Welsh National Opera - Candide

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18th-century France crashes into 20th-century post-war America.

The starting point for legendary composer Leonard Bernstein’s Candide was Voltaire’s 1759 satirical novella of the same name. Bernstein worked on Candide while composing West Side Story, having been prompted to create the operetta by playwright Lillian Hellman. For Hellman, the world about which Voltaire had written two centuries earlier provided an ideal metaphor for America’s anti-Communist ‘McCarthyism’ of the 1950s, a witch hunt that had negatively impacted herself, Bernstein, and many of their friends. 

Candide is a work which, despite initially being slammed by the critics, has gone on to become one of the most performed operas in the world...

This new version is presented in Birmingham by Welsh National Opera.  

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