become debilitating pain.

The eight-hour surgery saved her life, but doctors were only able to remove half the benign tumor. The partial hearing loss she experienced before the operation is still with her; so is facial pain and light sensitivity, which was caused by nerve damage from the tumors placement on the trigeminal nerve.

Ms. Moody hadn’t taken her finals in time to graduate with her class at Stanford in the spring of 2014. That summer, her life in limbo, she moved to Baltimore to be with Dr. Repper, who finished his Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the Peabody Institute of Music in 2022. “My parents were shocked,” she said. “They had anticipated I would recover with them in Florida, but we were in love.”

Since then, despite frequent separations for Dr. Repper’s conducting career — he is now music director of the Ashland Symphony Orchestra, Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra and the Northern Neck Orchestra of Virginia — they have rarely lived apart.

Ms. Moody received a bachelor’s degree in English and creative writing from Stanford in 2015. Her love of poetry led her to a Master of Fine Arts program at N.Y.U. the same year. While she wrote and read poetry in Manhattan, she also explored the publishing industry as an editorial assistant at Disney.

Dr. Repper started splitting his time between Baltimore, where he was still studying at the Peabody Institute, and New York. In 2017, when Ms. Moody finished the master’s program, Dr. Repper became the music director at the New York Youth Symphony, the orchestra he was leading when he won the Grammy this year.

The couple stayed in New York, he conducting and she working in publishing, until March 2020. Before the pandemic hit, she had already been considering a career switch.

Since her diagnosis, advocacy has become central to Ms. Moody’s life. In 2014, “I had so little experience with the health care system, and I was thrown into how to research and navigate it and advocate for myself,” she said. “I really ended up loving it.” Enrolling at the University of Virginia School of Law in August 2020 was a way to commit professionally, for herself and others. She secured a job as an associate at the Washington office of her firm before she graduated this spring, in May, with a law degree.

This past June, Dr. Repper arranged a weekend getaway to the Steeles Tavern Manor, in the Shenandoah Valley, to celebrate Ms. Moody’s latest triumphs.

Marriage had been a discussion for years. But “the reality is we already felt like we were married,” Dr. Repper said. They were lounging in Adirondack chairs at the manor on June 5 when the discussion resurfaced. “We had a mutual epiphany that marriage was something we wanted,” Ms. Moody said. Without a formal proposal, both pulled out their calendars. They agreed to marry as soon as they could find a weekend uninterrupted by Dr. Repper’s travel schedule.

On Oct. 21, Dr. Repper and Ms. Moody were married on a private dock overlooking the Chesapeake Bay in White Stone, Va., by their friend Monique Warren, who was granted celebrant status for the day by the Lancaster County Court. Ten guests joined them, including their parents and siblings and Ms. Warren’s husband, Joe.

The intimacy of the wedding may have belied the planning behind it. Wind, like smiling, can cause Ms. Moody discomfort, another side effect of her nerve damage. For that reason, Dr. Repper spent “a decent amount of time,” he said, figuring out how to avoid it that day. Ultimately, he chose to switch places with her as they exchanged vows so he would bear the brunt of any sudden gusts.

“Things that don’t affect other people affect Vanessa in a way that creates literal pain,” he said. “I’m often thinking, what can I do to mitigate that as much as possible?”

On This Day

When Oct. 21, 2023

Where A private dock in White Stone, Va.

On the Road Again “We’re doing what I call a traveling circus of weddings,” Ms. Moody said; they plan to host a series of parties for friends in points across the country.

Something Blue When Ms. Moody was in Baltimore recovering from surgery, she encouraged Dr. Repper to play and conduct Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” a favorite composition, for a doctoral recital. “That performance was about six months after Vanessa’s initial diagnosis and was a full circle moment for us as a couple,” he said. “To this day, if Vanessa ever is having a bad pain day or might need a smile, I absolutely will go to the piano and play excerpts from ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’”

Extended Family Ms. Moody and Dr. Repper’s love of children has been a constant in their lives, from his work with youth orchestras to hers with Disney. Because of Ms. Moody’s health and Dr. Repper’s travel schedule, though, they don’t plan to have children of their own. “So we’re being creative about how we can have kids,” Ms. Moody said. Both love mentoring, and “we’re both always looking for ways to do something” that could have an impact on a child’s life, Dr. Repper said.