Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1 The Cultural and Religious Prehistories
- 2 Tolerance, Translation, and Acceptance: Goethe's and Mendelssohn's Voices in European Cultural Discourse to ca. 1850
- 3 Reality and Illusion, Past and Present: Goethe and the Walpurgisnacht
- 4 The Composition, Revision, and Publication of Mendelssohn's Die erste Walpurgisnacht
- 5 The Sources, Structure, and Narrative of Mendelssohn's Walpurgisnacht Settings
- 6 At the Crossroads of Identity: Critical and Artistic Responses to Goethe's and Mendelssohn's Walpurgisnacht Treatments
- 7 Performing Identity and Alterity: Die erste Walpurgisnacht Then and Now
- Appendix A: Original Texts of Select Lengthy Documents Originally Written in Languages other than English
- Notes
- Selected Bibliograohy
- Index of Works by Goethe and Mendelssohn
- General Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
7 - Performing Identity and Alterity: Die erste Walpurgisnacht Then and Now
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- 1 The Cultural and Religious Prehistories
- 2 Tolerance, Translation, and Acceptance: Goethe's and Mendelssohn's Voices in European Cultural Discourse to ca. 1850
- 3 Reality and Illusion, Past and Present: Goethe and the Walpurgisnacht
- 4 The Composition, Revision, and Publication of Mendelssohn's Die erste Walpurgisnacht
- 5 The Sources, Structure, and Narrative of Mendelssohn's Walpurgisnacht Settings
- 6 At the Crossroads of Identity: Critical and Artistic Responses to Goethe's and Mendelssohn's Walpurgisnacht Treatments
- 7 Performing Identity and Alterity: Die erste Walpurgisnacht Then and Now
- Appendix A: Original Texts of Select Lengthy Documents Originally Written in Languages other than English
- Notes
- Selected Bibliograohy
- Index of Works by Goethe and Mendelssohn
- General Index
- Eastman Studies in Music
Summary
The historical, religious, and societal conflicts reflected in the various texts discussed here, as well as the works themselves, all stem from European culture of the nineteenth century and earlier, but the body of readers, listeners, and performers to whom these texts address themselves is considerably broader. Latter day readers are not simply auditors to the extensive literary, musical, and visual discourses that center on the Walpurgis Night; we are participants in them. Our voices commingle in discourse with other voices whose physical sources of enunciation are long dead, but whose ideas remain alive and vibrant. Goethe's 1799 ballad, his Faust tragedy, and Mendelssohn's cantata on the subject of the Walpurgis Night are thus works whose musical as well as textual contents are subjects very much the province of our own time—subjects that we address each time we read, study, discuss, or perform those works.
With this perspective in mind, it seems appropriate to conclude this discussion of historical and artistic engagements with the Walpurgis Night topos with a few remarks concerning the performance of Mendelssohn's cantata. The problems that the performance-centered issues of tempo, language, and ensemble placement and disposition raise in this work shed more light on the conflicts between New and Old, Self and Other that are central to the poem and Mendelssohn's cantata, as well as on the broader import of Die erste Walpurgisnacht as an enduring, socially conscious artistic realization of the moral of Goethe's “poetic fable.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis NightThe Heathen Muse in European Culture, 1700–1850, pp. 197 - 216Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007