Candide

Welcome  |  About Candide  |  Cast, Creatives & Production Team  |  About Leonard Bernstein  |  John Mauceri on the Scottish Opera version | Synopsis  |  Articles  |  Acknowledgements

In 1988, Leonard Bernstein took his 1956 work to Glasgow, where he worked Scottish Opera’s then-Music Director John Mauceri on a revised score and satirist John Wells on a revised book. The result revitalised Candide, bringing greater focus to the story and successfully restoring much of Voltaire’s original comedy. The Scottish Opera version is the one you will hear today. We’re delighted to revisit a piece of our history in an outdoor production that builds on the successes of previous community operas Anamchara (2014) and Pagliacci (2018), as well as recent site-specific productions of La bohème (2020) and Falstaff (2021).

Director Jack Furness and designer Tim Meacock have created a supersized space that drops you right in the middle of Candide’s adventures, moving you along with the promenade performance. Their innovative storytelling draws on touchstones of popular culture – an appropriate choice, considering the issues dramatised are as relevant today as they were in Voltaire’s and Bernstein’s times. Migration, mass displacement, and the refugee crisis are radically upending lives, and global commerce, social media, and the internet are rapidly changing the ways we interact with each other. Candide explores suffering, but equally humanity’s capacity for hope and resilience. Comedy and tragedy work side-by-side here, with lots of room for reflection and celebration of life’s beautiful, messy stories.

Our cast includes William Morgan (The Gondoliers 2021), Ronald Samm (Pagliacci 2018) and Susan Bullock (Breaking the Waves 2019). Keep an eye out among Candide’s Chorus and Community Chorus – including members of the Maryhill Integration Network – as they take on multiple roles to bring this energetic world to life. Scottish Opera remains hugely grateful to the Scottish Government for its ongoing core funding. I would also like to thank the Friends of Scottish Opera, Scottish Opera’s Education Angels, and The Scottish Opera Endowment Trust for their special support of Candide.

I hope you enjoy this exciting production.

Alex Reedijk
General Director, Scottish Opera

The impetus for exploring American opera and lyric theatre during my time as Scottish Opera's second Music Director came from my colleague, Richard Mantle (then Managing Director of Scottish Opera). With this encouragement, the Company launched full productions of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, Marc Blizstein’s Regina, and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, and additional concert performances of George Gershwin’s Girl Crazy and Weill’s Lady in the Dark.

Having served Bernstein as music director on two earlier versions of Candide, I knew he was unhappy with both. Consequently, Bernstein agreed to a new version for Scottish Opera.

During this process, we added music to the score and worked with John Wells to return to Voltaire’s storyline, where Hugh Wheeler's text had departed (for instance, substituting Constantinople for Venice). Bernstein’s music thus returned to the correct countries: the Paris music played in Paris, the Venice music in Venice.

The Scottish Opera Version includes just about everything Bernstein wrote for Candide from 1956 to 1971. He agreed to and participated in the new structure, coming to Glasgow for its final rehearsals and premiere and insisting that BOTH syphilis songs be included in the score!