Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz

In “Lenz,” Cornelia Rainer delves into her own origins: hailing from the Tyrolean mountains, she 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.