Oh, that this lashing wind was something more

Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter …

The rain is pouring down. It is July.

There is lightning and the thickest thunder.

It is a spectacle. Scene 10 becomes 11,

In Series X, Act IV, et cetera.

People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,

Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old,

The air is full of children, statues, roofs

And snow. The theatre is spinning round,

Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.

The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.

And Ludwig Richter, turbulent Schlemihl,

Has lost the whole in which he was contained,

Knows desire without an object of desire,

All mind and violence and nothing felt.

He knows he has nothing more to think about,

Like the wind that lashes everything at once.