Cooperstown, N.Y., where the American soprano Elizabeth Futral recently began a 13-performance run in “The Music Man” at the Glimmerglass Festival, is 139 miles from Manhattan, where she will perform Kaija Saariaho’s operatic monodrama “Émilie” beginning on Thursday evening as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Yet her physical commute this weekend will be negligible compared to the psychic distance between Marian the Librarian and Émilie du Châtelet.


Ms. Futral bridges it easily, perhaps because she embodies a bit of both women: the forthright Marian Paroo and the brilliant Émilie, a pioneering 18th-century physicist, mathematician and thinker whose brief, turbulent life included extended affairs with Voltaire. Ms. Futral is the most gracious of magnolias, with just enough steel in mind, will and spirit to have propelled her to the top of her profession and kept her there for some two decades. Her luscious, pliant voice has allowed her — at 48, an age at which many lyric coloratura sopranos begin winding down — to take cannily calculated steps outside her comfort zone.


“Émilie” is a case in point. When Ms. Futral first tackled the role at the Spoleto Festival USA in 2011, James R. Oestreich of The New York Times described the work’s lone role as “a tour de force for soprano, some 75 minutes of almost continuous vocalization: speech, elevated speech and soaring melodic arcs, some with electronic voice processing to produce ghostly duets.”


“Ms. Futral negotiated it all beautifully,” he added, “and, it seemed, tirelessly.”


Ms. Futral, interviewed during a recent touchdown in Manhattan, said: “It demands everything I have: mental and emotional focus, physical and vocal endurance. But it’s such a fascinating character, such a beautiful score and text, I felt I had to try it, even though it was written for a very different artist.”


Ms. Saariaho conceived “Émilie” for the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila, who sang its premiere in 2010. But she enthusiastically embraced Ms. Futral’s lighter voice, subtler style and more compact physique. “Elizabeth is a shining Émilie, a beautiful, strong, clearly wise and experienced woman,” Ms. Saariaho said. “She has also warmth and passion, but she isn’t crazy, and I like that.”


Ms. Futral has been plying her craft longer than most. Growing up in Covington, La., where her father was pastor of the First Baptist Church, she found her niche early on in church choirs.


“They say I sang before I talked,” Ms. Futral said. “But from the earliest I can remember I was never just singing to sing. That marriage of trying to communicate something meaningful with the payoff of having an effect on people is what motivated me.”


Ms. Futral enrolled at Samford University, a Baptist college near Birmingham, Ala., intending to teach music but took a decisive step toward a performing career by earning her master’s degree at Indiana University. She next spent two years in the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Center for American Artists, forging a strong relationship with the company, where her many leading roles have most often included Violetta in Verdi’s “Traviata.” Next season she is to return as Musetta in Puccini’s “Bohème.”


Ms. Futral considers Chicago her artistic home and maintains an apartment near the opera house. But since 2005 her main residence has been a spacious house that she and her husband, Steven White, a Metropolitan Opera conductor, built in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.


Winning the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 1991 brought Ms. Futral a contract at the New York City Opera, where she made her debut as Gilda in Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” Back in Chicago, in 1993 Plácido Domingo heard her sing at a rehearsal of “Le Cid,” by Massenet, in which she was covering a secondary role. Mr. Domingo recalls asking Ardis Krainik, then the company’s general director, “Why did you hire a soprano from Europe for this role when you have this young lady right here in your house?”


Mr. Domingo lent Ms. Futral’s career a boost, inviting her to perform with him and to enter his annual Operalia competition, which she won in 1995. As general director of the Los Angeles Opera and, formerly, the Washington National Opera, he presented her in “La Traviata” and a number of other works, including Thomas’s “Hamlet,” for which she learned the role of Ophélie on a few days’ notice.