Stream: Candide
“Bernstein’s music has always been about one thing: exploring the differences among people, and pleading for tolerance to allow us to live in peace and kindness.” So says John Mauceri in his introduction to Scottish Opera’s Spotlight on Candide. The BBC’s 1988 broadcast from the Theatre Royal is available on YouTube, but I would recommend that you access it through the link at the end of this review, which also contains other interesting background material. Mauceri was Scottish Opera’s musical director from 1986 to 1992, the first American to hold that post in any UK Opera Company. Much of his research had been into Broadway musicals, and Scottish Opera benefited from several of his revised editions, including the first UK staging of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, a concert performance of Weill’s Lady in the Dark at the Edinburgh Festival, Mark Blitzstein’s Regina, and this 1988 version of Bernstein’s Candide. Bernstein attended rehearsals and also the performance seen here. He was reportedly delighted with the production, directed by Jonathan Miller and John Wells. Mauceri’s edition has become the established one, and was used as the basis of the 2007 concert performance at the Edinburgh Festival and the 2013-14 production in the round at the Menier Chocolate Factory.
I very much enjoyed seeing this performance. Be warned – the filming lacks the finesse of modern cinema versions. But there are compensations in seeing an opera from a smaller theatre, with a knowledgeable local audience, who get all the jokes. And they laugh at the right time too, because surtitles for performances in English were unheard of then, and the singers’ words are virtually all audible. The main attraction is Mauceri’s love for the music. It is obvious from his enthusiastic conducting of the overture, and underpins the high quality of the production.
Candide is a satire, and a very savage one at that. Candide’s picaresque adventures take a hard route towards the “tolerance” that Mauceri alludes to. Scarcely have we heard of the loveliness of this “best of all possible worlds” than we are plunged into a succession of wars, in which savagery is the norm, and the treatment of women is particularly shocking. Mark Beudert as Candide displays the right mixture of innocence and horror. Marilyn Hill Smith is pert and vivacious as Cunegonde. Both act and sing well, keeping their end up in ensembles and dialogue and making the most of their showpiece arias, Hill Smith’s Glitter and Be Gay, and Beudert’s Nothing More Than This. Although they and Ann Howard, formidable as the Old Lady, had operatic careers, they also sang operetta and lighter music. (Hill-Smith’s on-line biography records that she’s also played in pantomime, and on cruise ships). All of this varied experience shows and is exactly right for this production.
The star of the show is actor, Nickolas Grace in the combined roles of Voltaire, Dr Pangloss and the servant, Cacambo. With impeccable diction and comic timing, he delivers many of the best lines – John Wells wrote much of the material as well as directing – and his acceptable baritone suits the singing parts of the role. He has three main costume changes – sometimes on-stage transformations, but others in the cast, including the chorus, have multiple changes. (Read Paul Anwyl’s recollections for more on this!) The Scottish Opera Chorus – full-time then – relish the opportunities to sing exciting music in various styles from South American dance rhythms to church music to Sullivanesque repeated choruses. Individual chorus members take smaller roles with some skill – fans of Scottish Opera over the years will recognise them.
The staging is straightforward. Child-like brightly coloured props – three over-sized chairs, palm-trees, a sailing-ship, some cut-out waves, giants’ heads - stand at the back of the stage when not in use. The chorus, in larger and smaller groups, are marshalled efficiently, and the main action and singing take place towards the front of the stage – all helping to enhance our understanding of the words.
Brutal wars, the cruel regime of the Church, harsh nature and mischance – the first Act moves briskly through them all, until after the Lisbon Earthquake, the dishevelled heroes set sail for the New World. Worse follows- Candide is reunited with Cunegonde, whom he had believed dead, only for her to be enslaved. Colonialism, as practised by European invaders and Jesuit missionaries, treats the native-born population with as much callousness as anything Candide encountered in Europe. His early innocence (“I love all my fellow creatures/ And the creatures love each other” he declared in Act I) is replaced by grief and then cynicism. The Old Lady leads a quartet of chancers in the merry waltz -time lament “What’s the Use?” Even crime no longer pays: “There’s no use in cheating/It’s all so defeating.”
Back in Europe, Candide finds Cunegonde but despairs at her obsession with money. Eventually they make a declaration about life and love as it is: “We are not what we were, nor do we wish to be. We love now for what we are.” The finale with its soaring tune amplifies this sentiment: we may not be able to realise all we once dreamed of but we can “Make our Garden Grow.”
Available to stream for free here.
You probably won’t need them, but lyrics for this 1988 version can be found here.
