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Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

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Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) NOTES ON THE PROGRAM An Introduction Voltaire and Bernstein’s Candide plunge us from a fool’s world of naiveté to a pain- ful world of war, natural disasters, tragedy, fear of commitment, fear of facts, all cast under a cloud of faux sentimentality—yet with a wink towards truth and love. What an honor it is for The Knights to celebrate Leonard Bernstein in his musical home of Tanglewood with a work that encompasses all of his brilliant contradictions. Bernstein was both a man of his century and ahead of his time—socially, politically, and musically—which makes his centennial feel youthful and timely if not timeless. He lived through some of the world’s darkest times of war, fear, and terror, and his outpouring of joy, love, humor, love, generosity, love, and truth spill from him like it has from only a few geniuses before him. “You’ve been a fool, and so have I.... We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good” (Voltaire, Candide). Bernstein found a fellow optimis- tic jester in Voltaire. Voltaire wrote “It is love; love, the comfort of the human species, the preserver of the universe, the soul of all sentient beings, love, tender love.” Bernstein’s music embodies this senti- ment. Together, they show us many beautiful and joyous puzzle pieces that connect our imperfect best-of-all-possible-worlds. ERIC JACOBSEN, THE KNIGHTS Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) “Candide” A Very Brief History Bernstein composed Candide from 1954 through August 1956, with Hershy Kay assisting with the orchestration; the libretto was by Lillian Hellman, based on the novella Candide, ou l’Optimisme, by Voltaire, the pen name of François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778). The show was unveiled at a try-out in Bos- ton on October 29, 1956, and reached Broadway on December 1 of that year, at the Martin Beck Theatre. The original production was directed by Tyrone Guthrie and conducted by Samuel Krachmalnick, with a cast including Robert Rounseville (Candide), Barbara Cook (Cunegonde), Max Adrian (Dr. Pangloss), and Irra Petini (Old Lady). The score underwent revisions for ensuing productions, with adaptations to the book coming from Hugh Wheeler and to the text from Hellman, Richard Wilbur, John Latouche, Dorothy Parker, Stephen Sondheim, John Mauceri, John Wells, and Bernstein himself. The version being heard here (though with some cuts in the present performances) was created for Scottish Opera in 1988— the score carried the notation “Adapted for Scottish Opera by John Wells and John Mauceri”—and was unveiled by that company on May 19, 1988, at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow (a preview took place on May 17), conducted by Mauceri and directed by Wells and Jonathan Miller. The cast included Mark Beudert (Candide), Marilyn Hill Smith (Cunegonde), Nickolas Grace (Dr. Pangloss), and Ann Howard (Old Lady). SEIJI OZAWA HALL PROGRAM NOTES 53 Ozawa2 2018.indd 53 7/26/18 4:09 PM The Background The story of Leonard Bernstein’s operetta—or musical comedy, or opera—Candide is convoluted and, in the end, rather unhappy, an unfortunate situation for a work whose music and lyrics are overwhelmingly ebullient and even madcap. Voltaire is to blame for the whole affair, since it was his novella Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759) that so captivated Bernstein that the composer struggled for more than three decades to find the right way to translate it for the musical stage. To Voltaire we owe the tale of the wide-eyed hero Candide whose trips to distant points of the globe invariably turn into dismal misadventures, much though he may be assured by his idealistic tutor, Doctor Pangloss, that every- thing is for the best. Voltaire published his novella in 1759 as a satirical, persuasive rebuttal to the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leib- nitz’s philosophical assertion that “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds,” a necessary consequence of God being a benevolent deity. Voltaire, however, saw bad things happening all around, including such contemporary Voltaire (1694-1778) occurrences as the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 (which may have killed up to 100,000 people) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-63, leaving bodies strewn on battlefields throughout Europe). The whole idea struck Voltaire as palpably absurd. How does blatant violence fit into Leibnitz’s contention? What about ship- wrecks? Slavery? The Inquisition? Candide has to deal with them all in the course of this tale, and by the time he reaches the end of his journey he has become a wiser, if more cynical, young man, disabused of automatic optimism and intent on finding happiness where he can, achieving a measure of contentment in just making his garden grow. In the fall of 1953, Lillian Hellman suggested the idea of collaborating with Bern- stein on a stage work based on