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
2 - Tolerance, Translation, and Acceptance: Goethe's and Mendelssohn's Voices in European Cultural Discourse to ca. 1850
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
At least pave the way for a happy prosperity toward that height of culture, toward that universal tolerance of man for which reason still sighs in vain!
Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem; or on Religious Power and JudaismTolerance should actually be only a transitional attitude: it must lead to acceptance. To tolerate is to insult.
Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, No. 151Long after fears of demonic sabbaths atop the Brocken had been generally assigned the status of superstitious lore rather than realistic threats to the well being of society, the Walpurgis Night continued to function as a vehicle for artistic communication on issues that were real and pressing matters of the present. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was sufficiently familiar as a cultural topos to be able to function as a point of convergence for any number of intellectual, religious, and social cross-currents. It thus naturally offered artists a means to deal literally with a calendrical and social event that was familiar even to uneducated individuals while also reflecting allegorically or symbolically on broader matters too sensitive or complex to serve this discursive function effectively. Since these convergent lines of perspective reflected their constantly changing contexts, artists' interpretations of the topic also shaped public perceptions of their artistic identity—the issues that were important to them, where they stood on those issues, and how they related to societal norms and deviations vis-à-vis those issues.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis NightThe Heathen Muse in European Culture, 1700–1850, pp. 30 - 53Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007