Overture to Candide
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

THE STORY

     Leonard Bernstein’s comic operetta (an opera with spoken dialogue), Candide, opened on Broadway in December 1956; but closing three months later with just 73 performances, it didn’t exactly catch on with the public. That run would be impressive for a contemporary opera but was practically a disaster for a Broadway show.
     That was at the heart of the issue for audiences—they couldn’t understand whether the new work was an opera or a musical. Plus, they found the story of the naive young man Candide and his misadventures in half-a-dozen locations around the world to be esoteric, lacking in the standard romantic plot of a musical, and simply too long. 
     Yet, no one could seem to give up on Candide. The operetta was revised numerous times over four decades, by Bernstein and others. (When a new book was written to replace the one by Lillian Hellman, she was outraged and withdrew her 1956 original; it remains unavailable for performance to this day.)
     Bernstein’s music is undoubtedly the work’s greatest asset, with the overture in particular having become a hugely popular concert classic. With energetic wit and sophistication, it perfectly captures the mood of the musical comedy and has become one of the most-performed pieces of contemporary music.
     The first concert performance of the overture was given in 1957, the year following the Broadway opening. Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic, where he became music director in 1957 and Laureate Conductor in 1969. It is a long-held tradition of that ensemble to perform the work without a conductor, in tribute to their former music director.

LISTEN FOR

• The foreshadowing of some of Candide’s most well-known musical moments—“Glitter and Be Gay,” “Oh, Happy We,” “The Best of All Possible Worlds,” and the instrumental Battle Music—in addition to melodies that Bernstein created specifically for the overture

• The gleeful violin solo

• At the end of the five-minute overture, a shower of all of the musical fragments already heard, growing to a sparkling, rousing crescendo

INSTRUMENTATION

Piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, E-flat clarinet, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, strings