THEATER : The Passages of ‘Candide’ : After 30 years, Gordon Davidson returns to the crossover show that made his name: Leonard Bernstein’s opera/operetta/musical.

At the end of 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted one of his most exultant concerts in a lifetime of exultant music making. It was a gala concert performance in London of his “Candide,” offered with a cast of some of our most celebrated opera stars, young and old. It was an evening of great emotion, the first (and only) time in his life that Bernstein had conducted what many feel is his best score (popular or serious); it was also the first time all the music to the show had, at last, been heard. And although Bernstein’s voice croaked worse than ever, ill with a flu (and also suffering from the emphysema that would kill him almost exactly 10 months later), he typically couldn’t keep quiet.

He began the evening by speaking to the audience, calling himself “the old professor” and describing, in his best rabbinical manner, the historical motivations for Voltaire to write his famous satire on optimism and our own continuing struggle with good and evil. Assuming a mock pompous tone when explaining the philosophical background of l’optimisme , he suddenly broke off, saying, “Oh, the hell with it! Let’s play the overture.”

Bernstein’s little professorial act doesn’t quite come off when it is watched on the Deutsche Grammophon video of that concert. It seems too contrived, as if Bernstein were addressing not the audience but the camera and, by extension, history. And he probably was, in an understandable attempt to shut everybody up about “Candide” already.

Is it an opera, or isn’t it? Is it the operetta that Bernstein, when pressed, initially called it? Or is it, at heart, the Broadway musical that it was supposed to be all along, but that audiences in the mid-’50s just weren’t sophisticated enough to get?

Bernstein had been hearing the same questions for some 35 years, ever since “Candide” flopped on Broadway. But they wouldn’t go away then. And they won’t go away now, with “Candide” being revived Wednesday in a new production by Gordon Davidson to celebrate the return of the Center Theatre Group to the newly renovated Ahmanson Theatre.

They won’t go away in part because this production in particular will inevitably draw attention on how much has changed (and how some things haven’t changed) since Davidson’s famous production of “Candide” at UCLA in 1966. It was that production with Davidson’s then-resident UCLA company, Theater Group, that brought “Candide” back to life, the show having been little seen or heard from since its Broadway flop 10 years earlier. It was also that show that prompted Dorothy Chandler to invite Davidson and his company to become residents of the new Music Center.

One thing that has changed, of course, is our attitude toward opera and musical theater, and their crossing over into each other’s turf. “Candide” has, since 1966, succeeded on Broadway; it has been produced in opera houses internationally, and, thanks to Bernstein’s extraordinary performance, it has triumphed as a concert work. The overture is utterly familiar concert fare, both on symphonic and pops programs (to say nothing for having once been the theme music for Dick Cavett’s television program). The comic aria, “Glitter and Be Gay,” is sung by coloratura sopranos everywhere.

No one looked askance when the New York City Opera mounted an opera house production of “Candide” in 1982 and brought it to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as part of an opera season (the controversy was only about the questionable taste of Harold Prince’s slapstick production); no one looks askance now that it is produced by a theater company at the Ahmanson.

In his extensive notes to Bernstein’s “Candide” recording made at the time of the concert performance, Andrew Porter dismisses those questions about opera and musical, saying that we don’t ask them about “The Magic Flute,” about Offenbach’s frilly works or Gilbert & Sullivan. And Davidson, when asked what “Candide” is, says that by now we should be flexible enough to understand that it is not any one thing.

“The complexity and the multiplicity of it is both its genius and maybe has been a bit of its curse,” he explains. “Bernstein was using all the forms--opera, operetta and musical theater forms--with great purpose. And so you have to embrace the fact that it is many things and it is its own unique thing.”

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But “Candide” has had what Bernstein called a checkered career for a reason, and its complex history reveals something important about America’s troubled relationship with opera and the difficulty we have had, and continue to have, in establishing a national opera style.

There is no easy summarizing that checkered career. The score has six different copyright dates for music and lyrics. Although the principal lyricist was the poet Richard Wilbur, there are additional lyrics by John Latouche, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, Steven Sondheim and Bernstein himself.

