“Dam the Rhine with their corpses; / Heaped with their bones, let it / Bow foaming around the Palatinate / And then be the border!”

In his musical version, the French composer Justin Lépany, who lives in Berlin, sets Kleist’s fantasies of violence to music with medieval-sacral expressions that defamiliarize them beyond recognition. The three women’s voices without instrumental accompaniment form a contrast to any martial attitude.