as a fragile lute, staging a charged piano lesson, and trapping artists inside their own imaginations—to a longer tale in which the shabby mandolin-player Simon becomes page to the alluring Klara and brazenly faces her looming husband. Next come two sharp fables: a threadbare “genius” who reshapes the world only to remain unhelpable, and an upside-down world of social reversal swallowed at last by divine negation. Subsequent sketches pivot between stage and street: a spent clown eclipsed by an angelic boy dancer, a too-perfect “puppet” city dismissed as unreal, a rapturous swim on a small lake, a panoramic account of a forest fire and civic frenzy, a melancholy Sunday park stroll, and an armchair voyage to Moscow that dissolves back into a quiet room. The sequence also includes a harrowing theater conflagration with a stoic rescuer, a sensual Maria Stuart monologue, and a bustling “Lustspielabend” in a playhouse that ends mid-scene. (This is an automatically generated summary.)