Goethe & Wieland

Hymns to love, says the subtitle, and the evening takes the best of what both men wrote on the subject. The pairing is the interesting part: Wieland was in Weimar before Goethe, was the reason a duchess thought the town could hold writers at all, and is now the one of the four classics that visitors cannot place. The house credits him with bringing enormous elegance and lightness into the German language, and quotes him on the paradox of love — two fundamentally different creatures bound together while permanently misunderstanding each other. An actor and a musician carry it, which is the right scale for poems about wanting things.