Apart from music, theater is his favorite art form. While in London on vacation once, he had tickets for an entire week of shows. “But the thing I saw the first night was so compelling that I saw only that performance seven times. It was the last thing Noël Coward did onstage, a piece called Suite in Three Keys.” Two years ago, he saw Elaine Stritch’s one-woman show fourteen times.

Levine responds strongly to what he calls great communicators, with their devotion to craft and to revealing the core of a theatrical piece. This goes a long way toward explaining why one thing that really worries him in the classical-music world right now is what he sees as opera’s current tendency toward radical interpretations of standard repertory. Whereas singers and conductors have dominated previous periods in opera history, this is the age of the director, and Levine, by opera standards a comparatively progressive musician with his preference for Schoenberg over Puccini, is nevertheless a dramaturgical traditionalist.

“The crisis of how to enact opera onstage visually has some alarming facets,” he says. “I’m referring to productions the composer and librettist would denounce. I’m speaking of a production that uses a piece instead of presents the piece. People will say, ‘Oh, Jimmy—he’s so fanatic.’ But a lot of people are willfully rearranging what happens onstage in order to make some original point, which has nothing to do with the way the composer and librettist imagined it. I’m not talking about anything as simple-minded as whether the period was changed. I’ve been to performances where the period was changed and it was very good. But there are so many contemporary productions that just destroy the piece, for nothing. In Europe especially, the reaction to a performance is often, ‘Well, wasn’t that interesting . . . ?’ ” he says dryly. “I’m tempted to say, ‘Okay, the next time I come to your theater, whatever the opera is that we’re doing, I will have the wind players play the string part and the string players play the wind part—and it’ll be very interesting.’ ”

Levine’s traditional leanings set him up, some believe, as a conductor who may have difficulty coming to grips with Peter Gelb, the Met’s incoming general manager. Gelb doesn’t traffic in the avant-garde, per se, but he has already announced that iconoclastic director Peter Sellars and filmmaker Anthony Minghella will helm productions. And many classical-music purists fear he has a penchant for the dread crossover. Norman Lebrecht, a writer with a reputation as something of a classical-music conspiracy theorist, has gone so far as to write that “unless Gelb has undergone a Damascene conversion . . . his contempt for artistic values and his adulation of mass entertainment point to an historic shift in Met priorities.”

Gelb says, however, that he’s not out to turn the Met into a venue for Il Divo or Josh Groban. “What I did [at Sony Classical] was appropriate for a record label,” he says. “Now I’m running an opera house, and different aesthetic rules apply.”

And if there is a looming controversy over the change in Met leadership, Levine seems unfazed. “When I came to the Met, Rudolf Bing was the general manager,” he says. “I’ve worked with all of them since then. There were things to learn and like and things not to learn and not to like.” Indeed, Levine seems hopeful that Gelb can turn around the ticket slump. “Peter has a lot of experience in this difficult area.” (Last week’s $25 million gift to the Met from Sid and Mercedes Bass is also a welcome development.)

Still, in 2004, Levine downgraded his duties and title at the Met, from artistic director (a post he had held since 1986) to music director, in order to accept the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s music directorship, replacing Seiji Ozawa, who had the job for 29 years. “Honestly, it’s been one of the most marvelous periods of my life,” Levine says of his first Boston season. He’s wasted no time reinvigorating the orchestra, but in order to do so, he’s leading fewer Met performances this season than he has in years. Might he scale back further, escaping the relative turbulence at the Met in favor of an adoring Boston audience? “I signed a contract to do my Met work until 2011,” he says, seeking to put this line of speculation to rest for good. “Maybe there’ll be some time in the future where, for whatever reason, I need a time adjustment or something, but I don’t see that coming. I’ve been here for 35 years—all of it of my own free will!”

The day after a Falstaff dress rehearsal this fall, the production’s major singers have assembled in List Hall, adjacent to the main theater, for a rundown of what needs to be improved before opening night. The space seats about 150, and on the back of each red-velvet seat is a wooden fold-up desk, as in a high-school auditorium. The cast is crammed into the first two rows.