 Composer and professor of experimental music Dieter Schnebel (1930–2018) wrote of this scene

The central storm scene is, so to speak, a film with sound, whose moving images show an exterior and interior drama.The furtive encounters between people in the darkness, irregularly broken by lightning, are exposed by the empty fifths, the tremolos of strings, the brief breakthroughs of the wind instruments, the thunderclaps and the sinister sighs of the chorus, which express as well an external process that is internal