All that is long ago and far away for the less glamorous but more committed version of the Argentinian director, now 78, who was the soul of American opera as it moved closer to the mainstream in the late 1970s. Then, the opera world needed Capobianco's kind of showmanship; now, Academy of Vocal Arts needs his kind of wisdom.

AVA was a launching point for his U.S. career 47 years ago, with a six-season stint as resident stage director. Somewhat quixotically, he has returned to direct Verdi's most intricate, high-traffic opera, Falstaff, opening Friday on the academy's Helen Corning Warden Theater stage - which seems even smaller than he remembered.

The production budget, minuscule compared to his heyday, is fine with him. "We're concentrating on the making of artists," he said the other day after rehearsal. "I don't need sets. Save $15,000. Give me props and costumes and I don't think the audience will notice that there are no sets. It's a unique pleasure to see artists grow. I feel like a gardener taking care of a gift from God."

Capobianco's current crusade (and he always had one, whether at New York City Opera or running the San Diego and Pittsburgh opera companies) is his war on attention deficit among the emerging generation of singers. "They can't give you more than five or 10 minutes," he says. "I teach them concentration and conviction. And if you don't have motivation, forget it!"

The AVA cast may never experience the likes of him or his Falstaff again. He's there to teach the basic, classic Falstaff - no high concept, no updating into punk/goth (as did a recent production he saw in Florence). He's out to give singers the foundation they'll need when asked to adapt to currently fashionable unorthodox stagings. And on all matters Verdian, Capobianco is the oracle. "For me, Verdi is like reading a newspaper," he says.

Yet his sessions encompass matters well beyond music.

"Every morning when he starts rehearsal, he says, 'OK, we have a little chat and warm up the mind before warming up the voice and the body.' Today, the discussion was that nothing is impossible onstage," says Michelle B. Johnson, who plays Alice Ford. "He doesn't give up on us. Even though we don't get something after the 100th time, he asks, 'Why won't you do it?' And he gives another chance. He won't let us slack. And he says that every day you should grow in some way or another."

Not that he isn't practical. He has to be, with the stage filled to capacity and singers fretting about running into one of three swords in the production. He laughs quietly: "I will teach them how to take care!"

Capobianco himself appears to have survived everything, almost like a South American Zelig, except that he has never faded into any background. He was an assistant at Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires when the legendary Sir Thomas Beecham conducted Otello and Carmen. And while working his way up from gofer to director of a full-blown Aida at age 22, he also studied psychology as a fallback profession. He was among the first to update opera - an early Tosca was reset on the eve of World War II. And if he looks like a movie star - Omar Sharif? - it's because he was one. Having studied acting, he appeared in five films with titles like Street of Sinners.

So when he got to AVA in 1962, he not only had been career building for a good 10 years but also possessed both the credentials to teach singers to command the stage - he acts out their roles for them in rehearsal when necessary - and the psychology smarts to handle them well. No surprise that the high-octane Tito didn't take to residing at the posh Bucks County farm of Adele Warden Paxson, daughter of AVA founder Helen Corning Warden: "Do you want me to direct opera or play golf?"

Because AVA didn't require his constant presence, he commuted to Philadelphia from New York, both then and in the 1970s when working with the Philadelphia Music Academy in a program that survives within the University of the Arts. More visibly, he was part of New York City Opera's vanguard years, when such great singing actors as Beverly Sills and Norman Treigle - under his direction - changed the way the world thought about opera. Sills' trio of Tudor queens, Maria Stuarda, Roberto Devereux, and Anna Bolena, which remains a unique, monumental achievement in modern divadom, might not have gone so well (or at all) without Capobianco.

He was a pioneer of opera on TV - his 1971 pre-Live From Lincoln Center telecast of Le coq d'or starring Sills can be found on YouTube in grainy black and white, though his 1984 Metropolitan Opera Simon Boccanegra, released on DVD last year by Deutsche Grammophon, obviously gives a better picture of his stage-directing style.

About that era he gossips remarkably little. The only real revelation: Much of tenor Franco Corelli's stage fright came from living with a hernia he refused to have repaired for fear of compromising his breathing mechanism. Of Sills, whom he met before she was famous, he says nothing the world doesn't know, but puts a finer point on it.

"She was recommended to me by a friend who explained that she had a mountain of private-life problems with her children," one of whom is severely autistic. "We had a big fight at first and she left my rehearsal. It was Tales of Hoffmann and she said, 'I'm sorry, I'm a singer and not a dancer.' My wife used to be a prima ballerina and she went and talked to Beverly and an hour later she came back. And that was the beginning of everything."

During his 1976-83 tenure running the San Diego Opera, he induced Sills and Sutherland to share the stage in Die Fledermaus. And his 17 years at the Pittsburgh Opera (1983-2000) were heady, with billboards announcing his arrival. But constant fund-raising crowded out creativity.

"I was eating myself ... I was on the edge of repeating myself," he says. "You have to keep the company in the popular repertoire - Traviata-Boheme-Aida-Boheme-Traviata. How many times can you do that? I left very happily. Better to go out and concentrate only on young people."

Gigi, his wife, now stays home in Florida. Working without her is strange, he admits. "She was my devil's advocate. She never said yes to me. Never. And you don't know how fantastic that is. To have someone who always says 'yes, sir' is the worst thing that can happen to an artist. It's the beginning of all mistakes. Nobody stops you.

"We had special walkie-talkies made. I was onstage and she would be in the audience making notes. Always, I explained to her what I wanted to achieve. And she would tell me when I didn't achieve it, in cold blood, with 'no,' 'maybe,' or 'yes.' "

That's fine for a collaborator. But a marriage? "When we left the theater, she was no more the devil's advocate. That I can swear to you!" he says. "And now we're celebrating our 54th wedding anniversary."

You can't help but be envious. "I have no complaint," he says. "I did everything I want. I am happy."