Giuseppe Verdi’s 200th birthday is five years away, but it looks as though the baritone Thomas Hampson is celebrating early. His operatic docket this season includes Verdi operas exclusively — “Macbeth” in San Francisco, “Don Carlo” in Vienna, “La Traviata” in Chicago and Zurich. And he makes his debut as Don Carlo in “Ernani” tonight when the hot-blooded Romantic sizzler returns to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time since 1985.

“I wanted to turn the corner and sing characters that are really interesting,” he said recently in a conversation about his Verdi commitment and his choice to sing roles often associated with heavier voice-types. “You can find a lot of Verdi’s own life in the baritone characters,” including expressions of “cynicism, sarcasm, and frustration,” Mr. Hampson said. “The later roles are very much him,” he continued, calling special attention to Simon Boccanegra, the former pirate-turned-statesman who seeks to unite political factions in 14th-century Genoa.

Mr. Hampson, a searching artist with a keen intellectual approach to the characters he undertakes, quickly offered insights into other roles. The elder Germont in “La Traviata,” for instance, who breaks up his son’s relationship with a former prostitute, is often seen as a stuffy moralist. “Yes, Violetta casts a shadow on the family,” Mr. Hampson said, but money is an equal if not greater concern to Germont, a role Mr. Hampson took in Willy Decker’s now legendary 2005 Salzburg production that also featured Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon. “The boy is doing reckless things with his inheritance,” Mr. Hampson said. Germont comes to realize that “real love” is involved, “but at no moment would he ever change his mind,” he added.

In the years since his 1986 Metropolitan Opera debut, Mr. Hampson, a native of Spokane, Wash., has become perhaps America’s most revered baritone. But the voice does not have the heavy, weighty sound that American audiences, conditioned on singers like Leonard Warren, Robert Merrill, and Sherrill Milnes, have come to expect. Mr. Hampson, 52, wants to dispose of the “silly cliché of the Verdi baritone.” “Different reasons exist to sing different things,” Mr. Hampson said. Although baritones are typically villains, “some of them are basically compassionate but led to do evil things, while others are essentially evil but long for something decent,” he noted. He numbers Renato in “Un Ballo in Maschera” among the former, Count di Luna in “Il Trovatore” — despite the lyricism of his aria “Il balen” — among the latter. He thinks Don Carlo in “Ernani” “needs to be essentially a lyrical voice but [one with] the strength and maturity to carry long lines and project big emotions.” It is “silly to search for one kind of animal. I am very happy with my voice. But it shouldn’t just be about the vocal instrument. Some perceptions just hang in there.”

One of the remarkable things about “Ernani,” which dates from 1844 and is Verdi’s fifth opera, is that it captures the raw emotions of the underlying play by Victor Hugo, which caused riots at its 1830 premiere. The opera is full of climactic events that constantly push the story in new directions. Set in 16th-century Spain, it finds Donna Elvira, niece of the nobleman Don Ruy Gomez da Silva, attracting the love of three men: the nobleman-turned-bandit Ernani, the Spanish king and later Holy Roman Emperor Don Carlo, and Silva himself.

“Don Carlo is the most fleshed out of the characters,” Mr. Hampson believes, one who “makes slightly sadistic use of his own power.” In Act 2, he knows that Silva is shielding Ernani in his castle and, bound by ancient precepts of hospitality, will not give him up. Accordingly, Don Carlo takes Elvira as a hostage, singing the elegant cabaletta, “Vieni meco, sol di rose,” as he escorts her away. “This beautiful piece is unbelievably perverse,” Mr. Hampson said, “sung right in Silva’s face.” Don Carlo’s ruthlessness makes his grant of clemency later in the opera, in one of Verdi’s greatest baritone scenes, “even more profound.”

Because Mr. Hampson has so extensive a career as a recitalist — his Songs of America tour in conjunction with the Library of Congress may take him to all 50 states in the 2009–10 season — he can afford to be selective in choosing opera roles. He doubts that he will ever sing certain Verdi roles onstage, such as Count di Luna, which requires a “darker, heavier voice,” but he expects to sing Iago in another three years. “If audiences can appreciate Natalie Dessay’s Lucia after [the bigger voices of] Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland — and well they should — there really is nothing so remarkable about Tom Hampson singing Verdi.”