To the waltz arietta, “Ah, je veux vivre dans le rêve.” Please, let’s not worry over whether it belongs here or not. It isn’t going away. Besides, it’s a splendid number. I even think it’s interesting, dramatically speaking. Taken with the “Écoutez!,” etc. (see above) it does, however, pose a challenge of the same sort we find in a number of other 19th-Century soprano parts: the role’s introductory demands (high, florid, ornamental) seem out of kilter with the writing later on, which has a lower center of gravity and is implicitly more dramatic in calibre. Violetta is the most obvious example, but the comparison is closer with another role for which Gounod accommodated Mme. Miolan-Carvalho, Mireille. She, too, has an early waltz song, and much later in the evening the extended solo Scène de la Crau, which calls for full-throated, emotionally intense singing, and is if anything more demanding than that of Juliette’s Potion Aria. This appearance of dichotomy, though, is a byproduct of how we sing now, with soprano voices loosely held, lacking in the centering and grounding that gives the lower octave a penetrating clarity and firmness while serving as a launching platform for brilliant excursions into the high extension, so that the instrument is knit throughout the range. It isn’t really a contradiction in the writing.

“Je veux vivre” has a more elaborated form than the other solos in Act I. Its animato A section, in which Juliette says she wants to keep living in her intoxicating dream, to guard its sweet flame like a treasure, is repeated, with slight variations. Then, though, in a sudden change of tone though not of tempo, she says that this youthful intoxication lasts, alas, but a day—soon comes the hour when the heart gives in to love, and happiness flies, never to return. It’s the statement of a highly romantic, even morbidly inclined, adolescent. It’s also a girlish echo of the sentiment expressed by her father a few minutes earlier, as if picking up on his cue. Now she brightens again and returns to A, but only momentarily, coming to a cadential pause on a full high B-flat. And then (a little slower now, with the accompaniment dropping the waltz beat for some dreamy rumination), she asks to sleep far from sad winter, to inhale the fragrance of the rose before it withers—again an imitation, from her child’s P.O.V., of her father’s regretful words. Finally, caught by the pulse of the waltz, she bucks up and finishes quite grandly, with mounting trills and (usually) a held-to-endurance top D.

Some of these are unquestionably intimate thoughts. Why is she singing about them, and to whom might they be confided? The cue for them comes from Gertrude, Juliette’s Nurse, in the form of a nudge about Paris and the prospect of marriage. Juliette is hiding from both, and it is surely to her Nurse, and only to her, that she would open up her feelings in this manner. That is also what’s indicated in the creators’ text, if anyone cares. In the most harmful of all his anti-operatic distortions thus far (but just wait), Sher turns the piece public, with Juliette explaining her feelings to, and interacting with, the chorus. It’s a typical faux-realist choice: give the performer an outer-directed action, preferably chockfull of tiny busy-ness opportunities, that will lend an appearance of inventive behavior without having to confront any of the character’s inner emotional life, i.e., what the scene is actually about. He had already forced upon his Juliette, Diana Damrau, some of the scampery rushing about that seems to be the lot of sopranos of whatever age and locomotive predilections pretending, generally on first view, to be much younger. We’ve seen much the same from Dessay in her Juliette, from Karita Mattila as Puccini’s Manon and Anna Netrebko as Massenet’s—all eye-aversion moments, even from these performers of unusual theatrical command.