The well-known American composer, conductor and passionate promoter of music, Leonard Bernstein, is also the author of one opera and several musicals, of which West Side Story, also presented for the first time in Pilsen in May 2017, is one of the best that has ever been created in this genre.
In the shadow of the famous musical, however, Candide, written according to Voltaire's short story, was called a comic operetta in the first version from 1956 and a musical in the revised version from 1974. It was performed here for the first time in 1980 in Brno, then in 2006 at the Prague State Opera.
The naive young man Candide grows up in the castle of his uncle Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalia, where he is raised by the philosopher and scholar dr. Pangloss, an ardent proponent of the optimistic philosophy that we live in the best of all possible worlds and that everything that happens is inevitable. When Candide falls in love with the baron's daughter, he is banished from the castle and thus begins his long journey across the globe. From the German Westphalia, he travels through many landscapes, experiences sailing on the sea and shipwrecks, wandering in the South American forest... Everywhere he finds himself, he encounters various forms of evil caused by individuals, society and nature. But eventually they also understand that everything is different and that everyone has their own destiny fully in their own hands.
The work is ingeniously composed, the philosophical theme is simultaneously accompanied by an emotional theme. The plot, composed of small episodes, is connected to each other by the motif of travel, combined with the biography of the protagonist. We present the production in the Czech version with songs in the English original with Czech subtitles.
