Overture to Candide

Candide opened on Broadway on 1 December 1956 at the Martin Beck Theatre and closed after seventy-three performances — a failure Bernstein spent the rest of his life trying to repair through successive revisions, with Lillian Hellman's book eventually replaced altogether. The overture survived independently from the start: Bernstein conducted it with the New York Philharmonic in January 1957, and within two years it had been taken up by orchestras everywhere. It runs about four minutes and works as a compressed medley, drawing on Oh, Happy We and on Cunegonde's coloratura aria Glitter and Be Gay.