Candide, an earlier project they had flirted with, on the subject of Eva Perón, having failed to take root. By January 1954, Bernstein was committed to the effort, which he initially envisioned as a full-scale, three-act opera. Hellman began fashioning Voltaire’s novella into a book for the show (often mak- ing adaptations nowhere suggested in the original novella), and John Latouche and Richard Wilbur were enlisted to pen the lyrics, although Hellman, Dorothy Parker, and Bernstein himself all added further contributions to the script. It seemed like a fine idea, but the slender volume posed more problems than any- one had anticipated. It is a picaresque novel in which the hero zips around the globe encountering one situation after another, rarely staying put long enough for any of them to undergo much development. It makes for entertaining, even breath- less reading, but turning it into a stage piece was not an easy matter. How would one instill a sense of unity in an operetta that begins in the “Teutonical rusticity” of Westphalia, ends outside Venice, and trots across the globe in between? Hellman had written “well-made plays” and movie scripts before, such as The Little Foxes; but notwithstanding her vaunted wit, she had never penned a comedy, which is what this show needed to be. Director Tyrone Guthrie was at a similar disadvantage. His credentials were impeccable; his curriculum vitae included directing at the Metro- politan Opera and Sadler’s Wells, heading the Old Vic, and even serving as found- ing director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Canada. But Broadway was virgin territory to him, and he seemed not always in sync with the rough-and-tumble entailed in revisions and quick turnarounds. Some of Bernstein’s composition of Candide overlapped with his work on West Side Story. On the face of it, the two stage works seem entirely dissimilar—Candide a descen- dant of European operetta, West Side Story a profoundly American paean to urban grittiness. Despite the disparity, music flowed in both directions between the two SEIJI OZAWA HALL PROGRAM NOTES 55 Ozawa2 2018.indd 55 7/26/18 4:09 PM scores: the duet “O Happy We” in Candide started life as a discarded duet between Tony and Maria in West Side Story, while West Side Story’s “One Hand, One Heart” and “Gee, Officer Krupke” originated in Candide before finding their proper places. Bernstein said that his score was a valentine to European music. Traditional light- opera forms populate the piece throughout, although often modernized through Bernstein’s infectious off-kilter rhythms: gavotte, mazurka, polka (“We Are Women”), schottische (“Bon Voyage”), tango (“I Am Easily Assimilated”)—sometimes parodisti- cally, sometimes not. The lovers’ duet “You Were Dead, You Know,” borrows details from the bel canto conventions of Bellini, and Cunegonde’s famous waltz-aria “Glitter and Be Gay” is a first cousin to the “Jewel Song” in Gounod’s Faust. Following a try-out in Boston, Candide opened in New York on December 1, 1956, and played for seventy-three performances at the Martin Beck Theatre, long enough to prove in some measure respectable and to pique the interest of sophisticated music lovers, but not long enough to be considered a triumph by Broadway stan- dards. The production was plagued by internecine squabbles and finger-pointing, and nobody involved seemed grief-stricken when it closed. Thus began the saga of the work that gave Bernstein more headaches than any other. Candide was transformed considerably in the course of later emendations. Hellman did not allow her book—neither her words nor the locales she specified— to be used for the 1973 version staged by Hal Prince at the Chelsea Theatre Center, so on that occasion a new libretto, reduced to a single act from the original two, was created by Hugh Wheeler, with Stephen Sondheim joining Wilbur, Latouche, and Bernstein on the list of the show’s lyricists. Unfortunately, some marvelous musical numbers needed to be omitted for that incarnation of the piece. Permutations, com- binations, and revisions of either or both of those two versions charted Candide’s uncertain history, some emphasizing the score’s operatic elements, others its musical comedy streak. Bernstein was directly involved in at least seven versions of Candide, some of which differ vastly from each other. None proved definitive, although each had his blessing at least provisionally. In 1989, the composer led a concert perform- ance in London—in a version preserved on recordings—that stands as his last sign-off on the opera that had puzzled him for thirty-three years. It is impossible to point to any one version as the best of all possible Candides. The one we hear in this performance was prepared for a 1988 production by the Scottish Opera in Glasgow. It uses about forty percent of all the Candide music that had accu- Classical.org The premiere digital classical music experience 56 Ozawa2 2018.indd 56 7/26/18 4:09 PM mulated in the course of the many revisions, and it is the shortest of all the versions, running just under two hours.
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