It was the sixth of seven to be composed for the opera cycle Licht: die sieben Tage der Woche (Light: The Seven Days of the Week), and the last to be staged.

The Wednesday Greeting consists of the electronic music from the fourth scene, Michaelion, and is played in the foyer amidst flues, winds, blowers, kites, balloons, and flying doves.

As the parliamentarians arrive via transparent elevators at the top floor of the skyscraper or floating glass dome, helicopters and doves occasionally pass by in the blue sky beyond.

After a final large vowel spiral, the parliamentarians synchronously declare the central theme of the opera: "World parliament Wednesday from Light, day of reconciliation, love".

In the last solo, the double-bass player becomes convulsed in an obsessive-compulsive fit of scraping and groaning, until the appearance of the mysterious figure of a mummy who, with a stroke on a Chinese gong, releases the bassist from his affliction.

The solos are accompanied by electronic and concrete music in octophonic spatial projection, and each is associated with a particular image: The four musicians of a string quartet are first introduced to the audience by a moderator, who describes the technical details of the performance.

[11] Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jörn Florian Fuchs cited Kathinka Pasveer's musical direction as a "truly brilliant realization of the score".

[12] Agreeing with this assessment of Pasveer's accomplishment, David Fallows added that "one of the important details of any live performance of Stockhausen has always been the sheer gorgeousness of the sound projection, making its impact right from the first moments of the magically lucid Wednesday Greeting".

[15] Nick Richardson, writing in the London Review of Books, disagreed about the Helicopter Quartet, describing it as "fantastic on Thursday night, particularly at take-off, the strings' vigorous tremolos locking with the throb of the rotor blades and the warm, bass hum of engine".

[16] Gisela Schwarz wrote in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger that Graham Vick had ably captured Stockhausen's diverse religious views without dismissing them as merely esoteric.

[10]Mark Swed summed up his view of the production in the Los Angeles Times by writing, "the event was astonishing for the soul and simply beyond belief".