E-Mail This Article to a Friend All possible worlds Opera Boston’s Candide, Handel and Haydn’s Messiah BY DAVID WEININGER

Leonard Bernstein’s career as a composer always left him poised uncomfortably between "serious music" and Broadway. That he was always better known for West Side Story than his three symphonies discouraged Lenny no end. When he left the New York Philharmonic, in 1969, it wasn’t to write show tunes but to compose a Masterpiece, one that never materialized.

Few of his works illustrate this dilemma better than Candide, which he once called "a personal love letter to European music." By "European music" he meant the light-opera tradition that encompasses Gilbert & Sullivan, Offenbach, and Bellini. All the more surprising, then, that it had its origins in Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s. To Bernstein and playwright Lillian Hellman, who wrote the book for the original production, the parallels between the dangerous phony moralism espoused by Voltaire’s priests and the smearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee could not have been clearer. Setting Voltaire’s brilliantly satiric novella would be their response.

The artistic marriage was an unhappy one, however. Hellman’s script was thought clumsy and awkward, obscuring the light touch that made Voltaire’s satire so acute. And it was a poor match for the brilliant charm of Bernstein’s music. Candide opened in 1956 to decidedly mixed reviews, its initial run lasting only 73 performances — far from a success by Broadway standards. It was repeatedly reworked thereafter, and Hellman’s contribution was eventually erased when the book was rewritten by Hugh Wheeler.

So what is Candide? Its most common designation — operetta — is evidence that it isn’t really at home in the concert hall or the theater. Most of the songs have the sound and the feel of show tunes, but the music outdoes almost every other Broadway show in sophistication, even Bernstein’s other works in the medium. "Paris Waltz," the formidable coloratura aria "Glitter and Be Gay," "Best of all Possible Worlds," and the concluding "Make Our Garden Grow" bring Candide into the company of Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and Jacques Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann.

In the end, of course, it doesn’t matter what we call it: Candide is one of America’s most distinguished music dramas, and perhaps Bernstein’s best-written score. But I can’t help wondering how Lenny would have felt knowing that its magnificent overture has become one of the most frequently programmed American orchestral works — a stand-in for the never-written Masterpiece.

We’ll get another chance to revisit Candide next weekend when Opera Boston (formerly Boston Academy of Music) makes its regular-season debut under its new name, with James Schaffner in the title role and Sanford Sylvan sings Pangloss. Opera Boston music director Gil Rose will conducts three performances at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont Street in the Theater District: November 28 and 29 at 7:30 p.m. and November 30 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $24 to $85; call (617) 451-3388.

ALL PLACES AND TIMES. Although we’ve become used to performances of Messiah as a Christmas institution, Handel faced similar questions of genre crossing at its first performance in Dublin in April 1742. As Harvard Music Department chairman Thomas Kelley notes in his wonderful book First Nights, Handel’s oratorio was one of the first major works to bring religious texts out of the church and into the very secular world of the concert hall. Many thought that a musical presentation of the Christian message was thoroughly unfit stuff for a paying audience expecting entertainment.

We moderns, though, have no trouble with getting our religious edification in the concert hall, or our musical entertainment in church. Almost all religious works of art have become both sacred and worldly in varying measures, and Messiah is no exception. For us, the Hallelujah Chorus means the same thing in church as it does outside of it.

Still debated is whether the piece properly belongs at Christmas or Easter. The best answer, according to Kelley, is both. It is, he writes, "neither a life of Christ nor scenes from that life: it is the story of humanity’s redemption through God’s sending of his son, the Messiah." Insofar as it needs to belong to a season, it does so equally well at Christmas (the Incarnation) or Easter (the Resurrection). In fact, by presenting the essence of Christianity in compact form, it fits just about any time.

Now that that’s all cleared up, you can feel free to enjoy Messiah next week when the Handel and Haydn Society’s annual performances begin. Grant Llewellyn will conduct the assembled H&H forces and a line-up of soloists including soprano Lisa Saffer and countertenor Matthew White. Performances at Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, are November 30 and December 6 and 7 at 3 p.m., and December 5 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $23 to $74; call (617) 266-3605.