BERNSTEIN’S CANDIDE: Sunday, May 22

by Dr. Richard E. Rodda

© 2022 May Festival LEONARD BERNSTEIN

Candide

Born: August 25, 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts Died: October 14, 1990 in New York City Work Composed: 1956 Premiere: Pre-Broadway tryout at Boston’s Colonial Theatre beginning on October 29, 1956 before the show opened at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York City on December 1, 1956 Instrumentation: narrator, 2 sopranos, mezzosoprano, 3 tenors, 3 baritones, mixed chorus, 2 flutes (incl. piccolo), oboe (incl. English horn), 2 clarinets (incl. E-flat clarinet and Bass clarinet), bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets (incl. cornet), 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, bongo drums, castanets, chimes, cowbell, cymbals, glockenspiel, gong, gourd, hand drum, maracas, ratchet, snare drum, steel drum, suspended cymbals, tambour de Basque, tenor drum, triangle, whip, wood block, xylophone, harp, strings May Festival Notable Performances: This is the first May Festival performance of the work. Duration: approx. 110 minutes François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778) was the leading figure of the French Enlightenment and one of the 18th century’s most vitriolic intellectual iconoclasts. He railed throughout his long career against absolutism and persecution and dogmatism, extolling rationalism and skepticism as the proper foundations for human society. Among the best-known of his vast number of writings is the “philosophical novel” Candide of 1759, a swift and pointed satirical finger in the eye of unthinking convention that flattens the notion that “this” (whenever and wherever “this” is) is “the best of all possible worlds.” One such less-than-best world was created in the United States in the early 1950s by Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose ideological witch-hunt targeted some of the country’s most creative and independent personalities. Among those who became ensnared in McCarthy’s machinations was the writer Lillian Hellman. In 1951, her lover, mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, was called before the congressional committee, refused to answer its questions, and was sentenced to prison. Hellman was subpoenaed, wrote to the committee that she would testify about her politics but no one else’s, and was allowed to remain silent, though she was blacklisted for a time by Hollywood. She vented her rage in an anti-establishment adaptation of The Lark by Jean Anouilh, based on the story of Joan of Arc, for which the young composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein supplied some incidental music. Hellman’s next artistic reaction to her political harassment was a theatrical rendering of Voltaire’s Candide.

Hellman conceived a contemporary stage version of Candide as early as 1950, but it was not until 1956 that the project materialized. She originally intended the piece to be a play with incidental music, which she asked Bernstein to compose, but his enthusiasm for the subject was so great after re-reading Voltaire’s novel that the venture swelled into a full-blown comic operetta; Tyrone Guthrie was enlisted as director and Richard Wilbur wrote most of the song lyrics (after that task had passed through several other hands). Reviews of the first productions were mixed. All agreed that the production was opulent and attractive, but that the show itself was disjointed and clumsy. Bernstein’s music, however, received nothing but praise.

Director Harold Prince took the piece in hand in 1973, stripping it of Hellman’s proselytizing text, and gave it a riotous new book by Hugh Wheeler based more faithfully on Voltaire’s novel. In 1982, conductor John Mauceri, a Bernstein protégé, revised Candide for performance at the New York City Opera, restoring several cuts, enlarging the orchestration and reworking Wheeler’s book into the conventional two acts. For a Scottish Opera production in 1988, Mauceri prepared with John Wells yet another version of Candide, which included virtually all the music Bernstein had written for the show over the years and reassigned numbers to their original intended characters and situations.

In the concert version of the score, the following editor’s note is printed:

The contemporary references in the narration should be updated as the passage of time dictates.

This is easily done by “plugging in” the current fascist, current action movie star, etc. Local references may be substituted if appropriate;

U.S.-specific references in the narration may be changed for performances outside the U.S.

Changes, however, should not be made to soften the political commentary. The text for Candide will be projected above the stage and viewable throughout the auditorium. A synopsis will be printed in a program supplement that will be available at the entrances to the auditorium on May 22.

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