The best of all possible worlds: The Eldorado episode in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide

Abstract

In January 1954 Leonard Bernstein began work with Lillian Hellman on a musical version of Voltaire’s Candide. A first draft of the show was complete by the end of the year but was subsequently revised with new lyricist Richard Wilbur, eventually opening for previews in October 1956 and on Broadway that December. From the beginning, Candide was intended as political satire. Both Bernstein and Hellman leaned to the left politically and were embroiled in McCarthyism during the early years of the Cold War; Candide was their indictment of ‘puritanical snobbery, phony moralism, inquisitorial attacks on the individual, brave-new-world optimism, [and] essential superiority’, as Bernstein himself explained. Voltaire’s critique of Enlightenment optimism is here deployed against the ideological certainties of Eisenhower’s America. Yet the letters, scripts and scores that document the genesis of Candide indicate that playwright and composer struggled with its meanings and, even more, with their own intent. Of particular interest as a site of that struggle is the Eldorado episode, a passage of central yet ambiguous significance in Voltaire’s conte. Although Hellman and Bernstein may have first been attracted to Candide for its political potential, changes to the Eldorado episode, involving a complete reworking of the second act, shifted the focus of Candide away from satirical critique and towards a romantic plot more typical of the Broadway musical.