She showed up for “Lucia” at the Met this month with clear ideas about the opera and the inner strength of the character, a role closely associated with great divas like Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland. To rescue her family from ruin, Lucia is bullied by her brother into marrying a wealthy lord rather than her beloved Edgardo, who comes from a rival family. Every aspect of Lucia’s being, Ms. Yende said, especially her consuming passion for Edgardo, is thwarted.

Within everyone who is unable to express their inner feelings is a “kind of hidden strength” that they hold onto like “a survival instinct,” Ms. Yende said. Lucia’s desperation culminates in one of the most challenging mad scenes in opera. Forced to marry a man she considers her oppressor, the unhinged Lucia stabs him to death on their wedding night. Ms. Yende sees even this harrowing act as evidence that Lucia “is clinging to a kind of willfulness” that she shows to the world through murder.

You sense Lucia’s tenaciousness coursing through Ms. Yende’s performance of the mad scene on her latest Sony recording, “Dreams”; even in the character’s delirium there is a chilling directness, even defiance, to her singing. And it was fascinating to watch her in the Met’s spartan basement rehearsal room during the first rehearsal for her five-performance run, a revival of Mary Zimmerman’s slightly updated 2007 production.

This was a run-through of Lucia’s first scene, accompanied only by piano. In fluent Italian — Ms. Yende lives in Milan — she discussed fine points of the music with the conductor, Roberto Abbado. But the main business was to go through the blocking with the singers — especially Ms. Yende, who had only seen the production years ago, when it played at La Scala.

At the start of the rehearsal, Sarah Ina Meyers, a stage director, explained Ms. Zimmerman’s concept while emphasizing that the production was designed to be “open to interpretation.” In Lucia’s first scene, she has come to the fountain in a park near her family’s castle, waiting surreptitiously for her lover. She tells her maid, Alisa, that she has seen the ghost of a young woman who was stabbed to death by a jealous lover at this very spot. In Ms. Zimmerman’s staging, a silent dancer appears as the ghost, seen only by the emotionally vulnerable Lucia.

It’s essential, Ms. Meyers said, for Lucia to “keep the fountain alive,” in a dramatic sense, during this scene. Ms. Yende vividly responded to the suggestion. She sang the long, winding phrases of the aria “Regnava nel silenzio,” her sound warm yet bright, both youthful and wracked with premonitions. But she kept glancing nervously at the fountain — represented in the rehearsal room by a few tossed-together chairs and boxes — hovering near it then stepping away, entranced yet fearful.