"A whirling panopticon in which dreamlike images fly past, flaring up explosively in light and rapidly vanishing into the dark." What Detlev Muller-Siemens fascinated about Walter Hasenclever's play "People" - which the libretto of his opera is based on - was "its shorthand dialogues, often no more than a series of seperate words barely expressive of the plot." The scenes are closely interrelated, and deal with aspects of human existence - like birth, death, power, oppression, law, murder, fear, loneliness - which are contrasted with withdrawn, gentle and quiet moments, islands, so to speak. The character of the music evolves between these two poles: Two extremes - a metallic cutting shrillness pressing ahead in abrupt thrusts like a mechanical chain, and gentle lines circling and interlacing as if in weightless, foliage-like profusion - interact to produce an often highly fused form of polyphony between which the music autonomously transmutes, allowing the play, is complement and equal, as much scope as possible.