Page 18 - Phil Made in America program digital flipbook

Dr. Joan Tower is the Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard College, where
she has taught music composition since 1972. Born in New Rochelle, NY, she lived in
La Paz, Bolivia from the ages of nine to seventeen, then graduated from Bennington
and Columbia (doctorate in composition in 1968, co-founder of the Da Capo Chamber
Players, 1969-86). She was the first woman recipient of the Grawemeyer Award
($100,000 in 1990) and is one of the most frequently commissioned living composers.
Her six Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman and concertos for woodwinds, strings, and
percussion are widely played. Musical America named her 2020 Composer of the Year.
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Overture to Candide (1956) Leonard Bernstein

(1918 – 1990)
Iconic Massachusetts conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein was an avid
opera fan. As a teenager, he led works from the piano including Carmen and Pirates
of Penzance (during summers in Sharon, MA) and a revival of the politically charged
musical The Cradle Will Rock (at Harvard, only two years after the premiere). He
conducted the American premiere of Britten’s Peter Grimes (Tanglewood, 1946), was
the first American to conduct at La Scala (1953-55, supporting Maria Callas), and
devoted an episode of his 1958 Omnibus TV program to La Bohème (“What Makes
Opera Grand?”). He conducted Verdi’s Falstaff at the Met and in Vienna (1964-66),
featured operas in the NYPhil’s Young People’s Concerts, and recorded more than a
dozen complete operas. He composed three ballets, three film scores, dozens of popular
theater pieces, and three operas in his own Broadway-informed classical style: Trouble
in Tahiti (1951), A Quiet Place (1983), and Candide.

Bernstein’s Candide began as a 1956 Broadway musical combining Lilian Hellman’s
version of Voltaire’s expansive satire (Candide, or Optimism, 1759) with sung lyrics by
a collection of literary stars (Dorothy Parker, the young Stephen Sondheim, Richard
Wilbur, and Bernstein himself). Without the composer’s involvement, Harold Prince
heavily revised the show (1973-76), replacing Hellman’s book with a single act by Hugh
Wheeler (later author of the book for Sweeney Todd), and then expanded it into a two-
act “opera house” version for the New York City Opera (1982). Bernstein created his
own “final revised version” (1988-89): but the music that unifies all these versions is the
magnificent Overture, the only original part that Bernstein orchestrated himself.
The Overture begins with the intervals of a rising minor seventh and major seventh
(framing B-flat major): they are developed as “optimistic” motives throughout the show.
Without warning, we stumble comically into E-flat major (music from Candide’s “battle
scene”) and hear the “Oh Happy We” duet as a second theme. Note Bernstein’s “naïve”
development section, a gleeful violin solo, asymmetrical rhythms (dating from his
youthful fascination with Stravinsky in Boston and Tanglewood), and a final reference
to his hit coloratura soprano tune “Glitter and Be Gay,” which may be familiar as the
theme for Dick Cavett’s TV shows (1969-86).

Bernstein’s biographer Jack Gottlieb comments, “The Overture concludes with a shower

16 Plymouth Philharmonic O r ches tr a
16 Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra