Overture to Candide
Leonard Bernstein
(b. August 25, 1918 in Lawrence, Mass.; d. October 14, 1990 in New York City)
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” is not a hyperbolic way to begin to talk about the luminous gifts Bernstein brought to American music. He was a charismatic conductor, an inspiring music educator, and a composer of unparalleled versatility. Oddly Bernstein probably would have traded it all to be America’s Beethoven, but his talent as a composer was greatest at writing music that had popular underpinnings and that talent, great though it is, is just a part of the whole package.
Candide was Bernstein's effort to write a serious opera. He first enlisted James Agee whose work he discarded and then selected Lillian Hellman to write the script. The libretto was given to poet Richard Wilbur who wrote the lion’s share, New York’s society critic and satirist Dorothy Parker, a very young Stephen Sondheim, and several other stars.
Bernstein imagined opera singers as he wrote his score, but the venue available to him was Broadway and Broadway musical singers rose to the occasion, acing the technical requirements. The Lillian Hellman script and the relatively complex music seemed to bewilder enough theatergoers that Candide ran for 73 performances–respectable, but not a hit by New York standards.
The music of the overture gives vignettes of many of the tunes in the opera and follows a sonata-form as reliably as Mozart’s best. Jazzy syncopations and shifting meters keep the listener a little off balance. Nevertheless it is all a fine entertainment that sprints to the end.
The Candide Overture is a concert-hall favorite and its persistence helps explain why the opera has had regular revivals. Voltaire’s satiric novella about “the best of all possible worlds is worthy of Bernstein’s effort and his effort is a fitting tribute to Voltaire’s classic.
(c)2011, 2012, 2017, 2023 by Steven Hollingsworth, Creative Commons Public Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Contact: steve@trecorde.net