Johann & Georg Are Dead
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

It’s been a while since conniving German Lutheran organists had their own comedy, let alone one that tosses in sword fights, jokes about the rationalist philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and characters who literally regurgitate musical scores. Luckily, a 28-year-old savant named Itamar Moses has stepped forward to fill the breach. And if that sounds ludicrous, try this: He comes close to pulling it off.
Mr. Moses isn’t there yet. Once he establishes a viable premise, he seems a lot more interested in teasing out every comic nuance than in resolving it quickly or even plausibly. And the intellectual trickery ultimately crowds out the flashes of insight that characterize the works of Tom Stoppard, his obvious forebear. But Mr. Moses makes the kinds of stylistic gambles that should be applauded, even when they occasionally run aground.
It’s June 1722 in Leipzig. The previous organ master has died, and eight contenders have come to the city’s prestigious Thomaskirche to audition for his job. Mr. Moses – who, despite his young age, has attracted some fairly prominent cheerleaders, most notably Mr. Stoppard himself – confines his attentions to just six of the organists.
They are: the progressive Fasch (Boyd Gaines), who pines for a more open-minded approach to both religion and music; the reactionary Schott (Michael Emerson), aghast at these or any other innovations; the dissolute Lenck (Reg Rogers), who owes money to just about everyone in the room; the foppish Steindorf (Jeffrey Carlson), who has a habit of escorting young ladies into the choir loft of his Zwickau church; the doddering Kaufmann (Richard Easton), whose inept diplomatic skills are all that stand between his region warring with Steindorf’s, and the pathetic Graupner (Andrew Weems), destined to be second best in virtually everything. That leaves two remaining spots, one of which is taken by a man the program describes as “The Greatest Organist in Germany.” Bear in mind the play’s title.
As if this world isn’t incestuous enough, Mr. Moses has named half of the contenders Johann and the other half Georg, including two Georg Friedrichs (not to be confused with Georg Friedrich Handel, who skips the tryout). And everyone on stage has enlisted at least one of the others in his alliances or blackmail plots. For a group that (mostly) believes in predestination, these fellows sure want to have a go at shaping their destiny.
Actually, predestination gets a surprising amount of attention in “Bach at Leipzig,” so does Moliere’s stagecraft, the feuding strains of Lutheranism, and the use of rationalism in winning at cards. Not since Voltaire raked Leibnitz over the coals in “Candide” has German philosophy come in for so vigorous a comedic grilling.
As befits a Stoppard disciple, Mr. Moses doesn’t hesitate to mix linguistic gymnastics with Wildean aphorisms:
Schott: (With contempt.) So. You are a Pietist.
Fasch: … Why must everything have a name?
Schott: So that we know which houses to burn.
He also shares with Mr. Stoppard a soft spot for puns and word stunts. One of the best comes when Schott bemoans the burgeoning trend of resplendent French cathedrals and sensual imagery: “I do not know what they will call this ignominious new age, but it runs entirely counter to the spirit of the Reformation.”
Mr. Stoppard, of course, made his name with “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” which also finds erudite laughs in the travails of semi-notables eclipsed by far more famous contemporaries. It’s no accident that “Bach at Leipzig” is set in the town’s splendid church – but in the anteroom next to the room holding the coveted pipe organ. The characters, and we, get the sense that they won’t get a whole lot closer to those pedals.
By the end of Act I, when all six characters finally converge and the larcenous antics kick into high gear, “Bach at Leipzig” is a rare treat, a highbrow lark chockablock with vaudeville gags and beguilingly complicated subplots. Can Mr. Moses beat the odds and maintain this blissfully brainy energy for an entire evening?
Well, no. He begins the second act with an over explicit description and demonstration of a fugue, where complementary lines of music overlap and amplify one another. For the first time, not even Ms. MacKinnon’s clever staging can mask the effort involved, and the show-off in Mr. Moses makes its belated but perhaps inevitable debut.
Even this lapse, along with an egregiously overstuffed second act, can be largely papered over by a cast this strong. Mr. Gaines adds a few endearing filigrees to his plainspoken iconoclast from “Twelve Angry Men,” and Messrs. Carlson and Easton have a delicious rapport as roue and cuckold. Mr. Emerson – who excelled in plays like “Gross Indecency” and the Broadway “Hedda Gabler” revival without even cracking a smile, as far as I can recall – is a loose-jointed, bug-eyed delight as Schott, flailing around David Zinn’s austerely attractive set with remarkable physical ease. (The period costumes and wigs by Matthew J. LeFebvre allow for a surprising amount of physical mayhem.)
As the play fast-forwards to a late-in-life reconciliation, Fasch and Schott put aside their philosophical differences and share thoughts on their common experience: The inexpressible pride and shame of living in the humbling yet somehow glorifying shadow of greatness. “I have spent the better part of my life in this doorway,” Schott says on the outskirts of the room where Bach has played for 28 years. “No one has ever minded.” It’s the first time Mr. Moses tiptoes toward any expressions of actual sentiment beyond the exclamations required by the dramaturgical machinery, and it’s too little too late.
A palpable love of the joys of stagecraft, coupled with an ear for comic dialogue as precocious as his head for seemingly unstageable arcana, mark Mr. Moses as an intriguing playwright. If he can peel away the architectonic facility of “Bach at Leipzig” and add the emotions that such dexterity so often seeks to hide, he could be a great one.
Until December 18 (79 E. 4th Street, between Second Avenue and Bowery, 212-239-6200).