Rolando Villazón directs opera at the world's top houses

Tenor Rolando Villazón was singing the title role in Massenet's "Werther" in 2006 at Nice, France, when he started thinking about how he would direct the opera.

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"I said, 'oh, this last act is very difficult. He shot himself and keeps singing for 40 minutes.' And so, what would I do?" he recalled. "And I started inventing, creating for fun a staging." Nearly two decades later, Villazón is making his Metropolitan Opera directing debut in Bellini's "La Sonnambula," which opened on Monday night with a standout cast of Nadine Sierra, Xabier Anduaga and Alexander Vinogradov.

"He is very sensitive to singers," Sierra said. "Maybe some directors, because they're not singers or they were never singers, it's hard for them to really relate to the psychological struggle that some singers, we deal with on stage. We want to make our characters as believable as humanly possible through the actions that we show, but sometimes it's hard to do that because you also have to sing high notes."