In 1953, Lillian Hellman suggested to LEONARD BERNSTEIN that he make a musical based on François Voltaire’s novella Candide, or Optimism (1758) as a protest to the anti-communist “witch-hunt” in the United States in the early 1950s by paralleling Voltaire’s ironic critique of social mores and naïve utopias. Once the idea was realized, the only open question was that of genre – between opera, operetta, satire, and musical. Bernstein says: “What I should call it – operetta, comic opera or something else – let others decide. It may turn out to be some new form. There are no analogues in our theatre, so time will tell.” At the end, though, he offers the definition “comic operetta.”

The operetta was completed in 1956 and performed in Boston. Reviews did not live up to expectations. The libretto was considered weak, the dramaturgy patchy, and the score too operatic and Broadway-ish. In 1959 a new production was planned in London with a revised libretto, but again no success was achieved. Bernstein, however, continued to rework the score until 1971. With new direction (by Gordon Davidson), the operetta was presented in Los Angeles and in Washington. Between 1974 and 1976 it was performed on Broadway – this time successfully. The production received four Tony nominations – for libretto, costumes, set and direction. Thus, for nearly 40 years, Bernstein’s Candide searched for and found its way to the public – changing librettists, production crews, artists, adjustments to the score. While Lillian Hellman sought ideological provocation, the composer saw his task as an act of appreciation for his European predecessors in music. He said, “I paid homage to everything I admired in European music – to Gilbert and Sullivan, Offenbach and Bellini, Ravel and Prokofiev.”

In 1989, a year before his death, Bernstein conducted the final version of Candide at the Barbican Centre in London. In 1990, the New York Philharmonic performed the overture without a conductor and in memory of the composer and his work with the orchestra for 11 years.

In France, Voltaire’s homeland, the operetta was only staged in December 2006 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in a production by Robert Carsen.