We all know Leonard Bernstein’s celebrated musical, West Side Story, but what about Candide, the seldom-staged opera eclipsed by its exuberant overture?
Opera Tampa opens its new season on Jan.31 with a rare production of Candide, which begins with Bernstein’s single-most performed work, a rollicking hodgepodge of themes and break-neck tempos that hint of what lies ahead. Though the opera initially was unsuccessful, Candide has overcome its tepid start and achieved more popularity. Orchestras frequently play the overture as a stand-alone showpiece, an audience favorite since the first hearing in 1956.
Bernstein hit a grand slam with this tightly wound, five-minute gem that he wrote to complement, not overshadow, the opera. But it does, and in doing so captures the composer at his creative best: irrepressible, personified, eclectic, glorified and exploding off the stage. The music captures the frenetic activity of the opera and raises the adrenaline of musicians trying to keep up with notes on the page.
Based on the once-banned French satire by Voltaire, Candide is the story of a young man under the thrall of Leibniz’s philosophy of optimism and his disillusionment with life’s hardships. In his coming-of-age parody, Voltaire drives home the point that evil serves no purpose and positivity is absurd. With this witty music, the composer juggles the ambiguities of Voltaire’s novel and asks how our “capacity for laughter is nobler than our divine gift of suffering.’’
Bernstein was drawn to this 18th-century classic and wrapped it in a deliciously modern score. It might be viewed as the second in a trio of literary based works, along with Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium) of 1954, and West Side Story (after Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet) of 1957.
Just as Voltaire’s Candide wanders the world in search of truth and happiness, the music traverses a varied terrain: neo-Baroque, lighthearted Rossini, Broadway, jazz, Yiddish-tinged tango, Viennese waltz, French gavotte, Olympian fanfare and the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan.
This musical kaleidoscope mirrors Bernstein himself, notes Humphrey Burton in his 1994 biography on the composer: “The rival elements that jostle for supremacy are a reflection of Bernstein’s own complicated, almost schizophrenic personality.”
Bernstein, who died in 1990, would have agreed. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do,’’ he once said, but it contains “more of me than anything I ever wrote.’’
Kurt Loft, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, has written about the arts in the Tampa Bay area for more than 40 years and is a regular contributor to Opera Tampa.