If there is a key to the force and clarity of Rene Pape’s singing and acting, it’s this: His life has a place for music and drama – and a place for everything else.

“I love my work, my singing,” explained the 40-year-old Dresden bass after a rehearsal below the vast Metropolitan Opera Stage for the company’s new production of “Faust,” opening Thursday night. Mr. Pape plays Mephistopheles (he is also moonlighting as the Speaker in the Met’s Julie Taymor-designed “Zauberflote.”) “Yet I never identify myself ‘over’ my job, understand. I think I am really more of a normal guy with my own personal life and issues. We singers are just people, no matter how much people think of us as racing around the world singing, and going to big hotels – we do our work, and act, and sing. I do my [professional] things, and then there’s my other life – I am a father, I’m a boyfriend. I have two boys. They are 15 and 12. One plays acoustic guitar, one plays drum, and they are always making songs for me.”

Not a moment of bragging about the deluxe lifestyle, the hotels, the sports cars, the usual afflatus classical stars dazzle the public with. (“Sports cars?” he said with a wryness that often lightens his cavernous voice. “Well …”) Pape is grounded: He is passionate about his work, and is happy to work very hard and enjoy it. He can talk about it all with refreshing modesty, surprising wit, and not unexpected passion.

“Not unexpected” because this man hits the stage with a musical and dramatic force we seldom expect from basses, and can only pray for from most tenors. He grew up with performance as an ideal, and has some of that almost-spiritual fervor Eastern-bloc performers brought to the stage not so long ago. “I am not a singer who just takes care of his voice – I want to play onstage.”

“I never acted in a play but it was al ways my gig to act when I sang onstage,” he recalled. “When I was very young I sang – do you know the musical ‘Cabaret’? I was 13 years old, so I sang the Hitler Jugend character – ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me.’ That was my first step on a theater stage.” Now, when Mr. Pape is in New York, he checks out Broadway plays and musicals, amazed at “how completely trained the actors are – to sing, and dance, and act” – perhaps to find kindred spirits.

Met audiences know that when Mr. Pape sings the ascetic Gurnemanz in “Parsifal,” or Rocco in “Fidelio,” they will not only hear the role, but see it. Tall, graceful, and handsome, Mr. Pape has a face and body that reflect music and emotion with dazzling, at times delirious, fluency. If he could master the New York accent and find the right composer, he’d be the guy to bring one of Robert De Niro’s great film roles to the lyric stage.

Mephistopheles will be the fourth major role Mr. Pape has debuted “cold” at the Met – a one-time common enterprise. But the days when Enrico Caruso or Rosa Ponselle calmly learned new roles over the summer to premiere them at the Old Met each fall are long gone. Singers now “develop” parts, usually far from the ears of the New York press, until managers are satisfied to show them off. (Renee Fleming waited nearly two decades to bring her Traviata to the Met.)

Yet Mr. Pape has premiered – successfully – tough parts like Escamillo in “Carmen” right here in New York. “I’ve heard this before, but I think opening a role like this here gives you a bigger thrill, so you take better care in doing it,” he said. “I feel very secure at the Met, and don’t have any doubts here – everybody’s helping and wanting you to do well. It’s a very nice chemistry here. I’m at the Met 10 years, and it’s a family I have here.”

Isn’t there something more to it? “Of course! I mean, taking risks is very important. Challenging new repertoire its great. I’m not just a German singing German – I sing Italian, and French, and Russian, and try to be as good as I can. I could have had an easier life by saying ‘Look I have just five roles in German and I travel them – with maybe one Italian role, too – and that’s that.’ But I am not like that – not yet!” he said, and chuckled.

Mr. Pape’s boldness isn’t always welcomed. Recently a British stage director ruled him out of a Royal Opera House production of Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” because Mr. Pape was felt to be too young to play the role of the aging, melancholy King Philip II. In fact, Mr. Pape is about the same age the historical Philip was at the time the opera’s events transpired – a truth perhaps unknown to the artistic staff of the Royal Opera.

While he didn’t want to discuss this situation on the record, Mr. Pape nonetheless admitted to being “really pissed” about the decision. “I can play all kinds of characters,” he said firmly. “I can play a young Gurnemanz at the start of ‘Parsifal’ and two acts later the old one.”

Mr. Pape’s recording career has been unfortunately sparse. Record companies, fearful of market saturation, don’t turn out solo recitals as often as they used to, or feature stars of his magnitude in broad sweeps of new opera recordings. But Mr. Pape can be heard singing Mahler’s Eighth under Colin Davis (BMG) and in several outings with Sir Georg Solti for Decca (including Haydn’s “The Seasons” and “Creation,” the Mozart Requiem, and a valedictory “Meistersinger,” in which the bass sings Pogner (taking on Hans Sachs is “about five or six years away – but let’s not gossip about that.”) On video Mr. Pape’s Pogner was recently seen in the Met PBS telecast of “Meistersinger.” And there is that searing Rocco from the Met’s recent “Fidelio” production, now out on Deutsche Grammophon video.

And then there is Broadway. Last January Mr. Pape made a guest appearance at the Marilyn Horne Foundation gala at Zankel Hall. After singing his announced Schubert number (beautifully), he returned to the stage with a sheepish grin, and sang the purest, most idiomatically perfect rendition of “If Ever I Would Leave You” from “Camelot” that I have heard since my boyhood. It romanced the house with the kind of brio that used to be obligatory on the Great White Way but has been banished by two generations of Broadway barking and belting.

The crowd went wild. Ms. Horne, who had just celebrated a birthday, cried “Now I almost don’t mind turning 71!”Yet Mr. Pape insists he barely knew the song until recently. “No, really! But I worked on the song with a great coach, and once you learn the style, you just sing it with the same feeling you would bring to anything else. Yes?” Yes. If only the rest of the denizens of the opera, recital, and musical worlds could invest their work with “the same feeling” Rene Pape does.

“Faust” opens at the Metropolitan Opera House on April 21.

Faust in the City

“Faust,” Charles Gounod’s 1859 distillation of Goethe’s unwieldy drama, opened the lavish new Metropolitan Opera house in October 1883 and has played regularly there ever since, even as it lost stage time at many other opera houses to more modern works. (Gounod’s name was one of six chiseled across the top of the Old Met’s gilded proscenium arch, embarrassing some opera lovers.) The Second Empire-style designs for the Met’s new “Faust” are by Santo Loquasto, perhaps best known for his designs for Woody Allen’s films. The production is by Andrei Serban, perhaps the most adventurous and brilliant director of the late, lamented off-off-Broadway scene. James Levine’s Germanic training and taste should illuminate the darker moments of Gounod’s otherwise very French, very Romantic score.

Every “Faust” stands or falls on its Mephistopheles. Rene Pape is a singing actor with a voice and manner at home in both lyrical interludes and dark eruptions of wilful mayhem. Marguerite was a role beloved by generations of divas; at the Met, she will be sung by the Finnish soprano Soile Isokoski, above right, who debuted two seasons ago as the “Figaro” Countess.

The French-born Italian Roberto Alagna, below left, an ardent lyric tenor, has of late sung heavier roles (such as Radames in “Aida”). This “Faust” should be a delightful chance to hear him in the kind of music he became famous singing. Dmitri Hvorostovsky, above left, as Valentin and Kristine Jepson, below right, as Siebel round out the cast.