Lenz.

Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz: A Sturm-und-Drang poet with extraordinary talent and a sensitive soul. Initially celebrated as a literary genius, Lenz increasingly experiences isolation and alienation throughout his life. Perceived as too much of a free spirit for the intellectual narrowness of his homeland in Livonia and the strict upbringing of his parents, he is deemed too inelegant, polite, and wealthy for the literary society around Goethe in Weimar. Lenz remains a “wanderer” throughout his life, homeless and misunderstood

In “Lenz,” Cornelia Rainer grapples with her own origins: she hails from the Tyrolean mountains and stages the nature of the Steintal and Lenz’s inner world as an acoustic landscape: harmonious, disturbing, and imbued with the radical contradictions inherent in the Lenz narrative.

Cornelia Rainer captures the immense linguistic power and atmospheric density of Georg Büchner’s text, depicting the twenty days that Lenz spent in the Steintal, in that sparse yet striking landscape, at the house of Pastor Oberlin. She turns these days into a symbol of a lifelong quest, where recurring themes and states condense: the gradual distortion of perception, the influence of nature, the vulnerability to one’s own mood, the longing for community and companionship with others, the torn and ambivalent relationship between religious delusion and atheism, between hubris and self-flagellation, mania and boredom, dream and wakefulness.