Samstag is an opera for 13 solo performers (1 voice, 10 instrumentalists, and 2 dancers) plus a symphonic band (or symphony orchestra), ballet or mimes, and male choir with organ.

The score is dedicated, on the occasion of her twentieth birthday, to the composer's daughter Majella who, together with the bass Matthias Hölle, premiered the work in the Théâtre Municipal Metz on 19 November 1981.

[5] The opera's third scene, Lucifer's Dance, was commissioned by the University of Michigan Symphony Band and their conductor, H. Robert Reynolds, who appeared in the staged premiere in Milan on 25 May 1984 after having given the concert premiere on 9 March 1984 in Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, with Luis Maldonado (euphonium), Markus Stockhausen (piccolo trumpet), Kathinka Pasveer (piccolo), and Laurence Kaptain (percussion).

The separate premiere of Lucifer's Farewell was performed by the Händel Collegium Köln on 28 September 1982 in the Chiesa di San Rufino in Assisi, where St. Francis was baptised.

Finally, the fourth scene presents both static and rotating events surrounding the audience, as well as diagonal movements, and the release of a wild bird who flies away.

This is an example of what the composer called moment form, in which the surface events give the impression of entirely different situations, held together by the structural connections of the music.

[12] In the opening scene, Lucifer dreams Klavierstück XIII, a composition in five temporal layers with increasing "compressions of figures of human music, extensions and rests, for the abolition of time".

Toward the end he listens, enraptured, to a simple melody, fends it off, enjoys it, again wards it off, and finally succumbs and dies a feigned death.

The flautist, costumed as a cat, is the shamanistic celebrant, and is accompanied by six percussionists representing the six mortal senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and thought.

The percussionists play on a set of tuned sound plates (initially eleven of them, arranged in the order of the notes of the Lucifer formula), as well as on a total of at least 30 specially created "magic instruments" which are attached to or form parts of their costumes.

As the percussionists continue playing through this second pause, the flautist performs an "exchange of the senses", reordering the sound plates and adding a twelfth note, in order to transform Lucifer's formula into that of Eve.

[16] Lucifer's Farewell concludes the opera with a ceremony of exorcism, performed by 3 x 13 monks, singing the "Salutatio Virtutum" by St. Francis of Assisi, in Italian translation as "Lodi delle virtù" (The Praises of the Virtues).

After the last words of the text bells begin to peal, the monks free a caged black bird, and then open the sack, which proves to be filled with coconuts.