Bernstein: Candide
MusikTheater an der Wien, 21st January 2024
Opera? Operetta? Musical? Perhaps because Candide doesn’t slot into a neat category, it has struggled to find its niche in the repertoire. The work of a multitude of librettists – but only one composer, Leonard Bernstein – it has existed in many guises and revisions. The “final definitive version” as conducted by the composer at London’s Barbican in 1989 – a year after the “definitive version” prepared by John Mauceri, under the Bernstein’s supervision, for Scottish Opera – assigns most of the dialogue to a narrator, much as in the original Voltaire novel (1759) satirising Enlightenment ideals on the theme of “optimism”.
Nikola Hillebrand (Cunegonde) and ensemble
© Werner Kmetitsch