Leonard Bernstein introduces a London , 1989 performance of

C A N D I D E

The Composer: ‘Surprise. My dear friends, I hear you thinking. Here comes the Old Professor to lecture us again. But I promise to be brief, and only by way of introduction... The reason I feel I ought to say something is that for more than 30 years, 35 years to be exact, people have asked me: ‘Why Candide? Whither and whence Candide?' And I thought I might answer a bit more clearly by speaking not only as the composer of this work, but as an everyday observer of history, like anyone here, but particularly of that period of history known as the Age of Enlightenment, roughly the 18th century. And that was the century in which Voltaire lived, wrote and had extraordinary influence. His masterpiece was a tough, skinny little novella called Candide, which inspired the playwright Lillian Hellman and me to have a bash at it musically. Voltaire's book was actually entitled Candide, or Optimism , it being a viciously satirical attack on a prevalent philosophical system known as Optimism, which was based on the rather indigestible writings of a certain Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and popularized by our own, beloved

(English poet) Alexander Pope, for example in this great line from his Essay on Man : ‘One truth is dear— whatever is, is right.' Now, according to Leibniz, whose ideas Pope was lyricizing, if we believe in a Creator, then he must be a good Creator, and the greatest of all possible creators, and therefore could have created only The Best of All Possible Worlds. In other words: ‘Everything that is, is right.' Granted that in this world the innocent are mindlessly slaughtered and that crime mostly goes unpunished, that there is disease and death and poverty. But if we could only see the whole picture, the divine and universal plan, then we would understand that whatever happens is for the best. Thus

spake Leibniz. Naturally Voltaire found this idea absurd every day of his life, but particularly on that day in 1755 when all of Lisbon , Portugal exploded in an earthquake, and uncountable numbers of people were drowned, crushed, burned alive, exterminated. Now if Leibniz was right, said Voltaire, then God is just playfully spraying his flit gun and down go a million mosquitos, at random, haphazardly. Well, the Lisbon disaster was the last straw for Voltaire and provoked him to write Candide, in which he lashed out against all established authority, royal, military or mercantile, but most of all at the power of the Church, which actually was brning heretics at the time, brning them alive to prevent earthquakes. In other words, says Voltaire, sectarian religion is always an incitement to conflict, and Optimism as a strict belief therefore breeds complacency, induces lethargy, inhibits the human power to change, to progress, to rise against injustice, or to create anything that might contribute to a genuinely better world. During my incredibly extensive researches for this lecture which you are now suffering, I came across the following quite succinct summing up of the whole Voltairisme: ‘Voltaire was acting as an Eclectic, who had synthesized the ideas of the Stoics, the Epicureans, the Skeptics...' Oh, the hell with it! Let's play the Overture..”