Leonard Bernstein was born on today (August 25) in 1918.
Candide opened on Broadway in 1956 and closed after two months — a famous, thorough failure that Bernstein and his collaborators kept revising for the next thirty years without ever quite fixing. The overture survived on its own. It is four and a half minutes long, it gets played by more orchestras than almost any other American concert piece, and it is a small masterclass in how to be funny in orchestral writing without ever winking at the audience.
The recording to watch is the Barbican concert of December 1989, the last time Bernstein conducted it. He was seventy-one and had ten months to live. He barely moves. The beat is in his eyebrows, his mouth, an occasional flick of one hand — the London Symphony had rehearsed it, and he seems to have decided that the remaining job was simply to enjoy it in front of them.
Nothing about it is a farewell, which is why it works as one.