Candide (20 page)

The director of the Scottish Opera, John Mauceri, began work on his version of the musical in 1982. Mauceri expanded the 1973 version back into two acts and restored nearly all of Bernstein’s music. Five years later, he brought Bernstein back into the process, and the two collaborated on a 1988 production in Glasgow. After the death of Hugh Wheeler, the job of expanding the book fell to John Wells. His revisions reinserted several incidents from Voltaire’s original. In 1989 Mauceri and Bernstein mounted a production in London that, for the first time, Bernstein conducted himself; it included all the favorites from the original 1956 production as well as songs added later, including “Best of All Possible Worlds,” with the combined lyrics of Richard Wilbur and Steven Sondheim, and “Glitter and Be Gay.”
Candide
:
Final Revised Version
, 1989 is now considered definitive. Harold Prince revived
Candide
for the New York City Opera in 1994 and 1997.

The civilized world was horrified by the news of the terrible earthquake of Lisbon (November 1, 1755). Strictly considered, this frightful catastrophe was only, on a large scale, what, on a smaller, was, and is, happening every day. A vessel founders at sea, a house or theatre is on fire: the just and unjust alike, parents and innocent children, perish in the waves or in the flames, and there is weeping and wailing in many a home. But the colossal magnitude of the appalling disaster at Lisbon made transcendently more intense that feeling of the problematic in human destiny, which is aroused more or less, in susceptive minds, by the vicissitudes of daily life. Goethe, then a boy of six, was as much perplexed as the sexagenarian Voltaire how to reconcile the goodness of the Deity with the seemingly aimless cruelty of what he had permitted, or ordained, to happen at Lisbon. The “whatever is is right,” the “all partial evil universal good,” of Pope’s famous essay, so much admired by Voltaire, who translated them into the pithy formula: “All is well” (
tout est bien
), were now pronounced by him unsatisfactory. He had opposed a sort of optimism of his own to Pascal’s pessimism, and in “Le Mondain” had sung of the pleasures enjoyed by cultivated and civilized man. But he now struck his lyre to a very different tune in his “Poem on the Disaster at Lisbon; or, an Examination of the Axiom, All is Well”—to which he opposed a gloomy catalogue of all the ills that flesh is heir to.... Though not printed until some years later, [
Candide
] was begun soon after the Lisbon earthquake.

—from
Life of Voltaire
(1892)

 

The doctrine which [Voltaire] preached—that life should be ruled, not by the dictates of tyranny and superstition, but by those of reason and humanity—can never be obliterated from the minds of men.

—from
The New Republic
(August 6, 1919)

 

Voltaire in
Candide
, as Johnson in
Rasselas
, expressed the despair of the time over the problem of man’s life on earth. Voltaire mocked and Johnson mourned over the notion that this is the best possible world. Each taught the vanity of human wishes.... All evils of life, wittily heaped together in
Candide
, when they arise from man’s fraud and wrong-doing are conquerable in long course of time; and conquest of them means that advance of civilization towards which we have begun to labour in this century, with more definite aims than heretofore. The struggle of the French Revolution to lift men at once above those grosser ills of life which pressed upon them in the eighteenth century, and wrung from them such books as
Candide
and
Rasselas
, failed only in its immediate aim. Its highest hope is with us still, quickened though sobered by the failure of immediate attainment. A State can be no better than the citizens of which it is composed. Our labour now is not to mould States but make citizens.

—from Morley’s introduction to
Candide
(1922)

 

[Voltaire] wrote enormously: plays (now forgotten); short stories, and some of them still read—especially that masterpiece,
Candide
. He was a journalist, and a pamphleteer, he dabbled in science and philosophy, he was a good popular historian, he compiled a dictionary, and he wrote hundreds of letters to people all over Europe. He had correspondents everywhere, and he was so witty, so up-to-date, so on the spot that kings and emperors were proud to get a letter from Voltaire and hurried to answer it with their own hand. He is not a great creative artist. But he is a great man with a powerful intellect and a warm heart, enlisted in the service of humanity. That is why I rank him with Shakespeare as a spiritual spokesman for Europe. Two hundred years before the Nazis came, he was the complete anti-Nazi.

—from
Two Cheers for Democracy
(1951)

Because God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-benevolent, any world He created would have to be the best possible. It is true that there are murders, rapists, thieves, and bloody-minded dictators, but free will is so important a good that evildoers must be allowed to choose to do evil. Similarly, for there to be the maximum amount of order, beauty, and variety in nature, there also has to be the possibility of droughts, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the like. Such, greatly simplified, are the kinds of ideas against which Voltaire directs his satire.

1. Does
Candide
refute such ideas successfully?

2. Could it be that Voltaire’s satire is not so much directed against these ideas as against people who use them as a pretext for a heartless and self-righteous complacency?

3. What do you understand Candide to mean when he says that from now on he will “tend his garden”? Refrain from public life? Accept things as they are? Try to expand this phrase into a program for living.

4. What is your own answer to the violence and misery of human life as Voltaire depicts it?

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Candide
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Candide:
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Candide
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Candide
”:
Optimism Demolished
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,
Candide
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