What do Voltaire and Leonard Bernstein have in common? Both the Enlightenment-era intellectual and the 1950s composer lived through times of intense censorship and political scrutiny, which affected their lives and made its way into their work. In 1759, Voltaire published his classic novella Candide ou l’Optimisme, and its open critique of religious dogma and references to the Spanish Inquisition resulted in its banning by the Catholic Church.
Two centuries later, Leonard Bernstein’s adaptation — the opera Candide — premiered in 1956, facing a parallel context of political censorship in the waning days of the McCarthy era. A political satire boldly ridiculing religion and questioning optimism, Candide became the 11th most performed opera in the world in 2018. The 1988 Scottish Opera version performed by UBC Opera on Feb. 5-8 was bold, explicit and confidently satirical.
UBC School of Music Director and Associate Professor Dr Hedy Law started off the evening with a pre-show talk focused on the academic interplay and differences between Voltaire’s original satire and Bernstein’s more explicit comic opera. Law highlighted how Candide’s process was animated by frequent back and forths between Bernstein and playwright Lillan Hellman, who wrote Candide’s libretto. These included disagreements on the show’s depiction of El Dorado, which was ultimately simplified to focus on the love story between protagonists Candide and Cunégonde’s, as well as Bernstein’s anxieties about whether the show’s genre-spanning made it an opera or a Broadway musical.
Law also recounted that Hellman and Bernstein were both wary of publishing a political satire in the McCarthy era — Hellman had been summoned by the House of Un-American Activities to testify on anti-communist investigations in 1952 and Bernstein had been subject to prior congressional inquiries, so both felt as though they were on thin ice.
Hidden from the audience by the Old Auditorium’s orchestra pit, the UBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jonathan Girard, triumphantly opened the performance with the opera’s overture, which brought together two contrasting themes: a dominant fanfare that interacted with a softer, melodic voice. The piece ended with an increasingly powerful repeat of the final melody, incrementally raising its tempo in a rossini crescendo, as pointed out by Dr. Law’s introduction.
Anchored by narration from Christopher Gaze — founder of the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival — the UBC Opera ensemble transported the audience into the world of Candide. As Gaze officially introduced the opera’s story to the public, the curtain rose to reveal the projected green backdrop of Westphalia. The entire ensemble had flooded the stage in three ranks and greeted the audience with a striking a capella ode to the region, setting the scene for the idyllic first setting of Candide’s story.
Joining Gaze on their own velvet chairs, the main cast of Candide’s life — constituted of low-born Candide himself (Millen Sandhu), the barons’ children Maximilian and Cunégonde (Olivia Howe), the chambermaid Paquette (Victoria Kazantseva) and their teacher Pangloss (Robert McDonald) — introduced themselves. Led by Pangloss, the quintet set the stage for the show’s central themes that critique optimism. These introductions marked the first solos of the opera and set up Candide and Cunégonde’s budding forbidden romance. The couple’s dreamy first duet showcased Candide’s humility and love of the simple life, contrasted with Cunégonde’s frivolity and greed.
Soon, the idyllic setting was shattered by the exile of Candide and the violent invasion of Westphalia by the Bulgars. Set off by the panic of the progressively slaughtered chorus and the visible explosions projected on the background, the scene blended hilarity and tragedy. The audience laughed as actors died on invisible swords wielded by cloak-clad Bulgars, especially when Maximilien (Denis Petrov) fiercely protected his face from the sword’s blade by offering up his posterior instead.
In the middle of this scene, which otherwise aptly amplified the comedic tone of Bernstein’s work, one beat fell tonally flat. The implied rape of Cunegonde by the soldiers — narrated by Gaze as “Cunegonde was molested… repeatedly” while she was taken offstage — followed Petrov’s interaction and came across as another attempt to make the audience laugh, which felt uncomfortable and insensitive. The harrowing scene set up the cycle of Candide’s tragic misadventures across the world, and the story continued through a series of new cities, brutal deaths, surprising revivals, splits and reunions with Cunégonde and accidental murders along the way.
Throughout the opera, the chorus’s performance shone. The ensemble scenes — apart from sounding beautiful — were particularly successful at establishing new locations and making them feel distinctive in the story. This was a formidable challenge in a story that flipped through no less than ten passing settings. While the set design’s contribution to this effect was minimal — transitions were established by projected slideshows — the chorus’s energy drew attention away from these details and made each place feel distinctive.
From the crazed, encircling crowd of Lisbon to the friendliness of El Dorado, the chorus’s chemistry complemented the main cast’s individual performances and helped some stand out even more, with the dynamic scene of the Old Lady’s (Briana Sutherland) life story in Cádiz providing a memorable example.
Howe’s Cunégonde was another highlight of the show, with a brilliant performance showcasing impressive range and nuance. Her aria in the Paris scene enthralled the audience, bringing forward her character’s complexities while holding immaculate high notes. Though Cunégonde’s greed made her easily detestable in contrast to Candide’s simple virtue, Howe’s subtle acting made the character well-rounded and touching.
Her duet scenes with Sutherland’s Old Lady — who was introduced late in the show but whose performance packed a punch — felt like foil to Candide and Pangloss’ duets on the teaching of optimism, creating a twisted parallel as Cunégonde and the Old Lady presented their own lessons and teachings.
While Sandhu stood out in duet scenes, especially romantic ones with Howe, his Candide was generally subdued. Sandhu carried most of the opera’s philosophical themes and tension — the clash between optimistic philosophy and the satirized cynicism of the real world — but he also had the difficult task of portraying a character who lives through an endless series of miserable tragedies, ultimately with very little agency. As a result, while less dynamic, his low-range performance felt true to the character — an efficient conduit for the opera’s satire and critique.
Contextualising Law’s early comments about Bernstein’s adaptation being decisively more outright and political than Voltaire’s subtler satire, the performance absolutely fulfilled its satirical objective by ridiculing the optimists, the powerful, the religious and the royal. While the audience might have left with a different discussion than what Voltaire had intended when deconstructing the ‘best of all possible worlds’, the acknowledgment of consistent chaos and hopelessness in the world is a timeless message.
Scenes like the public trial and hanging of Pangloss and Candide by the Inquisitor in Lisbon critiqued authoritarianism and religious dogma in a way that resonated across centuries.
In 2026, Candide and the UBC Opera managed to make their audience think about parallels to Enlightenment-era censorship and McCarthyism, and laugh at memorable phrases like “[STDs] are the seasoning of love’s air” or “what is paradise without love and social position.”
