The Modern Alchemist by Richard Alan Miller

It would appear that the urgent political impetus for writing the musical was the one aspect of the work that didn't stand up to the test of time. The director, Tyrone Guthrie, became too nervous about her “Auto da Fé” scene specifically, as it directly satirized the House Un-American Activities Committee. The lyricist credits were already beginning to mount up.Īlthough the theme of political aggression originally attracted Lillian Hellman to the project, her sharpest writing on the topic was ironically jettisoned while the show was still out of town. By October 1956, Candide was ready for performances in Boston, where Dorothy Parker contributed lyrics to 'The Venice Gavotte' while Bernstein and Hellman had also added lyrics of their own to other numbers. Hellman, Bernstein, and Wilbur worked periodically over the next two years but labored in earnest through 1956, a year when Bernstein was simultaneously composing West Side Story. Before long, LaTouche was replaced by poet Richard Wilbur. Charged with rage and indignation, she began her adaptation of Voltaire's with lyricist John LaTouche and Bernstein, who wrote numerous musical sketches. Hellman observed a sinister parallel between the Inquisition's church-sponsored purges and the 'Washington Witch Trials,' fueled by anti-Communist hysteria and waged by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Voltaire's 1758 novella satirized the fashionable philosophies of his day and, especially, the Catholic Church whose Inquisition routinely tortured and killed 'heretics' in a ghastly event known as an 'Auto da Fé' ('act of faith'). In 1953, the renowned playwright Lillian Hellman proposed to Leonard Bernstein that they adapt Voltaire's Candide for the musical theater.

The Modern Alchemist by Richard Alan Miller