Bernstein: Candide; The Glimmerglass Festival, Cooperstown, NY, August 13, 2023—The 2023 Glimmerglass Festival is the first helmed by Rob Ainsley, late of the Washington National Opera and of the American Opera Initiative. For six years, he commissioned and premiered more than 30 new operas and other works. This inventiveness and, I might add, fearlessness, turned his debut season in Cooperstown into a mini-cornucopia.
The only leftover from Francesca Zambello’s stewardship was a revival of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, which used the 1999 version from the Royal National Theater of London: Can anyone imagine getting as many great minds to work on one project today? Richard Wilbur, Stephen Sondheim, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, John Latouche, and Bernstein himself, all dipped in, editing one-another, adding, subtracting, taking more hints from the original Voltaire, cramming as much cleverness as they could into what was going to be a masterpiece. (In all, Bernstein et al, wrote or re-wrote almost 90 songs). Well, masterpiece it is, but incoherent and far too busy at times (the second act can make you dizzy), and the sheer fecundity of it all is sometimes indigestible; too many ingredients. Still, has anyone ever left a performance unhappy?
Surely not at Glimmerglass. The ruminations on optimism, as expressed by Prof. Pangloss— a stand-in for Voltaire himself—that we live in the best of all possible worlds is instantly contradicted as our innocent hero, Candide, and the children of the Baron and Baroness of Westphalia (Maxmilian and Cunegonde) whom he tutors, go off into the world.
Cunegonde and Candide profess their young love for one another. A bloody war, an earthquake in Lisbon, Cunegonde’s descent into self-approving prostitution, a meeting with a wacky old woman with one buttock, all seem to lead them to Spain. All of the characters, some we thought dead, wind up separately in Montevideo, Paraguay, El Dorado, on a Tunisian ship, and Venice. At the end, Candide convinces them to go to the purity of the mountains and do good work—to “make our garden grow”. Suddenly the cynicism and very pointed irony melts away, and Bernstein gives us the most sentimentally gorgeous finale—it is the sound of hope and goodness.
The production, now under the auspices of choreographer Eric Sean Fogel, was jumpy but great fun, and music director Joseph Colaneri held it together and made sense of it. The endlessly wry text, clearly spoken, with titles above the stage for the songs, almost stuns with its cleverness.
Bradley Dean was the finest Pangloss I’ve encountered—witty, wise, all-too knowing, yet sympathetic—a fine guide. Innocent of look and tone, tenor Brian Vu made us believe “It must be so” and delighted in his duet, “Oh happy we”, with the Cunegonde of Katrina Galka, who quite rightly stopped the show with “Glitter and be Gay” with its high Cs, Ds, and E-flat. Meredith Arwady’s Old Lady, clearly sung, explained her ability to adjust to anything in “I am easily assimilated”. Schyler Vargas was a convincingly vain Maxmilian, handsome and properly stupid. Ryan Johnson did double duty as The Grand Inquisitor and the Governor of Montevideo. A half-dozen Glimmerglass Young Artists filled out the rest of the roles like the professionals they will soon be.
It’s good to hear an audience laugh out loud at the opera, not to mention leave the hall humming some tunes. Disasters may befall us, but it’s up to us to overcome them, and we may just be rewarded with a C major finale that sounds like sunshine.
