The production will be stamped with a triple seal of novelty: it will be a Flanders debut for Yannis Pouspourikas, the opera house’s visiting conductor. It will also be a first for Nigel Lowery, the British director (pictured below) whose staging of the show has been announced as a cross “between Brecht and Monty Python”. But, above all, it will be the first time that Bernstein’s extravaganza is shown in Flanders.

At once tough, witty and risqué, Candide is an ambiguous crowd-pleaser. It has always posed a problem: to Bernstein, who took more than 40 years to compose it, revising it until his death and enlisting the help of half a dozen American playwrights and songwriters; to opera house managers, who practically never stage it (although its overture and a few arias have become concert fixtures); and to the rest of us, who’re not quite sure what to make of it: is it serious or light? An opera or a musical? American or European? Sublime or kitsch?

For Bernstein, there was no doubt about it: Candide was an operetta in the purest European tradition. A musical chameleon, he excelled at whatever genre he chose to embrace, from Mahlerian symphony to jazz and from Renaissance church music to Broadway musical. Candide, he said, was “an American’s Valentine to Europe”, and he composed it as a pastiche of Old World music, with echoes of Offenbach, Gilbert and Sullivan, Bellini, Gounod and a few Viennese waltzes thrown in.

Yet underneath its glittery appeal, Candide is no escapist romp. Far from offering a refuge from the world, it makes us look at it without flinching. And what a world it is: a general bloodbath created by incessant wars, natural disasters and fanatics of all persuasions. The six protagonists are not spared: they are raped, robbed, spanked, shipwrecked, butchered by foreign armies and hanged by the Holy Inquisition, each time rising back from the dead like cartoon characters.

This scouring satire was penned in the 18th century by the French writer Voltaire as a critique of optimism, a theory made popular by the German philosopher Leibniz, which claimed that every event, good and bad, was part of some grand, hidden design and therefore for the best.

In 1755, a massive earthquake ravaged Lisbon and confirmed Voltaire in his opinion that the world was a brutal, senseless place and optimism a ridiculous notion. He reacted by producing a novella that went to town on that theory. Its hero, Candide, is a fresh-faced young German who has been brainwashed into thinking that he is living in “the best of all possible worlds”. He doggedly clings to this precept until, at long last, he gives up philosophising and concentrates on “cultivating his garden”.

Fast forward 200 years: the Massachusettsborn Bernstein dominated the American music scene. The child of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, he was also, in many ways, Voltaire’s spiritual son: prodigiously gifted and versatile, a high-society icon and a political figure whose liberal sympathies earned him as many enemies as friends.

When the playwright Lillian Hellman suggested they write a musical revisiting the story of Candide, he accepted immediately. Both had been the targets of Senator McCarthy’s attacks and the parallels with the Inquisition’s auto-da-fé scene were self-evident.

Candide’s message, if we had to summarise it, would be something like this: work hard, engage with the world and stay away from slick, ready-made theories. These offer no valid short cut to first-hand experience and can only lead to complacency and fanaticism.

Voltaire and Bernstein basically agreed on this, but each says it in his own way. Voltaire’s final maxim “we must cultivate our garden” makes no promises – it is the disillusioned statement of a man who’s done with the world. Bernstein translates it to: “We’ll make our garden grow” and sets it to soaring fourths and fifths. There’s an uplifting “Yes We Can” tone to it, a clear belief that the world can be changed for the better. Optimism dies hard – but hey, it’s Christmas after all.

Candide
Until 31 December
Vlaamse Opera Antwerp
9-17 January
Vlaamse Opera Ghent
www. vlaamseopera.be