Next comes the first of the aforementioned four brief episodes of the aria’s B section. It is a recitative, the first few bars almost in old-time secco style in a nervous allegro (N-S secures a crisper execution from the accompanist): (“Carlo will be here! . . . Yes! . . . he must depart and forget forever . . . to Posa I swore to watch over his days.” (Now the tempo moderates, and the recitative turns more to the accompagnato style.) “He must follow his destiny, it will lead him to glory. As for me, my day is already at twilight!” Nézet-Séguin’s suggestion here is that with “Carlo qui verrà!“, Elisabetta is again the young girl of her first meeting with Carlo, which we have or have not seen, depending on the version chosen. Perhaps we shouldn’t quibble over choices like this, since in a class environment we are concerned more with process than interpretation. But N-S is offering a way of thinking about interpretation, which in turn becomes becomes a part of the singer’s process. So: in an effort to tie the first two episodes of B together, N-S is jumping the gun. It is true that when Elisabetta reaches the end of this sequence—”la mia giornata a sera è giunta già!“, her thoughts logically turn from these sad end days to the time of youthful love and hope in her native land. But in the opening of this recitative, she is surely very much in the present, preparing herself to stay resolute, and it is just as surely the voice of the mature woman that concludes this episode, where Verdi reinforces his fermata marking with the recommendation “lunga silenzio,” exactly for the purpose of allowing time for the memories to steal into Elisabetta’s mind. (And how masterfully Verdi makes this transition for her, ending the first episode in a darkling lower-middle color, then carrying her up and back, brightening along the way, for her piano attack on the upper F for “Francia!”). N-S’s premature young-girl idea leads here to a tremulous, “scared”-sounding little line (“That’s it!”, he says) that sets the whole sequence off on the wrong foot.

N-S scores a couple of good points in the next episode. The first is a re-run of the “ri-Po-so” suggestion, but this time in a more clearly apt spot—the move from C to the upper F of “Fon-tain-e-BLEAU!“, where a brief easement into the note gets a more appropriate effect than an unvaried approach. The second is in an area of great interest to everyone who works with singers, the relationship between bodily gesture and vocal gesture. This occurs on the descending line “E quest’eternità,” on which each of the five eighth notes gets its very own accent in the score, yet must remain sostenuto and not turn choppy. The singer marks this phrase with a clenched fist on a fixed arm. N-S unclenches the fist and turns the angle of the wrist so that the palm faces sideways and the arm descends in little pulses; the singing changes subtly.This is again a subjective choice—one could easily argue for more strongly marked accents, especially in a true dramatic soprano instrument allied with a certain temperament. And of course the gesture is not for the character on the stage; it’s just to locate something in the singing. But the awareness of the connection (something that the physical act of conducting no doubt encourages) is at least a positive. Yet, in the category of things passed over is the end of this same thought—that this apparent eternity of youthful joy and hope “un giorno sol durò.” And this thought, like an even darker one coming up (at “la pace dell’avel“), is set in pronouncedly chest-register territory, where the singer would benefit from a more fateful, withheld intensity of tone, not just the pretty, “relaxed,” and expressively neutral one over which N-S again exclaims “That’s it!”