Voltaire’s Candide—and the show it inspired—asks us to set argument aside and get to work. 

By Kelley Rourke

How do we make sense of bad things happening to good people? Voltaire’s Candide, ou l’optimisme (1759) plays like an irreverent comic strip, with no shortage of sex and violence, but at its heart is a serious question. The title character has his faith shaken by one calamity after another, and those who claim moral authority—whether via church, state, or academia—only seem to make matters worse. How, then, should one live? Banned shortly after publication, Candide was an instant hit and is now considered a classic of Western literature.

Young Candide has no reason to doubt his tutor, Pangloss, when he declares this to be “the best of all possible worlds.” After Candide is forced to leave home, he encounters the brutality of man (the Seven Years’ War), the savage power of nature (the Lisbon earthquake), and the corruption and hypocrisy of those in positions of moral authority. Pangloss’s explanations seem increasingly ridiculous, priming Candide to reconsider his worldview when he meets the pessimist Martin.

“I think we see ourselves in Candide,” says director Francesca Zambello, who first directed this production at the Glimmerglass Festival in 2015. “He wants to do the right thing. He wants to see the world as a place where order and reason and justice prevail. And we want Candide to succeed because we want the same for ourselves.”

The “optimism” referenced in Voltaire’s subtitle is a philosophical response to a perennial question: if God is all-powerful and all-good, why does goodness not always prevail? Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz maintained that we live in the best of all possible worlds; Alexander Pope declared that “whatever is, is right.” The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed tens of thousands of innocent people, prompting Voltaire to challenge philosophical optimism in his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (Poem on the Lisbon Disaster). The earthquake also appears in Candide:

Some falling stones had wounded Candide. He lay stretched in the street covered with rubbish. "Alas!" said he to Pangloss, "get me a little wine and oil; I am dying." "This concussion of the earth is no new thing," answered Pangloss. "The city of Lima, in America, experienced the same convulsions last year; the same cause, the same effects; there is certainly a train of sulphur underground from Lima to Lisbon." "Nothing more probable," said Candide; "but for the love of God a little oil and wine."

Voltaire drops similar moments throughout Candide like breadcrumbs leading to his conclusion: metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology is all well and good, but each of us has work to do in this imperfect world. Or, in Candide’s final words, “We must cultivate our garden.”

Lillian Hellman proposed adapting Candide to Leonard Bernstein in 1953. Both had been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and pressured to “name names” of suspected communists. Hellman, who declared “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” saw in Candide a means of condemning anti-Communist “witch hunts.”

“It’s so obviously right that I wonder nobody has done it before, or have they?” Hellman wrote to Bernstein. “I think if done right, it could have real style & wit, and great importance.” Adapting the story was daunting: more than 20 locations on land, additional adventures at sea, and 50 characters played by 44 actors in the original Broadway production.

Candide opened on Broadway in 1956 to mixed reviews. Richard L. Coe’s musings in The Washington Post proved prophetic: “What does worry me—and, I suspect, its other admirers—is that Candide is too special for popular success.” The production closed after 73 performances. Hellman abandoned the project, and Hugh Wheeler wrote a new book for a fleet, circus-like 1973 production, cutting half the songs and reducing the orchestra to 13 musicians. Its 740-performance run inspired Bernstein and new collaborators to revisit the piece, adding more Voltaire—and more Bernstein.

Bernstein described Candide as his “love letter” to European forms—the gavotte, mazurka, polka, schottische, waltz. (He worked on Candide more or less simultaneously with West Side Story, a score steeped in the Americas.) The overture opens with a bright fanfare before sprinting through offbeats and accidentals, sampling a bombastic battle, flirting with peaceful domesticity, and letting loose peals of virtuosic laughter. A manically cheerful character predominates, but there are moments of stillness, too, when Candide searches for purpose amid the chaos with a melodic line that leaps an octave, stumbles, falls, then tries again.

“The musical and geographical variety packed into Candide makes it an inspiring theatrical playground,” says director and choreographer Eric Sean Fogel, who has been with the production since its premiere. “The challenge is to make sure the characters’ internal transformation doesn’t get lost in the constant transformation of the space around them. This will be the seventh time we’ve staged this production, and we’re still learning. It’s been a gift to have the opportunity to tend this garden for the past 11 years.”

Candide ultimately rejects Pangloss’s optimism and Martin’s pessimism, choosing action over argument and propelling us into Bernstein and lyricist Richard Wilbur’s finale:

We’re neither pure nor wise nor good
We’ll do the best we know.
We’ll build our house, and chop our wood,
And make our garden grow. 

“Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists,” writes essayist, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit. “Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.”

Bernstein never excused himself from acting. He spent more than three decades revising Candide with a succession of collaborators. He conducted and recorded the “final revised version” shortly before his death in 1990; had he lived longer, he might well have kept at it. Candide remains part of an extraordinary body of work that inspires all who would “make some sense of life.”

Kelley Rourke is a librettist, translator, and dramaturg whose work has been presented by opera companies throughout the United States. She serves as dramaturg of the Glimmerglass Festival.