Just about every opera we know is a reworking of the original composition by the composer.  After experiencing the rehearsal period, opening night, critics' response or perhaps the desire to rethink the work years later, many composers have decided to rewrite their operas.  For some works, like Don Carlos, the process is fairly well known, and for others, like Traviata and Butterfly it is practically unknown to the general public.  Broadway musicals have a more open history.  Public consciousness of the adding and subtracting of songs and dialogue in the out of town try-out is a fairly well-known process and in our own time which has begun to value the restoration of the Broadway musical it has become common for previously cut material and original orchestrations to find their way back into contemporary performances and recordings. 

When On Your Toes opened on Broadway in 1983 with its original orchestrations, arrangements and complete score (as well as its original director and choreographer from its first appearance in 1936), few people seemed willing to support the concept of the integrity of the Broadway score.  The songs were never in doubt of course — provided you could add a few extra hits to a revival, but never had anyone dared to keep the dance arrangements and orchestrations intact.  The wisdom of the time was to write new ones.  (This of course still unfortunately happens, as with London's recent Kiss Me Kate which jettisoned all the original dance music and replaced it with new music and totally new orchestrations.  Certainly more than 40% of the evening's music is composed/arranged by someone other than Cole Porter.)  Kiss Me Kate at least was a hit in 1946.  But what of the flops?  What if Puccini had thrown out Butterfly after his opening night fiasco?  (or Verdi with Traviata?)  Puccini and Verdi were fortunate in that they lived in an era which gave the composer a second or third chance.  This rarely happens today in the world of opera/music theater. 

When Candide opened on Broadway in 1956 it was not a success.  Its out of town tryout in Boston was unhappy.  (The staid people of Boston still can recall Tyrone Guthrie's pre-curtain speech begging their indulgence by telling them "Keep your peckers up!").  The work was called "a comic operetta" but there was nothing funny in Lillian Hellman's book.  It was ponderous and pedagogical, springing more from her anger at the McCarthy trials than from any attempt at representing Voltaire.  While Leonard Bernstein had captured the spirit of the French book, the American playwright seemingly had no intention of doing anything of the kind.  Opera singers played the major roles, except for actor Max Adrian as Pangloss and a young and inexperienced lyric soprano Barbara Cook, as Cunegonde.  Operatic works had occasionally been tried on Broadway — and rarely with commercial success: Porgy and Bess in the 1930s, Street Scene in the 1940s and at the time of Candide, Menotti opened The Saint of Bleeker Street and The Consul on the Great White Way.  Bernstein's mentor Marc Blitzstein had adapted Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes for his opera Regina, but again without making money — Broadway's cruel measure of success. 

But Candide would not just die.  It came to London in 1959 with some new songs but it did not succeed there either.  Until 1971, when Sheldon Patinkin directed a new production in Los Angeles with the hopes of a Broadway run, the Hellman script was adapted and Bernstein was still writing material for poor Candide.  The Patinkin production got all the way to Washington's Kennedy Center but closed there before it could travel five hours north to New York.  But it still would not die.  The next year Hal Prince decided to make a completely new version without one line from Lillian Hellman.  The English born playwright Hugh Wheeler wrote a short and very funny book to accommodate a one act cartoon-like version of Candide.  This time Bernstein had no hand in the music, preferring to stay at Harvard for his Norton lectures and letting me act in loco compositoris, using his music.  The puzzle was to fit pre-existing music to a new set of situations and locales.  Armed with two volumes of extra material written from 1956 until 1971 as well as the 1956 published score, I was allowed to play in the garden with Hal and Hugh and Steve Sondheim.  It was a magic time for me.  Bernstein came to the dress rehearsal in Brooklyn and seemed to love it.  He saw it one more time and seemed to hate it.  But it was a hit.  It sold tickets and for the first time in Candide's history it was making money.  After its limited run in Brooklyn it opened on Broadway, slightly enlarged, but still in one act and it ran over a year.  Once it closed, this little and funny Candide became and still is an immensely popular property for small theater companies throughout America.  But more than half the score was missing from that version and its orchestration for thirteen instruments is clever but hardly the sound intended by the composer in 1956. 

As a stopgap I arranged a Candide Suite for the Israel Philharmonic which contains about fifty minutes of the 1956 score and can be performed by symphony orchestras with four soloists and a chorus.  At least this way more of the original score could be heard.  But in 1982 the idea of an expanded performing version based on the Hugh Wheeler script became a reality in response to enquiries from opera houses to make a version with greater legitimacy available.  This time Leonard Bernstein went to Los Angeles to run a conducting school while I basically completed the task started in 1973 for Brooklyn.  The expanded book could accept almost all of the music from Candide, even some songs which had never been orchestrated before.  The two act "opera house" version opened at the New York City Opera and was an immense success — not by Broadway terms, of course, because it only played a very limited run, rather than eight a week — but as an opera it was up there with Carmen and Boheme in popularity in City Opera's season.  Although the composer was always consulted about this expanded version and although he was acclaimed on that opening night and although he was unstinting in his praise for me, I knew him well enough to know that it was still not right.  The success was hardly the point.  Something had gone out of Candide after 1971 and the composer wanted it back.  It would be facile to say it was guilt over allowing the Hellman book to be jettisoned that caused this malaise.  I felt it too, and I am no fan of that original book.  It seemed impossible, but after working on this for a third of my life, I found myself suggesting a hopefully final version that would redress the problems and even risk failure far the sake of something very important. 

Leonard Bernstein's music has always been about one thing: exploring the differences among people and pleading for tolerance to allow us to live in peace and kindness.  This Candide had turned into one long joke.  The heart, the tears and the faith — all clearly part of Voltaire's reason for writing Candide — were nowhere to be found in the post-Lillian Hellman versions.  Also the music was all out of order.  The music intended to be played in Paris had to be placed in Lisbon and the New World and the Venice music was shifted to Constantinople.  With a fresh beginning, using Hugh's two act version I was sure that the venues could be re-arranged to come closer to the 1956 venues and then the four missing songs and a chorale — most of this being "serious" music could be restored, giving a proper balance to the evening.  The incredulous composer agreed to another go — but this time he had to come to Glasgow and be available during the months of preparation. 

Hugh Wheeler agreed to adapt his own script, but then sadly died.  Jonathan Miller, our chosen director, suggested John Wells to help adapt the script.  And we all re-read Voltaire.  This new version restores much Voltaire to the text of Wheeler, which was already closely aligned to the French original, but now includes moments of Voltairian seriousness.  "Candide's Lament" is placed where the composer always wanted it near the beginning of the show.  (This song, which was cut from the 1956 Broadway production, contains the "Cunegonde theme" for which there are many subsequent variations in the score.)  The Paris music is in Paris, the Venice music takes place in Venice.  "We are Women" written for London is restored for the first time in almost thirty years.  "Nothing More than This" written in the fifties is restored to the score and placed where the composer intended it — a kind of Alfredo aria in which Candide throws the gold at Cunegonde and leaves her.  "Martin's Laughing Song", written in 1971, is a major restoration since it balances Pangloss' "Best of all Possible Worlds".  Here Candide meets the man who thinks this is the "Worst of all Possible Worlds".  From the entrance into Venice to the end of the play the musical numbers flow with almost no dialogue through the glorious finale.  We have risked upsetting the success of the opera-house version because Candide is a more complex work, one which aims higher.  What better place to try this out than Glasgow?