The Score

Like a great fugue, Trevor Nunn’s grand non-musical exploration of one of the greatest composers builds its power through precise counterpoint. Brian Cox, fresh from his seismic success in TV’s Succession, brings that same domineering presence to Bach alongside his real-life spouse, Nicole Ansari-Cox. Nunn’s ‘magnetic’ (Daily Telegraph) portrait of power and prowess serves as a painful reminder of how civilization's highest achievements coexist with its darkest impulses. In an era of diminishing theatrical ambition, Oliver Cotton’s intimate play delivers the rare pleasure of watching two maestros wage a war of intellect in period costume.

The Story

It is spring in 1747. Unbeknownst to the soft breeze, a sinister trap is being laid inside Frederick the Great's Potsdam palace, where Johann Sebastian Bach and Maria Barbara Bach’s fifth-born son is the court composer. The challenge is simple enough - an ostensibly difficult theme must be adapted into a fugue. Here is Bach, a divinely inspired and morally uncompromising musical genius, forced to pay homage to a monarch whose enlightened rule has left Silesia's fields littered with corpses. What begins as Frederick's attempt to humiliate an aging Lutheran composer evolves into something far more dangerous: a confrontation between a man of God and a recklessly godless autocrat.