Overture: Candide

The original version of Candide - Leonard Bernstein’s fourth music-theatre piece, after On the Town, Trouble in Tahiti and Wonderful Town - was taken off after only short runs in Boston and New York in 1956. His next musical, West Side Story, achieved no fewer than 734 performance on its initial production on Broadway just a year later. The difference was that, in keeping with the eighteenth-century origins of the libretto, the score of Candide was basically classical, with various local colourings, rather than popular American in idiom. A thorough revision, which added three librettists or lyricists to the original tally of five - not including Voltaire, the author of the Candide story on which the whole thing is based - did not much improve matters. However, since Bernstein himself first introduced it into the concert hall, the Overture has been generally welcomed as a vivid example, classically contained in sonata form though it is, of the vitality of the work. The opening fanfares come from the wedding procession of Candide and Cunegonde, the aggressive trumpet and drum sounds from the battle which interrupts it, the big tune in the middle from the duet “O happy we” and the breathless crescendo before the coda from Cunegonde’s “Glitter and be gay.”