WEARING a black dress and clutching a Bible, the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato walked stiffly on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera during a recent rehearsal for Donizetti's "Maria Stuarda," which will open on New Year's Eve and be broadcast Live in HD on Jan. 19. First kneeling, then standing, her aching movements in the final scenes reflected the title character's physical demise after years of imprisonment.
Ms. DiDonato's voice took on a hard-edged sheen as she sang "Tutto col sangue cancellerò" ("For with my blood all is washed away") from "D'un cor che muore"("From a dying heart"). In this aria, in which Mary forgives Queen Elizabeth for sending her to her execution, Ms. DiDonato imbued the words with a potency missing from even some of the most beautifully sung recorded interpretations.

For David McVicar, who is directing the new production, this opera and other bel canto pieces "can stand on their own two feet if all you want is canary fancying, if you think this is all about warbling prettily," he said during an interview at the Met. "But if you bother to take them seriously and question them and treat them with intelligence, they pay you back and reveal themselves as being so much more interesting than people think they are."

At the Met, Mr. McVicar has already directed "Anna Bolena," the first opera in Donizetti's "Three Queens" Tudor trilogy, which opened last season with Anna Netrebko in the title role. "Maria Stuarda" is the second, and there are plans in the works for him to direct "Roberto Devereux," the final installment, at the Met.

"Bringing a strong sense of history fleshes out the opera," Mr. McVicar said about "Maria Stuarda." History, however, is liberally blended with fantasy in the work, which has a libretto based on "Mary Stuart," Friedrich Schiller's 1800 play about a fictitious meeting between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots.

The opera also includes a love affair between Mary Stuart and Robert Dudley, the first Earl of Leicester. "I find that harder to stomach than the fake meeting between the queens," said Mr. McVicar, while acknowledging that "there a little kernel of truth, since Leicester was twice a suitor for Mary's hand."

In their meeting Mary accuses Elizabeth of being a "vile bastard," which displeased the Italian censors. (She also accuses Elizabeth of being an "obscene, unworthy whore.") Maria Malibran, the mezzo soprano, rebelled against the censorship and reinserted "vil bastarda" when she sang in the 1835 premiere at La Scala; the opera was then banned in Milan.

The work boasts several such dramatically colorful scenes and some of Donizetti's most haunting music, like Mary's Act III prayer, in which her voice soars over the chorus. Donizetti had already composed more than 40 operas, and his writing for Mary is masterly, particularly in arias like "O nube! che lieve per l'aria," her poignant reminiscence of France and freedom.

Discussing his staging of the opera Mr. McVicar emphasized that he doesn't "work conceptually."

"The concept is embedded in my work with the singers," he said. "I am very unfashionable, I suppose. I don't believe the concept should be jumping up and down beside the singers waving its arms like an adolescent in class going, 'Look at me, look at me.' "

The sets are by John Macfarlane, who brings a "painterly" perspective, Mr. McVicar said, adding that the writing on the wall in Act III evokes the letters that the imprisoned Mary actually wrote to Elizabeth. Presumably they will contrast with the monochromatic and sometimes unimaginative sets Robert Jones designed for "Anna Bolena."

Mr. McVicar prefers a collaborative approach with his singers, he said. "If they bring a lot to the table, if they've done the historical research, if they already have a strong idea about their character and the person, it makes my job much more fun," he said "I have something to work with, rather than spoon-feeding them. Some singers have zero intellectual curiosity."

That hasn't been the case with this strong cast, he added, which in addition to Ms. DiDonato features Elza van den Heever as Elisabetta, Matthew Polenzani as Leicester, Joshua Hopkins as Cecil and Matthew Rose as Talbot.

Ms. DiDonato is an experienced purveyor of tortured bel canto and baroque heroines, most recently with her dazzling recent performance and recording of "Drama Queens," a compilation of baroque selections sung with vocal agility and emotional potency. In song recitals she has an unusually gregarious stage presence and dispenses with the often off-putting formality of recitals, which she says needs "to be booted into the 21st century" to survive.

Regarding the coloratura contortions of the florid baroque and bel canto repertory she champions, Ms. DiDonato said she learned from performing Handel that "if you don't infuse meaning into it, it can be superfluous." A lot of singers just sing the notes, she added, instead of infusing them "with real vocal purity and real theatrical commitment."

"The phrase has to turn a certain way because of the emotional journey," she said.

The heroines of bel canto express their suffering through heart-wrenchingly beautiful music, conveying a combination of beauty and pain that often reflects real life, said Ms. DiDonato. During a recent interview in the Met's press room, her eyes misted over as she recalled how the death of her father in 2006 "was actually beautiful." After a month in intensive care, she said, his tubes were removed, he asked for white wine and to sit up, and then died a few hours later.

"In one minute I'm heaving with horror that this is happening, then I'm marveling at how this is so peaceful, so beautiful," Ms. DiDonato said softly. With bel canto, "there is the same juxtaposition."

Ms. DiDonato, 43, who was raised as a Roman Catholic in Prairie Village, Kan., said she also identified with Mary Stuart, the Catholic queen, even though she no longer is a churchgoer. Speaking about the confession scene with Talbot, Mary's ally, Ms. DiDonato recalled her own childhood as one of seven children, whose monthly confession schedules were marked in the calendar by their mother.

"You're dreading it, and your stomach is turning in knots," she said. "Then you come out, and there is this cleansing that happens. So I get that whole idea of martyrdom and righteousness."

Ms. DiDonato recently sang the title role at the Houston Grand Opera; she has also sung the role of Elizabeth, both originally written for sopranos but now sometimes sung by mezzos. "I've never been a singer who is worried about competing with ghosts, although I know that's part of the culture of opera, and I respect that," she said, adding that in Donizetti's era it was common to tinker with keys and transpositions to accommodate different performers.

The vocal demands of "Maria Stuarda" are huge, she noted. At the end of the rehearsal on the main stage, after Ms. DiDonato and her colleagues finessed logistical details concerning the blindfold Mary wears to her death, she walked over to the pit to discuss the most effective pacing for her final arias. "I need to have momentum," she told Maurizio Benini, who is conducting the production.

Partly because of Marco Armiliato's conducting, the "Anna Bolena" last season felt uninspired, lacking a vital intensity. Mr. Benini, a bel canto expert, said that pacing is a crucial element of the genre. The music "needs to live," he told the orchestra musicians at a previous rehearsal, advising them how to phrase a descending motif more effectively in an Act I duo between Elizabeth and Leicester.

In an interview Mr. Benini explained that some of the om-pah-pah orchestration is so simple that the musicians can easily lose concentration: "There is nothing to do, so few notes. But the problem is that these notes must have life, and if you don't think about the line, it quickly becomes boring. I ask for life and expression in the accompaniment. Each note must have emotional importance."

Like Mozart's music, bel canto is "very naked," he said, "with nowhere to hide. The simplest things are always the most difficult."

In verismo, he added, the singers can get away with a little "sporcizia," or dirtiness, but not so in bel canto.

That combination of vocal and spiritual purity adds an extra resonance to the part of Mary, Ms. DiDonato said. "There is this transcendence that happens to her as she takes on being a martyr," she explained. "There's still fear, but a kind of joy in it. I think that's one of the reasons the opera is so compelling."

By Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times