Renée Fleming, Star Soprano, Tries Out the Director’s Chair

A young soprano was rehearsing a difficult aria from Mozart’s “Così Fan Tutte” when the director stopped her and made a suggestion.

“I always liked to lay down for this part,” the director said, “because it lets the body relax.”

It’s not every opera director who can talk about performing choices in the first person. But on that summer afternoon in Aspen, Colo., the woman staging the scene was Renée Fleming, perhaps the most famous soprano of recent decades. Fleming was passing on a career’s worth of accumulated wisdom to a cast in which the oldest singer is 32.

Among her lessons was when to say no.

“Just remember, you’re going to be more nervous onstage than you are now,” Fleming said as the group worked on some aerobics-style choreography for the production, set in the early 1980s. “So maybe don’t do these jumps, because even if you can sing while you’re doing them now, you’re going to be out of breath on opening night.”

Fleming is making her directing debut with this “Così,” which opens on Monday at the Wheeler Opera House as part of the Aspen Music Festival and School, one of the country’s most prestigious summer programs for rising artists.

She joins a select group of divas (and divos) turned directors. This fall, the tenor Rolando Villazón’s production of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” comes to the Metropolitan Opera. And the mezzo Denyce Graves is staging Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha” for Washington National Opera next year.