Shhh. There’s an opera diva in town, one of the greatest of the past 50 years or so. Just don’t expect Frederica Von Stade to tell you about it.

The beloved mezzo-soprano has come to Hawaii to perform in Hawaii Opera Theatre’s production of “Three Decembers,” a piece written for her by Jake Heggie, the preeminent American opera composer today. HOT thus joins the pantheon of opera companies to stage productions around her — joining La Scala in Italy, the Royal Opera in London, the Paris Opera, New York City’s Metropolitan Opera and other great houses.

Her more than 60 recordings have garnered six Grammy nominations; awards in the French, German and Italian equivalents of the Grammys; and “Best of the Year” citations by opera magazines. She’s sung for presidents and is a decorated artist in two countries, her own and France.

In person, she is modest, her colleagues in “Three Decembers” say, while praising her for her generosity and support.

“She’s the most down-to-earth, non-opera-star star you’ll ever meet,” said director Karen Tiller.

Von Stade launched her career at the pinnacle of American opera, the Metropolitan Opera, in the early 1970s. She credits “a whole bunch of good luck,” though she had to pass several auditions. She quickly joined the Met’s constellation of opera stars.

“Birgit Nilsson would sing one night, Joan Sutherland the next, Marilyn Horne of course. (Renata) Tebaldi, I used to help her put on her shoes before she sang a high B-flat,” she said.

“There was no bulletproof glass around anything. We called Sir Rudolph Bing (the legendary general manager of the Met) ‘Sir Rudy,’ and you knew everybody’s name. I knew all the stagehands. I know it sounds corny, but it was really a family. I knew everybody in the orchestra.”

Von Stade also credits much of her success to her manager, Matthew Epstein, who, she says, “shoved me down a lot of people’s throats, like, ‘I’ll give you Marilyn Horne, but you’ve got to take this girl too.’”

She said Epstein helped her career by introducing her to “unknown” French works, like the comic opera “Mignon” by Ambroise Thomas. “It used to be as popular as ‘Boheme’ in a certain generation, and then it came back,” said Von Stade, without mentioning her role in bringing it back.

That she is also acclaimed for playing Mozart’s “pants roles” — roles traditionally sung by women playing boys or young men — is testament to her diverse abilities.

What’s it like to sing in great opera houses? Her favorite is the Met, which is essentially like her home team, but her second favorite is Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which she calls “the most exquisite theater.”

“What you sing at a place like La Scala, you think, ‘All those voices, it’s in the walls,’” she said. “It’s just everywhere around you and you have that incredible sense of history that you don’t have in the United States, because nothing’s that old. The new Met just predated my singing by just five years or so. Kennedy Center didn’t exist when I started singing.”

Back in 2008, “Three Decembers” was seen as her swan song to opera, because it tells the story of a fading stage star. But she has continued to perform, including in Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking” and other new works.

“I call it the ‘say yes to the dress’-type attitude,” she said. “If people ask me, and I look at it and if I can do it, I’ll say, ‘If you’re not happy, if I get there and you think I’m not in shape, just fire me.’ But I’ll say, ‘Yes, I’d love to.’”