"Anthony Tommasini, another critic at the same paper, describes the opera as "balancing between whimsy and terror".The whimsy can be illustrated by Berthe describing the bird's song in terms of instruments in Weir's orchestra, ("you would have thought the horn and the oboe were playing",) and by a parody of the Tieck's "Waldeinsamkeit" verse in which the bird instructed to sing the line "Alone in the wood, I don't feel so good" as if airsick.