“Glitter and be Gay” from Candide

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

“Glitter and be Gay” from 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 applications of local colour, 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. Since then, however, it has made its way into the operatic repertoire, not least successfully at Scottish Opera (in an adaptation by John Wells) in 1988.

Most prominent among the operatic elements of Candide is “Glitter and be gay” which awards the soprano heroine one of the most brilliant arias of its kind. Introduced by a cor anglais solo, it doesn’t sound very gay at first, as Cunegonde laments in slow waltz time the fallen-woman situation to which events have reduced her. But then, with a change of tempo she finds consolation in it – the champagne, the dresses, the jewellery – and resolves to be bright and cheerful. The slow waltz-time returns but once again she revels in her sapphires, her gold, her diamonds, this time in even more glittering and even more challenging coloratura.