Penultimate March, and today’s song from Candide is Cunegonde’s aria “Glitter and be gay” (from Act 1, right before “You were dead, you know”, the title subject of my 3/27 posting on this blog), in which she confronts her, um, suitors with the defiant quatrain:
Enough! Enough!
I’ll take their diamond necklace
And show my noble stuff
By being gay and reckless!
(Oh, honey, I am so with you!)
Candide is a remarkable theater piece that provides almost as many quotations suitable for random occasions as the Alice books, but with a sensibility that is some sort of compound of Voltaire’s satirical novella and the New York City intellectual and artistic world of the 1950s. But it works.
Now: the work, my 3/27 posting, and two responses from old friends about the show.
The work. From Wikipedia:
Candide is [a comic] operetta with music composed by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics primarily by the poet Richard Wilbur, based on the 1759 novella of the same name by Voltaire. Other contributors to the text were John Latouche, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Stephen Sondheim, John Mauceri, John Wells, and Bernstein himself. Maurice Peress and Hershy Kay contributed orchestrations.
(#1) Cover of the original Broadway cast albumThe operetta was first performed in 1956 with a libretto by Lillian Hellman, but since 1974 it has been generally performed with a book by Hugh Wheeler, which is more faithful to Voltaire’s novella.
Bernstein’s works had a clear musical signature: characteristic melodic and rhythmic figures that make his music almost instantly recognizable, the way Richard Strauss’s music is. And whatever form he’s writing, it’s operatic, extravagantly theatrical. Indeed. his conducting was equally dramatic (a very long time ago I experienced an electrifying performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”), conducted by Bernstein, which was actually exhausting).
My 3/27 posting uses the duet between Candide and Cunegonde in Act 1 of Candide, “You were dead, you know”, to explore the life of Larry Schourup, my first male lover and then life-long friend, on the occasion of my discovering that, against my fears, he had not in fact died.
Two responses to this posting, in my e-mail.
First, from Bonnie Bendon (as she was in 1960 when we first met), now Benita Bendon Campbell, on 3/28:
When Ann [Daingerfeld, later Ann Daingerfield Zwicky] and I lived chez Mme Nollau, 86 rue de Lille [in Paris in 1956], Keene [Ann’s father] sent Ann a record player (that ended up with you [AMZ and ADZ] in Urbana and Columbus). It wasn’t fully compatible with French electricity, so it played everything a bit too s l o w l y and made us crazy. A very few of our recordings were bearable to hear because they were sung fast, really fast. One was Candide. We listened to it over and over. Once back in Princeton, we continued listening to it, but we had to get used to hearing it at a normal speed. Libby [Ann’s mother] loved that record, too — especially “lady [lightly], lady brightly, charming lady fly-by-nightly” [“Venice Gavotte”, from Act 2]
From “Venice Gavotte”, sung by Dr. Pangloss:
Millions of rubles and lire and francs,
Broke the bank, broke the bank,
Broke the best of all possible banks.Pieces of gold to the ladies I throw;
Easy come, easy go.
Shining gold to the ladies I throw.See them on their knees before me.
If they love me, can you blame them?
Little wonder they adore me.
Watch them woo me as I name them:Lady Frilly, Lady Silly,
Pretty Lady Willy-Nilly,
Lady Lightly, Lady Brightly,
Charming Lady Fly-by-Nightly.
Then, from Larry Schourup himself on 3/29:
I’m glad [that I] brought to your mind that marvelous song [“You were dead, you know”] from Candide. I remember hearing it at the Broadway Theater in about 1974 — from up close since the small audience was partly seated onstage and partly on bleachers surrounding the stage. And I remember the fetching Mark Baker as Candide.
I didn’t see Baker in Candide, but I did see him (enjoying his performance but not registering his name) in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. From Wikipedia:
Mark Fredric Baker (October 2, 1946 – August 13, 2018) was an American actor. He was best known for the title role in Harold Prince’s revival of Candide, for which he received a Tony Award nomination —
(#2) Mark Baker in the 1974 revival of Candide (photo from Playbill)— and his portrayal of Otto Kringelein in the international tour of Grand Hotel [AZ: I am a great fan of the film version]
… Baker made his professional acting debut portraying Linus Van Pelt in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in a 1970 off-Broadway production [AZ: Clark Gesner, the creator of this show, was a Princeton friend from 1959-60]
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