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.
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Voltaire’s Candide through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Commentary
FRANCIS ESPINASSE
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)
LYTTON STRACHEY
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)
HENRY MORLEY
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,
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Voltaire’s Candide through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Commentary
FRANCIS ESPINASSE
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)
LYTTON STRACHEY
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)
HENRY MORLEY
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,
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