Candide

Comic Operetta in two acts
Scottish Opera Version
Music by Leonard Bernstein
Book by Hugh Wheeler after Voltaire
Vocal lyrics by Richard Wilbur

In English with German and English surtitles

Premiere: January 17, 2024

ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien
Arnold Schoenberg Chor
Conductor: Marin Alsop
Director: Lydia Steier

Why is the world in crisis when everyone seemingly only wants the best? We are living in the best of all possible worlds. This is what the young Candide is taught by his teacher Pangloss. And even though Candide experiences war, plagues and natural disasters, even though his home is destroyed, his beloved Cunegonde is raped and he himself escapes death by the skin of his teeth on several occasions, he remains an incorrigible optimist as he travels boldly through the Old World and the New World. When Voltaire wrote his novel Candide in 1759, the Lisbon earthquake had just shaken humanity’s faith in the divine order to the core, and when Leonard Bernstein composed a very American operetta based on the novel in 1956 the world was in the grip of the Cold War.
Today, the world is going through one crisis after another, and the satirical operetta Candide describes the absurdity of this world better than it ever did. Leonard Bernstein’s score, which he revised several times, is a tribute to the history of music in Europe, full of witty parodies and brilliant orchestrations. Marin Alsop, principal conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and herself a pupil of Bernstein’s, will conduct Candide; the American director Lydia Steier makes her debut in Vienna.