Performer: Kristy Swift

Stephen Barlow makes the case for Beethoven's earlier version of Fidelio, but doesn't quite manage to convince.

First published in 1759, Voltaire’s Candide was re-imagined for the concert stage by Leonard Bernstein in 1956. An operetta whose aim was to mock the belief that everything—literally, everything—is for the best, Candide was an ideal medium through which to critique the excesses of McCarthyism and the complacency of the Eisenhower administration in 1950’s US politics.