LEWES, England — Stefan Herheim wants your attention.

When his productions fulfill his visions, the viewers can’t ignore what’s happening, Mr. Herheim, one of opera’s most innovative stage directors, said.

“That’s a feeling I absolutely adore, when the audience doesn’t just lean back and agree, ‘This is lovely, this is beautiful, this is happiness, this is exactly what we expected.’”

What he expects is for them “not to be bored,” he added in an interview after a rehearsal for Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” at the Glyndebourne Festival here; his much-anticipated staging opened on June 30.

Bored, watching a Herheim show? Never. Dazzled, yes. Bewildered, probably. Over the past 15 years, he has become celebrated for immensely complicated stagings of works we thought we knew, like “La Bohème,” “Parsifal” and “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” that are both bombastic spectacles and intellectual disquisitions. They’re full of blinding coups de théâtre — but replete, too, with playful minutiae you might see only on your fifth time around. They create glittering collisions between a work, its history and our expectations of it.