Jakob Lenz wanders through the mountains. Driven by inner voices, he throws himself into the icy water. To kill yourself? Or just to bathe, as he later claimed to Pastor Oberlin?
In 1778, the socially committed pastor Oberlin took in the poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, author of dramas such as The Hofmeister or The Soldiers . Together with the philosopher Christoph Kaufmann, Oberlin hoped to be able to counteract Lenz's attacks of paranoid schizophrenia. The increasing intellectual decline of the Sturm-und-Drang poet, as described by Oberlin in his notes, inspired the young Georg Büchner to write his novella Lenz , which in turn inspired the only 25-year-old Wolfgang Rihm to write a chamber opera.
The unstoppable pull of the mental and spiritual disturbance and the musical expressive force pulls the listener directly into the poet's shattered psyche. The real characters, Lenz, Oberlin and Kaufmann, are joined by six voices – projections of Lenz's inner state, his fears and dreams, but also voices from the world around him. Reality and hallucination overlap indistinguishably; Lenz's psychological experience merges with the sound that surrounds him. For Lenz there is no way out of his disturbing stream of perception, the only thing left for him is the straitjacket. Since its premiere in 1979, Rihm's youthful masterpiece has developed into one of the most successful German-language operas of the 20th century
