Diva Sees a Social Message in La Boheme : Opera: Ilona Tokody, who sings the role of Mimi, thinks Puccini was making “a statement about the problems of early death for young people” in his classic opera of romantic love.

Ilona Tokody is an opera singer of refreshing contradictions. At first impression, the 36-year-old Hungarian soprano has the girlish exuberance of a country lass on her first visit to the big city. Accordingly, she described her idea of Mimi, the role she will sing Saturday in San Diego Opera’s season-opening production of Puccini’s “La Boheme,” with gushing enthusiasm.

“Mimi is the one role truly dear to my heart,” she said through her interpreter, “and I am very close to her character. This opera will be important as long as people and romantic love exist in the world.”

But Tokody is not all sighs and sweet smiles. In spite of the sentimental cocoon in which most people have wrapped Puccini’s most popular opera, she spoke earnestly about the social context of this opera in which the 19th-Century heroine dies an untimely death from consumption, a term that century used for tuberculosis of the lungs.

“The social message is there. Puccini was an incredible prophet to have frozen in his opera a philosophical statement about the problems of early death for young people. In those days there was consumption; today we have AIDS and we have cancer. The issues in ‘Boheme’ are the issues of today,” she said.

Tokody speaks with some authority on the role of Mimi, which she says she had performed 100 times, an accounting she means in the literal rather than the figurative sense. It was her first major role, at age 26, with the Vienna Staatsoper, and the role with which she made her American stage debut (San Francisco Opera, 1983). And she has sung it opposite all of the tenor superstars.

“I sang it with Carreras in Vienna, with Pavarotti in Buenos Aires and with Domingo in London’s Covent Garden,” she noted with evident satisfaction.

Except for a few late Verdi roles, the vocal niche Tokody has carved out for herself has been limited to the verismo roles of Puccini and Mascagni. Her new recording of Mascagni’s “Iris” with Domingo on CBS records, conducted by the late, noted Italian maestro Giuseppe Patane, has just been released.

Tokody did not begin to specialize, however, until she left her native Hungary. Born in Szeged, a city on the Yugoslav border where her family still lives, she followed the typical musical route of her fellow countrymen, studying at Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy.

“In Hungary, I did a lot of 20th-Century music, both operas and recitals,” she explained. “I owe a lot of the beginning of my career to singing lead roles in contemporary Hungarian opera.”

Among these obscure Hungarian operas from the 1970s--unusual at least to most Western opera aficionados--she has sung primary roles in Zsolt Durko’s “Moses” and Sandor Balassa’s “Beyond the Threshold.” For paying her dues singing contemporary Hungarian opera, as well as to acknowledge her success on international stages, Tokody said that Budapest Opera is mounting a new production of Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” for her in May. But don’t expect Tokody to return to singing contemporary opera.

“I’m not closing myself off to 20th-Century music,” she said, “but it is better in everyone’s career to make a choice, to develop in one area and not tire out your voice doing too many things.”

After her North American debut in San Francisco, a series of appearances in American regional houses finally brought her to the Metropolitan Opera in 1988, where she debuted as Nedda in “Pagliacci.” Her favorable notices as San Francisco’s Mimi brought Tokody the invitation to sing Desdemona in Verdi’s “Otello” for San Diego Opera in 1986, a role she repeated last season for Los Angeles Music Center Opera. In “Aida,” the inaugural offering of Houston Grand Opera’s $70-million Wortham Center in 1987, Tokody filled in for an indisposed Mirella Freni in the title role.

Back for her second opera with San Diego, Tokody is comfortable working with British director John Copley, with whom she worked on a recent Covent Garden production of “La Boheme.”

“We work fantastically together. He has a knack for portraying everyday situations simply, as reality. You know, the simpler everything needs to be, the more difficult it is to make it appear natural.”