Candide is an operetta, arguably the last of the line - witty and gritty, theatrical, fastmoving (and dancing) and wonderfully, hummably, musical. A satire that started as a booklet with Voltaire in 1759, it was reborn as an operetta by Leonard Bernstein, with Lillian Hellman and other left-wing arts colleagues, over decades (1953 to the final version in 1989), as they emerged from the threat of McCarthyism in the US. (But hey, that is a country that can still accept that a centrist presidential candidate is a 'Marxist' 'Comrade'!)
Like Voltaire, Bernstein and colleagues, (though their punishments were not as dramatic as his) used biting satire to attack prejudice and injustice.
Playwright Lillian Hellman approached Bernstein in 1953 with the concept. They delighted in the idea of drawing parallels between Voltaire's satirical portrayal of the Catholic Church's blatant hypocrisy and violence and the inquisition-like tactics then being implemented by the U.S. government under the House of Representatives' House Un-American Activities Committee. Voltaire's charges against society in the 1750s — puritanical snobbery, phony moralism, inquisitional attacks on the individual — all rang true for Hellman and Bernstein in the 1950s. They set out with zeal to create a show that would capture a contemporary Voltaire viewpoint. More here.
Why did he spend three decades on Candide? Bernstein gives a 5 minute answer in his introduction to the overture here.
The operetta had many complicated revisions after its 1956 premiere. The lyrics for Candide were originally by the poet Richard Wilbur, later lyrics added by a formidable list of talent, including Stephen Sondheim. The story of its gestation as an operetta is told here.
Even though Candide sparkles with ideas, its heavy agenda weighed it down. If the build-up to its premiere was extensive, the work on its numerous revisions thereafter took longer. Considered one of the most laboured over Broadway shows in history, it endured many incarnations before Bernstein created what he called the ‘Final Revised Version’. He presented it with the London Symphony, which he presided over, at the Barbican in December 1989.
It's that 1989 production, conducted by Bernstein, which we'll be watching. It's a concert version, with subtitles. If you missed the full staged version presented by Victorian Opera this year, (Saturday Paper's review is here.) You can see it in Sydney, presented by Opera Australia, in 2025.
What's the plot?
Voltaire's Candide was a brilliant, bitter satire on the views of highly influential philosopher and mathematician Leibniz and his "philosophical optimism", fashionable enough at the time to make it to the UK in the works of Alexander Pope. Have you read the poetry of this pinnacle of English wisdom? Time to do so! Here in full is the long, torturous, logic-defying "An Essay On Man" (1733). In the final (tenth) verse of tediously rhyming couplets, Pope concludes that "One truth is clear/ Whatever is, is right." The lyrics of Bernstein's opera are FAR better poetry than Pope's! They're here in all their glory. (Disclosure: Pope's poetry was directly responsible for my withdrawal from a degree in English Lit.)
You don't have to read Voltaire's Candide in full text to get the point of this operetta - but it's a good read, and the full text is here. The plot is simple - no matter how shockingly unjust and brutal, no matter how great the misery and suffering, humankind’s capacity for mindless optimism will make it worse. The operetta focuses its attack on the current and the societal results of this blindness, highlighting the stupidity and evil via an amazing amalgam of modern music. Bernstein's website tells here of its creation.
Synopsis? Vic Opera, preparing for its 2024 production, offered splendid background materials, still available here. You missed it? Age review here. Saturday Paper here. Opera Australia puts this production on in 2025 - in Sydney.
And the music?
This is Bernstein, whose West Side Story dramatised life on the West Side, and in its music, told the stories of its underprivileged occupants. (He worked on West Side Story throughout the decades of writing Candide.) Visit Life magazine's images of him here.
Candide by contrast is an amalgam of music styles. Here's the famous overture he wrote for Candide. For a late arrival operetta it became a modern classic. Listen to this account of the musical offering.
And here is the hugely difficult coloratura song, "Glitter and Be Gay", in which Cunegonde (mirroring Marguerite in Gounod's Faust) lusts after the jewels and trinkets set as a trap for her. The singer at the BBC Proms is Scarlett Strallen - not a trained opera singer. The Guardian reviewer of her performance in the role in 2013 (left) wrote: "she wittily turns the high notes into a mark of Cunegonde's rapacity as she avidly seizes on jewels, tiaras and even shards of an overhanging chandelier".
Unlike West Side Story, this musical creation is a mix of musical styles - placing Candide as a satire on music fashion within a satire on morality.
Despite Leonard Bernstein’s championing of ‘American musical comedy’ during the 1950s, Candide is plainly a burlesque of European operetta – from Jacques Offenbach to Gilbert and Sullivan, the most satirical and topical of musical theatre genres. But it is also undeniably an eclectic, Broadway-style musical whose inventive, ambitious score places it in line with other genre-stretching musicals of the 1950s that were also attempting to elevate the form. More here!
If you have time, explore the Scottish Opera's site on the production we're celebrating.
In this and every other edition of Candide, its theatrical dynamism lies in the violent clash between the ravishing beauty, sweep, and wit of music and lyrics and the relentless succession of horrors that comprises its plot. (Stephen Sondheim considers it to have ‘the most scintillating set of songs yet written for the musical theater’).
And who are our singers? Our version is of Bernstein's London concert that preceded his only recording of Candide. Gramophone, who gave this recording their Gramophone Award in 1992 in the Music Theatre category, says
Indeed, it was an inspiration on someone's part (probably Bernstein's) to persuade the great and versatile Christa Ludwig (so "Easily Assimilated") and Nicolai Gedda (in his sixties and still hurling out the top Bs) to fill the principal character roles. To say they do so ripely is to do them scant justice. Bernstein's old sparring partner Adolph Green braves the tongue-twisting and many-hatted Dr. Pangloss with his own highly individual forms of sprechstimme, Jerry Hadley sings the title role most beautifully, con amore, and June Anderson has all the notes, and more, for the faithless, air-headed Cunegonde. It is just a pity that someone didn't tell her that discretion is the better part of comedy. "Glitter and Be Gay" is much funnier for being played straighter, odd as it may sound. Otherwise, the supporting roles are all well taken and the LSO Chorus have a field day in each of their collective guises."
Christa Ludwig (left) as the Old Woman sings "I Am Easily Assimilated". What a song!! Lyrics here.
And Jerry Handley and June Anderson provide the (spoiler alert!) optimistic ending with good advice. (Below)
Full opera on YouTube?
Yes, there are two versions, one from before the "final" edit by Bernstein, and one after, both fully staged. And both are pretty good, though image isn't perfect.
Here's the "Opera House version", 1982, New York City Opera lavish production featured 46 cast members, and an orchestra of 52 players, performed in repertory until 1984, and again in 1986, when the production was broadcast across North American televisions on PBS’ "Live from Lincoln Center" - the first Bernstein musical to be aired live on national television.
And the year before the final concert we are watching, Scottish Opera had produced a full staged version, recorded by the BBC - and now available here on YouTube.
Enjoy! Bernstein did.
Lyn, 19/9/24
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