Someone could probably write a book about the travails of the show’s book alone. Hellman’s cumbersome adaptation of Voltaire is usually thought to have been what sunk the original show. A new adaptation by Hugh Wheeler reworked the show for Prince’s revival at the Chelsea Theater in Brooklyn in 1973, which went on to Broadway. It was gradually extended into an opera house version for the New York City Opera in 1982, and later expanded further, with the participation of John Wells, for a version for the Scottish Opera along with the addition of music never used before. But the fact is that practically everyone who has attempted to put “Candide” on the stage has fiddled, in one way or another, with the book.

In Voltaire’s novella, Candide and his fiancee, Cunegonde, suffer the most extraordinary series of tortures and humiliations around the globe, with Candide always trying to maintain the philosophy that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire’s satirizing of the Catholic Church particularly appealed to Bernstein and Hellman, who saw a parallel between the Inquisition and the Senate’s anti-Communist witch hunts, to which they had both been subjected.

But “Candide” was far too literary and scenically ambitious (every scene is in a different country) for the Broadway stage. And Bernstein, moreover, chose remarkably highbrow collaborators: a serious playwright and, in Wilbur, a poet who would eventually become the Poet Laureate of the United States. That also meant three implacable egos. Hellman was reportedly intractable about anyone touching a word of her prose. Wilbur, according to Humphrey Burton in his biography of Bernstein, once became so frustrated with Bernstein’s own literary pretensions that he told Hellman, “If you catch [Lenny] rewriting my lyrics, clip his piano wires.”

Nor does there seem much doubt that Bernstein had operatic ambitions with “Candide.” He called it his musical love letter to Europe, and he included many European forms in the songs, from waltz to Scottish dance to comic aria. He expected Cunegonde (and, to a lesser extent, Candide) to be singers with operatic technique. And Davidson has followed suit by selecting young American singing actors--Kenn Chester as Candide and Constance Hauman as Cunegonde--with opera backgrounds.

So why didn’t Bernstein just write an opera?

Opera, and especially outdated operetta, were not, in the mid-’50s valid American art forms. The opera house was (as it mostly still is) a museum of European culture. And the few successful American operas of the time, like the works of Gian Carlo Menotti and Carlisle Floyd, looked to Europe for musical models, however American their subject matter.

What little indigenous opera there had been had always had a Broadway connection. In the ‘30s, George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” and Virgil Thomson’s “Four Saints in Three Acts”--the two finest examples of opera that drew from the American musical vernacular--both were first performed on Broadway (and both with non-operatic all-black casts).

Postwar “American” opera was outright Broadway opera--Kurt Weill’s “Street Scene,” Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina” (based upon Hellman’s “Little Foxes”), and Bernstein’s own slight one-acter, “Trouble in Tahiti.” They were, in fact, works indistinguishable from the Broadway musical style, except that they weren’t comedies, had more music and less talk, and took themselves very seriously. But whereas Gershwin and Thomson had seemed forward-looking for their time, by the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, with the rise of the international avant-garde, Weill and Blitzstein were musical reactionaries.

Bernstein allied himself with Weill and Blitzstein, but not without looking over his shoulder. And what he saw, nipping at his heels behind him, were the progressive modernist composers who were the musical optimists of their time. While Broadway opera tended to focus on the problems with society and personal relationships, the avant-garde had little interest in musical theater or expressing emotion in music. It was a great era--in all the arts--of abstraction, and composers--be they John Cage or Milton Babbitt in America, Pierre Boulez or Karlheinz Stockhausen in Europe--were utopian, looking for the latest musical discovery, and, to some extent, anarchistic.

But it was the avant-garde that got the serious attention in composition that Bernstein craved. And it is not hard to read in “Candide,” or to hear in “Candide,” a parody of this kind of musical optimism. The song “Quiet,” for instance, about yawning boredom, caricatures both Cage and 12-tone music.

Yet “Quiet,” especially as Bernstein himself conducted it at the end of his life, also happens to contain some of the most eerily beautiful music in the score. Bernstein had to prove he could do everything, not just write an infectious waltz but also write infectious 12-tone music, too.

That Bernstein did not want to choose sides, in his life or his music, is evident from everything he was doing at the time he was composing “Candide.” He was also working on a sophisticated genuine musical, “West Side Story,” and cementing his relationship with the New York Philharmonic. In the remarkable 10 months between December, 1956, and September, 1957, “Candide” had opened and closed on Broadway (after 73 performances), “West Side Story” had opened and triumphed, and Bernstein, at 39, had become the first American music director and the youngest music director of the New York Philharmonic.

