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
4 - The Composition, Revision, and Publication of Mendelssohn's Die erste Walpurgisnacht
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
You ask me… why it is that sometimes in my writings I quote examples from secular literature and thus defile the whiteness of the church with the foulness of heathenism. … I incline indeed to fancy … that in putting this question to me you are only the mouthpiece of another. … Please beg of him not to envy eaters their teeth because he is toothless himself, and not to make light of the eyes of gazelles because he is himself a mole.
Letter from St. Jerome to Magnus, an orator of RomeThe Walpurgis Night was already heavily invested with potential for artistic commentary on cultural, political, religious, and social issues by the late eighteenth century, and it became even more so in the wake of Goethe's powerful treatments. In the German-speaking countries particularly, the ideological glorification of a pre-Christian Germanic heritage was attractive in many sectors because it effectively emancipated Christianity from its indebtedness to the “pagan” monotheism of Judaism. This movement, termed “philo-heathenism” by Jeffrey Sposato, had attained a significant following by the beginning of the century and one of its most noted exponents was Friedrich Schleiermacher, among whose followers Mendelssohn counted himself in 1830 (see ch. 2, pp. 34–35). Against this backdrop, the pagan sympathies of Goethe's 1799 ballad (and, by extension, of musical settings thereof) were neither confrontational to Christian values nor provocative in their portrayal of Christian evangelizing in the Carolingian era. They simply submitted, in poetic guise, a historically based celebration of the ancestors of those latter-day Christians who were troubled by the notion that their religious pedigree resided in Judaic monotheism (or, to put it bluntly, that they were themselves essentially converted Jews).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis NightThe Heathen Muse in European Culture, 1700–1850, pp. 78 - 96Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007