KlavierLyrics

This song tells a deeply disturbing story of obsession, murder, and delusion. The narrator is asked to open a locked door, and behind it is a piano where a woman once sat and played. He was completely captivated by her, holding his breath every time she began to play, convinced her music was meant for him alone. But when he realized, or imagined, that this was just an illusion and she was not truly his, his obsession curdled into violence. The line about pouring her blood into the fire of his rage is the pivot point where the song goes from haunting to horrifying. He locked the door, and when people came looking for her, he said nothing.

The final section is where the full picture emerges. The door is eventually forced open, and the screaming of onlookers, a mother pleading, a father attacking him, tells you everything. The woman is still there, at the piano, dead. The narrator tries to explain that he himself is sick with grief and the stench of what he has done, but no one believes him or has any sympathy for him. He has convinced himself he is the victim of a kind of heartbreak rather than the perpetrator of a crime.

The last verse is the coldest and most elegant part. The chorus is mirrored and reversed: where he once listened to her play and held his breath in adoration, now she listens to him and holds her breath because she is dead and he is the one still playing. It is a portrait of possessive love taken to its most grotesque conclusion, the kind of toxic romantic fixation that Lindemann returns to often, wrapped here in the imagery of dusty keys, out of tune strings, and a locked room that smells of decay.