Schiller: Freude schöner Götterfunken

An actor and a musician set out, in the house's phrase, on a serious-and-cheerful search for what causes a life, and they conduct it entirely in Schiller's own words: the prose at full stretch and the poems that have no equal in German. The instrument is the surprise — clarinet and saxophone rather than the piano the material invites — and it stops the evening becoming a recital. A painted backdrop by Ulrike Theusner stands behind the two of them. The title line is the one everybody can already hum, and the evening's argument is that the man who wrote it was after something harder than joy.