Scared? No, she's not scared, she's terrified. But really, isn't that just how it should be?

Soprano Brenda Harris returns to the Minnesota Opera's "Roberto Devereux" this week to sing Elisabetta (Elizabeth I) -- a role ranked among the most difficult in bel canto repertory.

"I'm like the tightrope walker with Cirque du Soleil," Harris said over lunch. "It's terrifying and it's fulfilling, and I'm really up for that. You look at Norma, Lady Macbeth, Tosca, Electra; all the great bel canto roles are frightening."

Harris, a native Midwesterner, has a humble sense of confidence that she attributes to working hard, being smart about role selection and paying attention to the basics.

"A singer should sing for 40 years," she said. "If not, you're not doing something properly."

A favorite of Minnesota audiences for several years, Harris was last in the Twin Cities in 2006, when she sang Camilla in "Orazi and Curiazi." Star Tribune critic Michael Anthony said that in a vocally punishing part, "Harris managed to combine dramatic color and amplitude with perfect ease and agility in her top register." A year earlier, Harris had tackled Donizetti's "Maria Padilla."

And she has a distant knowledge of this piece. Six years ago, she did a one-off concert performance in Washington.

But that was a long time ago, she said, "so it was a ridiculous sense of false security when I went to take it off the shelf to look at it for this production."

"Roberto Devereux" is the first production in the Minnesota Opera's plan to show Donizetti's trilogy based on the Tudor queens. "Maria Stuarda" will be staged next season, and "Anna Bolena" will follow in the 2011-12 season.

Courtesy of Graydon Royce, Star Tribune