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
Preface
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
In the last days of paganism in Germany, the druids' sacrifices were subject to punishment by death at the hands of the Christians. Nevertheless, at the beginning of springtime the druids and the populace sought to regain the peaks of the mountains so that they could make their sacrifices there, and to intimidate and chase off the Christians (usually through the latter's fear of the devil). The legend of the first Walpurgis Night is supposed to be based on such attempts.
This book is founded on convergences of contradictory elements. At its center is the Walpurgis Night, a supposed celebration of evil that is named after a British saint whose good deeds took place deep inside what is now Germany. That fabled convergence of good and evil was treated in literature in a short ballad and two topically related scenes of the Faust tragedy by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), a pantheistic scientist, draftsman, and poet. The earliest of Goethe's literary treatments is the one that most overtly sympathizes with the participants of the Walpurgis Night revelries, but it is also the one that became the basis of a complex cantata by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–47), a devoutly Lutheran composer of Jewish descent and grandson of the Enlightenment's most influential philosophical advocate for the assimilation of Europe's Jewish and Christian citizenry. Goethe's ballad and Mendelssohn's cantata both center on the struggle for religious freedom and the nature of historical processes by mediating between the legend of the Walpurgis Night and a conjectural reconstruction of its historical basis, the conflict between Christianity and paganism a millennium before they took it up.
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- Information
- Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis NightThe Heathen Muse in European Culture, 1700–1850, pp. xiii - xviPublisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007