Candide, or Optimism

Voltaire, the great philosopher, relentless satirist and brilliant mind of the Enlightenment, was a great admirer of Cicero. He regarded *On Right Conduct* as the finest treatise on human duties. He held the ancient orator in high esteem as an opponent of despotism. How can one find happiness and love in a world full of malice, cruelty and injustice? Voltaire’s naive hero, Candide, is banished from his family castle in Westphalia – an expulsion from that paradise which, according to Leibniz’s theory, appears to be ‘the best of all possible worlds’. On his absurd journey, he stumbles from one catastrophe to the next, and the optimism of his companion Pangloss is increasingly exposed as ridiculous. ‘Our wars kill more people than earthquakes destroy,’ writes Voltaire – things are simply not all for the best as they are. The author reminds us not to simply accept all the evils of the world and reinterpret them as the best that could happen, but to view reality with open eyes and a clear mind, and to face it without illusions, whilst bearing in mind that there is always the possibility of making it a little better through tolerance and humanity. The way Voltaire manages to write about the world’s misery with such wit and good humour can be heard in Peter Lohmeyer’s reading, delivered with humour and bitter irony.

Leonard Bernstein set ‘Candide’ to music as a comic opera in 1956; in the libretto, Candide says to Pangloss at the end: ‘You are a fool – I have learnt it for myself, the world is terrible. Ideologies and dogmas cannot help us. All we can do is work and tend our own garden.”

Peter Lohmeyer, born the son of a vicar, grew up in the Ruhr region. After training at the Westphalian Drama School in Bochum, he has, over the years, carved out a place for himself in the upper echelons of German-language acting by juggling theatre and film. Despite winning several film awards, he has always managed to keep a low profile and has found his home in the beautiful port city of Hamburg. His colleague Joachim Król once replied, when asked what he valued most about Peter Lohmeyer: “his capacity for suffering”. And so, in his own words, Lohmeyer lives a happy and contented life by the motto: “We’re far too busy trying to avoid mistakes instead of making them!” For over ten years, he has also devoted himself to the visual arts, with exhibitions in Salzburg, Vienna, Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden.