“If I can write one, real moving American opera that any American can understand (and one that is, notwithstanding, a serious musical work),” wrote Bernstein in January of 1948, “I shall be a happy man.” With Candide and West Side Story, he was closer to his goal. His most successful and best-known stage works, they opened within a year of each other and were conceived in a similar creative spirit. The composer had an internal struggle about how to find the right formula. In a fictive conversation between his “irrepressible demon” (“Id”) and his ego (“L.B.”), published a month before the premiere of Candide, he exposes an unconscious battle about introducing European convention to the Broadway stage:

In the end, Bernstein reassures himself that that he is setting a “specific precedent” in the history of American theater by creating a “particular mixture of styles and elements:”

A month previously, in a talk on national television, he had more confidently declared American “musical comedy” as a form that occupies a “middle ground between variety show and opera.” He cited Rodgers and Hammerstein as precedents for having blended “the best elements of opera, operetta, revue, vaudeville, and all the rest” into “something quite original.” Bernstein concluded that although operetta played a role in educating audiences about musical complexity—paving the road to the “more ambitious musical comedies we have today”—the eclectic product that is American musical theater, “borrowing this from opera, that from revue, the other from operetta, something else from vaudeville,” had managed to create a new, indigenous form: “opera but in our own way.”