What was it like working with Leonard Bernstein on the opera/musical Candide?
Well, there were moments of course when we rubbed each other the wrong way, when I wanted to do one thing with a number and he wanted to do something else. But mostly what I felt was pleasure in working with somebody so full of drive and energy. It was a peculiar thing to discover about him that he was not melodically inventive. Very good melodies did occur to him, but they took their time about it. Thats not a negative criticismits just that if youre working on a musical show, and thinking up new numbers, I suppose its desirable if your musical collaborator thinks of a lot of tunes. He had ultimately very good ideas about every number, but was slow to think up anything that we could whistle or set words to, and so very often he was reluctant to have me write the words first, and I had to push a little about that. We ended up in a happy draw, pretty well dividing the work evenly between us. Of course hed been working on the materials of Candide for about five years before I came into t
