Freitag was commissioned by Udo Zimmermann of the Oper Leipzig, which gave the staged premiere on 12 September 1996.

The first layer is entirely abstract ambient electronic music, which plays underneath all of the staged action.

Adam's wife, Eve, is tempted to have an illicit union with Caino in order to accelerate the development of mankind.

Because this advancement is not part of God's plan for humanity, Eve and Caino's affair has grievous consequences, namely, a brutal war between children of different races.

The basic outline of Eve's sin and repentance is echoed in the action of the dancer couples.

They begin as natural pairings, but as a result of swapping partners, they engender unnatural hybrids.

In the opera's finale, these hybrids join into a towering candle flame and spiral upward.

The audience is greeted by 8-track electronic music in the lobby, which is lit solely by candles.

Ludon signals the black chorus and they begin to sing and play on their African percussion instruments.

After the fourth bar, Ludon graciously asks Eve to conduct the ensemble, and he joins the chorus to sing.

A bright red streak shoots down from the sky, across the lake, and across the audience out the front door and remains visible.

The white children enter from the left wearing military outfits and carrying toy weapons.

They race repeatedly over to the right side of the stage and return to the left as they make noises with their weapons.

In one rush, they exit entirely to the right, and return onstage battling the black children, who are fighting with simpler weapons (spears, bows, etc.).

Duration: 78.5 minutes The electronic music from the opera is played in the lobby as the audience exits the theater.

(These events occur simultaneously with Acts I & II) There are 12 couples (see above) of male and female partners played by dancers.

Gérard Condé wrote in Le Monde about how the requirements of the Light cycle forced the composer into a cloister of sorts, This quest for perfection, a complete fulfillment of the artistic gesture from its conception to its implementation, against the tide of the entire musical practice, gradually shut the composer in a superb isolation, which resembles a prison.

Opponents see it as the culmination of a paranoid megalomaniac, yet Stockhausen continues to fascinate, to open doors into the unknown with wonder.

[1]Writing for The Sunday Times, Paul Driver also cited the megalomania of Licht and Stockhausen's 'obsession with control', but his review was favorable overall: I found that there was something grand and stirring about it all, despite the apparent puerility.

His live music, when clearly apprehensible, as in the writing for children, is compellingly strange: disjunctive yet flavoursome; not exactly tonal nor atonal nor modal; always quasi-electronically sliding in pitch.

[2]Stockhausen's former assistant Richard Toop wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald, Clearly, there's something here to drive virtually everyone with a political correctness hobbyhorse into a frenzy: this is probably one reason why Leipzig is so far the only German opera house to commit itself to the LICHT cycle.

German critics in particular, many of whom still seem ideologically ensnared in post-'68 nostalgia, and for whom Stockhausen clearly exists only as something to be offended by, regularly get steamed up about the "renunciation of reason" in the LICHT cycle, to a degree that itself seems irrational.This seems to me to involve a certain hypocrisy, or at very least a double standard.

It's quite clear what the function of music is for Stockhausen these days: it's not just art (that too) but a means of raising human consciousness to a cosmic level, through stage presentations which synthesise old myths and seek to create new ones.

[3]Toop also takes pains to point out that all four performances were sold out, concluding "So much for the unmarketability of new opera".