Run Time: Approx. 5 minutes

Leonard Bernstein’s Candide somewhat defies categorization. Most often labeled an operetta, it is lighter fare for the opera stage, yet more classically rooted than a Broadway musical. Its roles, like heroine Cunégonde, have been played by both soprano Renée Fleming and Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth. How, then, to categorize it? Perhaps the ambiguity is part of its charm, and apt for a composer who so deftly straddled the worlds of classical music stardom and popular culture.

The story comes from Voltaire’s 1759 satire which savagely rebukes the philosophy of blind optimism. The idea—popularized by Leibniz and touted throughout the play by Candide’s tutor, Dr. Pangloss—insists that we live in “the best of all possible worlds” and therefore everything that happens, no matter how horrific, must be for the best. Candide earnestly tries to take this to heart, but over the course of the story he faces all manner of evils, including war, greed, earthquakes, shipwrecks, and even slavery, all while Pangloss tirelessly explains why each humiliation was necessary. Voltaire’s point is merciless: abstract optimism is grotesque in the face of real human suffering.

It is not hard to see why this story resonated with Bernstein. For a Jewish man barely ten years after the end of World War II, the idea of human cruelty made acceptable by ideology, prejudice, and willful blindness was no abstraction. Candide is not the only of Bernstein’s works to grapple with themes of violence and hatred, but where works like West Side Story and Mass face them with solemnity, Candide approaches them with manic absurdity.

Bernstein’s music meets Voltaire’s barbed satire pound for pound, and the overture offers an excellent snapshot of the antics to come. There’s something quixotic about the music’s exuberance: bright, brash confidence offset by chirping woodwinds, strange percussion sounds, and an undercurrent of insidious mockery. Even the radiant love theme between Candide and Cunégonde feels deliberately exaggerated—valiance teetering on parody.

And yet, at the conclusion of the story, Bernstein allows himself a measure of sentimentality that Voltaire does not. Both endings find the characters disillusioned and withdrawn from the world, settling on a small farm to live a simple, practical life. But where Voltaire’s final line is curt and unsentimental—“il faut cultiver notre jardin” (“we must cultivate our garden”)—Bernstein, ever the humanist, transforms this resignation into a warm and hopeful call, set to one of the loveliest ensemble pieces in the repertoire, “Make Our Garden Grow.” Just try to get through it dry-eyed. Candide is a fairytale indeed, but not one about happy endings. It’s a fairy tale about how to live in a world of injustice and horror and build something anyway.