The opera is the art of making the unbelievable believable. It is a discipline of a preforming Art that first founded during the baroque era, about 1600’s in italy. The opera is a unity between text, music and action that is preformed by a group of musician, poets and actors that wanted to revive the greek tragedy. The novella of Candide by Voltaire would make a great piece of opera. That is based on what voltaire wrote it for which is the wit that it contains, trying to make the audience lough, and highlight what was going on in the society during that period of time. As well as the critique purpose of it which was a response to the optimistic philosophy of the German philosopher Leibniz .
Voltaire made Candide as the main character of the novella as a naïve and innocent person to make us think about how one can figure things by experiencing them himself, not by what other people should say about them. Here voltaire is emphasizing more the spiritual and the metaphysical part of human being as, love, life and death, which are all a great themes of the opera, that always try to give life again to the ancient Greek artistic values. I really can picture Candide in an opera house singing to his lover Cunégonde with a voice of a castrati the famous song of Julio Iglesias with the french lyrics that start as : “Je n’ai pas changé, je suis toujours ce jeune homme étranger, qui te chantait des romances, qui t’inventait des dimanches, qui te faisait voyager….”(1)*. And after Candide is done with his part Cunégonde is replaying with the second part of the song as : “Et toi non plus tu n’as pas changé, toujours le même parfum léger, toujours le même petit sourire qui en dit long sans vraiment le dire.” (2)**. It is obvious that at the end of the journey of Candide when he finally fond his lover, Cunégonde, and she turned out to be not that beautiful as she was, inside him was not accepting her as before. But despite the fact that she was ugly and aged, he decided to mary her. This is what confirm that this story can easily turned into an opera considering the fact that reasonable people would change their mind if they think that what were looking for, beauty in this case, is not the same anymore. However, I still can picture Candide chanting about his sorrow and still fulfilling his promise. This imaginary opera scene is making us to believe what is hard to rely on in real life. Here we are not getting what we really want (beauty Candide’s case) which is the whole purpose of the opera.
Another imaginary scene that would make Candide as a great opera play is the one when he killed the Baron, Cunégonde’s brother in South America. I can really picture him with Cacambo, and the baron in the tent having that discussion with the baron that he refused him to mary his sister therefore he killed him. Afterwards, he started to cry because he murdered the brother of his lover, “But as he pulled out his smoking blade, he began to weep.” (Candide p 48). One here can question himself, how far this relate to real life, how can we imagine a murder weeping after killing his victim? Unless it is a scene in an opera house. We can include here a nice musical baroque piece with this scene when Candide is singing after the death of the baron, which musically summarize all his sadness and sorrow and also bring some old memories of his life in the palace of the baron and his first kiss with Cunégonde.
Furthermore, Candide is a great candidate for an opera play because it is about philosophy and virtue that voltaire in his novella present them as the conflict between the good and the bad. The conflict between the ideal philosopher, Pangloss ,that sees everything is going to the good of all,
المزيد
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