Word: voltairian
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...soft-voiced reason. He is polite to the point of obsequiousness, not only to his church superiors, but even to the people he torments. Creepy, well-met and utterly corrupt, and when the French invade he simply disappears - only to reappear later as, of all things, a Voltairian rationalist, married, with children, and growing rich as an enforcer for Spain's occupiers. He is, in his way, also a perfect modernist, blowing blandly and prosperously with the winds of change. As long as there is power and status to be had, he does not care who he must serve...
...Gregoire's increasing involvement in the court. This also means involvement with the unofficial reigning queen of the court, the widow de Blayac (Fanny Ardant). The widow de Blayac is almost a spiritual twin of Dangerous Liaisons' calculating Marquise de Merteuil. Both of them rule with Machiavellian minds and Voltairian wits. She is the master player that Gregoire has to confront from whom he learns to play the game of seduction as well as the game...
...Voltaire's novel, a satiric classic that describes how a young innocent named Candide, whose tutor has taught him to believe this "the best of all possible world1," experiences an interminable and hysterical series of disasters that teach him to view life a bit more realistically. To reproduce the Voltairian spirit. Prince engaged Hugh Wheeler (A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd) to re-write the book and Stephen Sondheim (ditto) to furnish some additional lyrics. He also "cast young" in-order to convey the naivete the original production lacked. The Loeb version has added a few direct confrontations between Candide...
...political dimension of a film with an apparently nonpolitical subject, such as Firemen's Ball, 1968. Others, like Jaromil Jires (The Joke, 1968) preferred social analysis and political generalizations, while Chytilova's Dazies or Nemec's Report on the Party and the Guests are philosophical tales in the Voltairian sense of the word...
...over the crucial blending and balancing of libretto and score that difficulties arise, partly from differences in tempo and tone, partly from the operetta medium itself. What is most inspired and Voltairian about Candide must plague operetta writing. Voltaire's book is much better suited to a film, which could approximate the breakneck pace and have a field day with the calamities; or to pure opera, which wholly through music could catch the book's speed, glancing wit and mocking elan...