Candide

The young Candide grows up with the two half-grown children of his uncle, Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh, Cunegonde and Maximilian, well sheltered in the latter’s castle in Westphalia. From their common tutor, the philosopher Dr. Pangloss, the three of them are educated together with the chambermaid Paquette in the secure belief that they are living in the »best of all possible worlds«. When Candide is ultimately disowned by his own family and must leave for the wide world he starts on a journey in the course of which he becomes the victim of natural disasters as well as witness to political and religious conflicts, abuse, treachery and deadly diseases, but none of which can however pry him loose from maintaining his unshakeable optimism about the »best of all worlds«.

Leonard Bernstein took the philosophical-satirical novel »Candide or Optimism« of the French Enlightenment thinker Voltaire from 1759 as a model for his »comic operetta« in two acts which premiered on New York’s Broadway on 1 December 1956. The composer subsequently revised his own work with the aid of various authors a number of times. Inspired by the caustic, socially critical irony of Voltaire, Bernstein created for his best known drama alongside of »West Side Story« music that in its poignant mixture of operetta, musical and cabaret at the same time constituted, as the composer himself once remarked, a »declaration of love to European music«, which quotes both European dance forms like the gavotte, the mazurka or the polka as well as traditions from Italian bel canto opera.