Franco Zeffirelli’s 1981 production of Puccini’s “La Bohème” is the only Metropolitan Opera production in which the Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu will appear this season. But that doesn’t mean her performance won’t be widely viewed. On Saturday, the matinee performance of the production will be transmitted in HD to more than 500 movie theaters around the world.

Mimì was Ms. Gheorghiu’s debut assignment at the Met in 1993, just a year after her sudden appearance on the scene as a protégé of the conductor Georg Solti. “I sang for James Levine in the summer of 1993, when he was conducting at Bayreuth, and made my debut in December,” she said in an interview at the opera house after a rehearsal last week. “My teacher gave me advice: ‘You must go through the front door; otherwise, you wait.'” Three years later she sang Mimì opposite her husband, Roberto Alagna, when he made his Met debut.

The beautiful, raven-haired Ms. Gheorghiu and her dashing husband quickly became opera’s glamour couple, but trouble arose from the Met’s previous general manager, Joseph Volpe, who dropped them from a new production of “La Traviata” in 1999 because they hadn’t signed contracts by the deadline he set. “He needs to be difficult,” she said of Mr. Volpe. “It’s easy to be difficult with people you don’t need, but he needs to be difficult with people with names.” She shrugged it off as a publicity ploy, choosing not to rehash old confrontations, particularly in light of the Met’s new regime, headed by Peter Gelb, which is much more to her liking. “With Peter, I have a very good relationship that goes back to his work with Sony. We speak the same language.”

When she finally sang in “La Traviata” at the Met in February 2006, she won wide praise for the dramatic depth of her portrayal of Violetta and for the range of vocal colors she brought to the role. But trouble surfaced again when Lyric Opera of Chicago dropped her from its production of “La Bohème” last fall for missing rehearsals. Mr. Alagna, who was in New York singing in “Madama Butterfly,” found himself also cast in Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette” following Rolando Villazón’s string of cancellations. “Roberto wanted me to be with him and I asked for permission but they said no. Then Roberto called again and I felt I had to go. They said I didn’t show respect, but what kind of respect did they show the audience that bought tickets to hear me?” She is particular about productions. Her withdrawal from Covent Garden’s forthcoming Verdi’s “Don Carlo” provoked speculation as to the cause, but her answer is simple: “I don’t want to sing it in five acts,” she said, expressing a preference for the four-act version of Verdi’s revision. “It is a difficult and long opera, and everything depends on my two little [vocal] chords.” But relations are fine between her and Covent Garden, and she plans to return. More frequently, the culprit involves the staging. “I am not a conservative person, but modern productions involve modern attitudes, and they can destroy the subject.” She points to “La Traviata,” in which Alfredo’s father persuades Violetta, a former courtesan, to give Alfredo up. “If that happened to me, I would say, ‘Excuse me? Here’s the door. Ciao.’ But in the opera the relationship is destroying his family.”

Her comment that modern productions can work with “pre-classical” operas because they are less tied to periods and “more like fairy tales” raises the question of whether she envisions singing any. Gluck’s “Alceste” is quickly mentioned. Next season, the Met will hear her in Puccini’s “La Rondine” and Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore,” an early success. Other Donizetti? “Maybe ‘Lucia,’ and I am thinking of the [operas with Tudor] queens.” She got her wish to sing in a new opera last September when she and Mr. Alagna starred in the Romanian composer Vladimir Cosma’s “Marius et Fanny” in Marseilles, a work with the same story as the movie “Fanny” with Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier. She will sing Marie Antoinette when in a future season the Met revives John Corigliano’s “The Ghosts of Versailles.” She notes that the composer, in time-honored fashion, is prepared to make changes to suit her voice.

She likes to be involved in the creative process and draws a parallel to her artistic forebear, the Romanian soprano Hariclea Darclée, who was the first Tosca. “It’s because of her that we have ‘Vissi d’arte,'” she said. The Met plans a new “Tosca” the season after next, and Ms. Gheorghiu will appear in a subsequent season. “I don’t know anything about the production, but let’s hope it is good — maybe even a little modern!”