... TO MAKE SOME SENSE OF LIFE

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. In such a world, how is an individual to live? Candide was banned shortly after its publication, but despite the controversy it created—which continued well into the 20th century—it was an instant hit and is now considered a classic of Western literature.

Young Candide is brought up in a backwater province and has no reason to doubt his tutor, Pangloss, when he declares it to be “the best of all possible worlds.” After Candide is forced to leave home, he comes face to face with the brutality of man (the Seven Years' War), the savage power of nature (the Lisbon Earthquake), the corruption and hypocrisy of those in positions of moral authority— and worse. Pangloss has a quick explanation for everything, but the explanations seem increasingly ridiculous in light of Candide’s accumulating experience. By the time Candide meets Martin, a pessimist, he is primed to upend his view of the world.

“I think we see ourselves in Candide,” says Francesca Zambello, who originated the Glimmerglass production 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 formal philosophical response to a perennial question: if God is all-powerful and all-good, how could he have created a world in which goodness does not always prevail? Versions of the “optimism” argument were championed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (we live in the best of all possible worlds) and Alexander Pope (what is, is right), among others.

Candide was not Voltaire’s first literary challenge to philosophical optimism. Four years before the novel’s publication, the Great Lisbon Earthquake had killed tens of thousands of innocent people; Voltaire argued in his 180-line “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne” (Poem on the Lisbon Disaster) that the catastrophe refuted Leibnizian Optimism once and for all. The Lisbon Earthquake also makes an appearance 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 through Candide’s story like breadcrumbs leading the way to his conclusion: Metaphysico-theologico-cosmologicopanology is all well and good, but each of us has work to do in this imperfect world of ours. Or, in the final words he gives Candide, “We must cultivate our garden.”

Lillian Hellman brought the idea of adapting Candide to Leonard Bernstein in 1953. Like many of her contemporaries, including Bernstein, the playwright had been called before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and pressured to “name names” of suspected communist sympathizers. Hellman, who famously declared “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” seized on Candide’s scenes of intolerance and hypocrisy—especially the chapter on the Inquisition—as a means of commenting on the anti-Communist “witch hunts” that were being conducted under the guise of protecting the American way of life.

“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.”

While Candide’s topic and tone may have felt obviously right, adapting the story for the stage was no simple task. Candide’s progress plays out in more than 20 land-based locations, with a number of additional events happening at sea. The original production featured 50 characters played by a cast of 22.

Candide opened on Broadway in 1956 to mostly positive reviews, but 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 first Broadway run closed after only 73 performances, and while the team briefly tinkered with alternative versions, Hellman eventually abandoned the project altogether. Hugh Wheeler created an entirely new book for a fleet, circuslike production in 1973, which eliminated about half the songs and reduced the orchestra to thirteen. The success of that production (it ran for 740 performances) led Bernstein to revisit the piece again and again, with a lengthening list of collaborators, gradually adding more Voltaire—and more Bernstein.

Bernstein described Candide as his “love letter” to European forms—the gavotte, mazurka, polka, schottische, waltz. (That he worked on Candide more or less simultaneously with West Side Story—a score steeped in the Americas—is testament to his wideranging musical facility.) Candide’s adventure is a grim one, but the title character somehow maintains a sunny outlook. The overture gives us an idea of what we’re in for, opening with a bright fanfare before sprinting forward through off-beats and accidentals, sampling a bombastic battle, flirting with peaceful domesticity, and letting loose peals of virtuosic laughter. As the work unfolds, a manically cheerful character predominates, but there are moments of stillness, too, when Candide pauses to search for purpose amidst the chaos with a melodic line that leaps an octave, falls, then tries again.

“The musical and geographical variety packed into Candide makes it an inspiring theatrical playground,” says director/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 sixth 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 eight years.”

At the end of his travels, Candide rejects both the optimism of Pangloss and the pessimism of Martin, choosing action over argument; his now-familiar melodic reach propels us into Bernstein and 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 the 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. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”

Bernstein was not one to excuse himself from acting. “ I want to conduct,” he told the New York Times. “I want to play the piano. I want to write for Hollywood. I want to write symphonic music. I want to keep on trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry. And I think I can still do justice to them all.’’

Bernstein actively tended Candide, that finicky hybrid, for a good portion of his career—perhaps longer than any other single work in his vast hothouse of ideas. The seed was planted early: after he made his New York Philharmonic debut, but before he was named Music Director; after Fancy Free but before West Side Story; after he made his first television appearance but before he launched the enormously popular “Young People’s Concerts.” While Bernstein had little involvement in the first major revival, he rolled up his sleeves and got to work on the many new versions that followed. He conducted and recorded the “final revised version” more than 30 years after the first version broke ground; had he not passed away shortly afterwards, it’s possible he would have kept at it. As it is, Candide is part of an extraordinary body of work that continues to influence and inspire all who would “make some sense of life.”