The composer set the pensive, lamenting poem by Andreas Gryphius to music as a demanding choral work. The text is musically reinterpreted by means of varied tone colours and through an emphatic interpretation of the words. Initially homophonic, the texture of the setting becomes polyphonic over the course of the piece; the number of parts varies between four and nineteen canonically treated parts. Solo passages round off the 'Karfreitags-Sonett' [Good Friday Sonnet] which was commissioned by the Bavarian Radio and premiered in Nuremberg in 1986.