It was all too much. Broadway wasn’t ready for Voltaire. And Bernstein was pulled in too many directions in his career and with “Candide.” He wanted a show that, at the same time, skewered the political right and the musical left, that celebrated Europe in its music but that was still quintessentially American. He wanted a show that was truly comedic and gay, but that had profound spiritual overtones as well. Ultimately, Candide and Cunegonde take a spiritual journey, and only through knowing themselves and not have unreasonable expectations can they, as they sing in the transcendent finale, make their garden grow.

That finale, “Make Our Garden Grow,” which has become one of Bernstein’s most beloved songs, may well have been its sticking point all along. Could Bernstein, who was living in the best of all possible worlds, have, in 1956, persuaded anyone of that spiritual journey? In a review of Davidson’s 1966 production, Times music critic Martin Bernheimer wrote that the finale was the one weakness that marred the original score, finding that it “remains maudlin, both in sentiment and in sound. It represents the kind of romantic gesture to which Bernstein has always been prone, the kind he steadfastly avoided in ‘Candide’ until this crucial point.”

Although Davidson claims that after 30 years he doesn’t even remember the details of his earlier production, he says that probably what has changed most about our attitude toward “Candide” over the years is what that finale means to us today and what Bernstein did to change its impact.

“I think there is a difference in sensibility between then and now,” he explains. “That notion of the power of redemption and transformation, which is the foundation of the finale, is a bit more tentative in 1995 terms. We all want to believe that if one person takes care of himself and if from that uneasy base we build community that it will lead to a soaring magnificence.” But Davidson notes that panaceas are not so easy anymore, and that no longer “simply by knowing the truth can you then expect to automatically go the next step.”

For his new production, Davidson will include a chorale about universal good that was not in any of the earlier versions, and only first heard in Bernstein’s concert performance. It is played three times, at beginning, midway and end, and each time with different lyrics which Bernstein wrote himself. The first time it is all bright optimism; the second time it questions those initial absolutes. Finally, when it is sung as prelude to “Make Our Garden Grow,” Davidson finds that “we’re not so sure anymore.”

That we can no longer be so certain that Candide and Cunegonde, even through self knowledge, will succeed in their relationship, changes the entire meaning of the song. (It is probably no coincidence that Bernstein was obsessed with psychoanalysis but lived a life of hopelessly entangled relationships.) Writing in the notes to his 1984 recording of “West Side Story,” Bernstein explained that that show was not an opera because it did not resolve itself in the music. One could then say that “Candide” originally was not an opera because it resolved too facilely.

But when Bernstein conducted “Candide” in London, there was no question that his conception of the piece, grand, bloated even, was all now of a piece, that he conceived it as a large spiritual journey akin to that of a Mahler symphony, with the finale being both as imposing as Mahler and as questioning.

And because of that, “Candide” no longer seems a reactionary work. It has even become a postmodern model for American composers facing an operatic downsizing ‘90s after a lavish operatic ‘80s. Most notably, John Adams and Peter Sellars, responsible for two of the most noted American operas of recent years, “Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer,” have lately turned to music theater with popular song.

Not only does their latest collaboration, “I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky,” take its musical inspiration directly from Weill and Bernstein, but it also takes the same kind of hard look at a complacent America in the mid-’90s, in which a time bomb is ticking, that Bernstein and Hellman took. Also like “Candide,” “Ceiling/Sky” had a significant flop at its first performance that has required rewriting and reworking and, consequently a re-evaluation.

It surely would have amused the old professor that not only is “Candide” the model for a whole new form of postmodern music theater for century’s end--which also includes collaborations between Robert Wilson and Tom Waits (“The Black Rider” and “Alice”) and Randy Newman’s current “Faust”--but that we still don’t know what to call it. Operetta, today, is simply a dead issue.

But most likely his reply would still be the same as it was at the end of the ‘80s: Oh, the hell with it! Just play the overture!

* “Candide” opens Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 365-3500, (714) 740-2000. Performances are Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m. Also next Sunday, Nov. 19 and 26, and Dec. 3, 7 p.m.; Nov. 20, 8 p.m.; Dec. 7, 14 and 21, 2 p.m. Through Dec. 24. $15-$55.