For decades, the director Franco Zeffirelli, who died on Saturday at 96, was the unabashed emperor of extravagance in opera. He became so associated with unchecked opulence that it’s easy to forget what an astute and fresh-thinking artist he was when he was young.

[Read the Times obituary.]

Stage actors like Judi Dench, and film stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, valued his guidance. Singers who believed fervently in opera as theater, including Jon Vickers, Teresa Stratas and Maria Callas, trusted him entirely.

Indeed, the most complete record we have of Callas on film is a televised 1964 London performance of Act II from Puccini’s “Tosca,” directed by Mr. Zeffirelli. It shows how opera, when rendered with honesty and daring, can be as profound and subtle as any form of drama.

[Here are the films and operas that defined Zeffirelli.]

Mr. Zeffirelli was never small-scale, but he was sensitive, as in the lovingly detailed, freshly rethought Renaissance “Falstaff” with which he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 1964.