Goethe und die Frauen

The title of one of his best-known early poems does duty as the subtitle here, and it fits the shape of the evening exactly — arrivals and departures, over and over. Three performers take a musical-literary route through what the house calls Goethe's changeable biography, telling the affairs and reading the poems they produced. The pairing is the point and it is not always flattering: put a poem next to the woman it was written to and then next to the date he left, and the effect is a plainer view of the man than the poem alone gives. A singer, an actor and a piano.