It was performed by Marco Blaauw (trumpet), Nicola Jürgensen (basset horn), and musikFabrik, directed by Peter Rundel.

Video was by Franc Aleu, dramaturgy by Thomas Ulrich, lighting by Frank Sobotta, and sound direction by Paul Jeukendrup.

In 2013, this production was revived for three performances at Avery Fisher Hall in New York as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, beginning appropriately on Thursday, 18 July.

[3] A third production, by the American director Lydia Steier (dramaturgy: Pavel B. Jiracek), opened at the Basel Opera on 25 June 2016, with sets designed by Barbara Ehnes, costumes by Ursula Kudrna, and video effects by Chris Kondek.

In the second act, Michael undertakes a journey around the world in what is essentially a trumpet concerto with orchestra, performed in a huge rotating globe set against a starry firmament.

There are seven "stations" along the way, at each of which the music takes on colour from the locale: Germany, New York, Japan, Bali, India, Central Africa, and Jerusalem.

Michael's formula gradually evolves from a simple beginning form to increasingly florid extravagance, finally shattering into incoherent fragments in stations 5 and 6.

Michael commands the earth to rotate in reverse as the seventh station, Jerusalem, is reached, and he begins a new process of rehabilitation in a therapeutic conversation with a double-bass player.

Two clownish clarinet players, costumed as a pair of swallows, mock and—together with the orchestral low brass, an emblem of Lucifer—"crucify" him, after which the act ends with a musical "ascension" in which the sounds of the trumpet and basset horn circle around until they are united in a trill.

[10] In a process of 15 cyclical transpositions, Michael explains (in threefold appearance as singer, trumpeter, and dancer), his experience and opposition to Lucifer.

The staged premiere of Donnerstag was very well received in Italy, where it was awarded the Italian Music Critics' Prize for best new work, in December 1981.

[14] The Covent Garden production in 1985 also provoked contrary points of view in the press, in part divided over the question of the music versus the theatrical conception.

Paul Griffiths, writing in the Times, for example, found that "it contains much quite extraordinary music" but "the opera never for a moment works as the mystic revelation it pretends to be.

[15] Andrew Porter, on the contrary, found the "variety of forces, forms, textures, and matter ... a strength and a pleasure", and the "somewhat ramshackle construction saves the work from solemn pretentiousness.

The score is a culmination of the marvellous musics—in whose making Michael's vision, Lucifer's technical skills, and the inspiration of Eve's love seem to have conspired—that have poured from Stockhausen during the last thirty years.

But what matters most now is the excitement of entering this huge, ambitious work, responding to its sounds and sights, trying to understand it, and feeling, perhaps, that it is—by intention at least—something like a Divine Comedy and a Comédie Humaine in one.