World Premiere: December 1, 1956
Last HSO performance: HSO Premier 
Instrumentation: 2 flutes with 2nd doubling piccolo, oboe doubling English Horn, 2 clarinets in B-flat with first doubling clarinet in E-flat and second doubling bass clarinet, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets with first doubling cornet, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, 2 percussionists, harp, strings.
Duration: 5’

Lillian Hellman conceived a theater piece based on Voltaire’s Candide as early as 1950, but it was not until 1956 that the project materialized. She originally intended the work to be a play with incidental music, which she asked Leonard Bernstein to compose, but his enthusiasm for the subject was so great after re-reading Voltaire’s novel that the venture swelled into a full-blown comic operetta; Tyrone Guthrie was enlisted as director and Richard Wilbur wrote most of the song lyrics. Candide was first seen in a pre-Broadway tryout at Boston’s Colonial Theatre on October 29, 1956 (just days after Bernstein’s appointment as co-music director of the New York Philharmonic had been announced for the following season), and opened at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York on December 1st. Make Our Garden Grow, arranged for chorus from the opera’s final scene by Robert Page, is one of Broadway’s most stirring anthems.

CANDIDE
You’ve been a fool and so have I,
But come and be my wife,
And let us try before we die
To make some sense of life.

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.

CUNEGONDE
I thought the world was sugarcake,
For so our master said;
But now I’ll teach my hands to bake
Our loaf of daily bread.

CANDIDE and CUNEGONDE
We’re neither pure nor wise nor good, etc.

ALL
Let dreamers dream what worlds they please;
Those Edens can’t be found.
The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

We’re neither pure nor wise nor good, etc.