The man who dusted the cobwebs off opera design keeps an impressively neat studio—all the better to accommodate his nervous energy. Michael Levine is bouncing around his Spadina and Adelaide workplace, darting back and forth among the tidily arranged tools of his trade. For the past 20 years, the 45-year-old production designer has been one of the foremost international movers in a drive to modernize opera. He’s collaborated with—and is sought after by—the leading opera, theatre and dance companies of the world. He spent 10 months in this spare studio designing the sets for the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Wagner’s four-part Ring Cycle. But this summer, Levine is plotting something new: the premiere of the Ring’s first part, Das Rheingold, the first production in the city’s new opera house, which he calls “one of the most beautiful in North America—a lovely translation of European architecture.” It’s also his debut as a director.

Levine’s career has been on an upward trajectory ever since he played the tuba at Forest Hill Public School. The child of a father who worked in the fashion industry and a stay-at-home mother, he got his first job straight out of Central Saint Martins College in London, when he was hired as a design assistant and set designer at the innovative Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow. Plum assignments followed, designing sets and costumes for the Opéra National in Paris, England’s Royal National Theatre, the Vienna State Opera, the National Ballet of Canada, La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera, among others.

The thought of directing Wagner fills Michael Levine with “extreme excitement and immense fear”

There are two fixed points in his peripatetic life: Miami, where Jeffrey Kofman, his partner of 18 years and a former CBC anchor, works as a news correspondent for ABC; and his studio, where he spends an average of 12 hours a day, six days a week.

Maquettes for the cycle, like operatic dollhouses, line one of the studio’s walls. They distill the four operas into a series of bold, pared-down images; like his other sets, rather than decorating a stage, they expose the work’s essence. Illustrating his “anal-retentive” passion for certain colours and the way they catch the light, he moves to one of the maquettes, a set for Götterdämmerung, and points to the subtle merging of green, blue and gray on the floor. “Nobody notices stuff like that! But I had to get it right.” Describing Wagner as a “horrible man” who wrote sublime music, his eyebrows escalate, and he asks—as if he’d only just discovered it and it was too wonderful not to share—“Can I play you something?” Then he shoots to his stereo and puts on Das Rheingold’s famous prelude, a swelling chord in a sinuous 6/8 rhythm. The music propels him to his computer, so that he can show me models of some of the sets he’s devised to underscore these glorious sounds. “But if you tell,” he says placidly, “I will cut off all 10 of your fingers.”

At the risk of losing my digits, I can report that Levine’s gift for sculptural, organically inspired sets is alive and well in Das Rheingold. As he did in his astonishing designs for Robert Lepage’s 1993 production of Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung for the COC—where arms protruding from walls and brilliantly lit, empty chambers underlined the prevailing horror—he zeroes in on the work’s emotional core and magnifies it until it’s surreal. Unlike many designers, Levine is more at home with psychology than style: his sets highlight the music’s emotional landscape rather than furnish a period-perfect set. “I’m not that good at aesthetics,” he explains. “I get in a panic about things like Louis XV furniture.”

The thought of directing Wagner also fills Levine with “extreme excitement and immense fear.” But, “I’m always doing things beyond my capability anyway.” His biggest worry is thinking on his feet. “What happens when a singer stops mid-aria and asks me something I’ve never thought of? I can hardly say ‘I’ll get back to you on that.’ ” Reassuring himself, he adds, “I have a strong sense of the characters and the main concepts, but I have no will to impose my ideas on a singer.” His best work, he says, comes out of the spontaneous combustion of collaboration. Sorting out the balance between his own interpretation and what he sees as a director’s necessary passivity will be—here he narrows his eyes and adopts a mock-sinister German accent—“an interesting experiment.” On that subject, an English director friend has just e-mailed him: “Aren’t you pooing in your pants?” Levine sends back a one-word reply: “Yes.”