Leonard Bernstein: Candide

If there were a prize awarded for the highest number of versions of a single work of art, it would have certainly gone to Candide. It haunted Leonard Bernstein for a full 33 years! Starting with its first musical version to the libretto of the American writer Lilian Hellman who adapted the famous short story by Voltaire (the first night took place in New York on December 1, 1956), over yet another musical version, until the final opera staging shown at the Barbican Centre in London on December 13, 1989, the libretto as well as the score were always changing by new songs being added (Bernstein himself wrote the lyrics to several of them, actually). The joyful exuberant satire, in part a sophisticated operetta and in part a crazy comedy with tints of the Monty-Pythonite humour, represents a gorgeous rendering of Voltaire’s ironic grin at the philosophic courses based on optimistic world outlooks.

In the course of the opera that moves forward in a lightning tempo, the luckless youth Candide was driven out of his native Westphalia, he was recruited in the Bulgarian troops, taken before the Spanish Inquisition, impoverished by a trickster, he wandered in the South American virgin forests, survived a wreckage at an abandoned island, and was repeatedly separated from his beloved Cunegund who with dignity faced various forms of corporeal denigration committed against her by literally everybody around. However, Candide always keeps in mind during all those catastrophes the theorem pronounced by his tutor, Doctor Pangloss, namely that “everything is perfect in this most perfect of all worlds”. Bernstein’s charming score is intermingled with witty songs (inter alia, Cunegund’s famous coloratura aria “Glitter and Be Gay”) and it has become a cult musical and, particularly in the United States, a household item that appears on the repertory of both amateur troupes and major opera houses.

Premiere: May 25, 2006

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