“Ah! mes amis, quel jour de fete!”  It’s the aria that launched Luciano Pavarotti to legendary status as “King of the High Cs,” when he belted it out full voice at the Metropolitan Opera in 1972, and the only one that could justify breaking the strict “No Encores” rule at La Scala—a dictate that held for 74 years before Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flores couldn’t resist a reprise. And when Daughter of the Regiment opens at Sarasota Opera on February 19, tenor William Davenport returns to the Sarasota Opera House with expectations as high as the notes themselves. “It’s really like tightrope-walking,” he says. “Terrifying, but thrilling.”

Most of the music in Donizetti’s opera-comique appears innocuous enough, but for this aria at the end of Act I, with a whopping eight high Cs jutting upward on the page in quick succession like some operatic Alps separating would-be Hannibals from their lesser imitators. It’s a height Davenport has reached for the Sarasota audience before, in La Boheme as Rodolfo, but nine of them? (A ninth high C is not written but almost always added at the end, because once you’ve locked into this sort of thing, the instinct is simply to push it as far as it can go.)

“To hear somebody go to a big high C, full voice, and throw themselves into it with reckless abandon makes everybody sit on the edge of their seat,” Davenport says. “But you have to be smart about how you practice. You don’t want to sing this aria 10 times a day or you might hurt yourself.” So he isolates bits and pieces to work on, never forcing or fighting through fatigue, which only invites injury and bad habits. Besides, Davenport knows he can hit the note. The bigger challenge will likely be psychological. “Especially with this aria,” he says. So he works on cultivating the psychological calmness that will allow him to not only sing his best, but perform at his best, as the love-struck Tonio.

“The real treat is when you can do it without getting out of character and when you can use the character to fuel the technique,” Davenport says. “Ultimately, the goal is to forget all of this and just go up there and be Tonio.”