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
3 - Reality and Illusion, Past and Present: Goethe and the 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
By the early eighteenth century the Brocken was synonymous with the cultural topos of the Walpurgis Night, and the Harz Mountains generally had become known for their mysterious but forbiddingly rugged beauty. In a world increasingly committed to “civilization” but romantically fascinated with nature's most impenetrable domains, the Harz represented a challenge to humanity and an opportunity to contemplate the great mysteries of humankind's relationship to God and nature. The Mountains' abundant lore of ghosts, phantoms, and sundry otherworldly experiences (especially the Walpurgis Night itself) added the Supernatural to this potent mix. It is thus hardly surprising that the natural scientist, thinker, and poet Goethe dealt with the themes of the Brocken and Walpurgis Night in some way or another throughout his creative life. Drawing on a wide array of the fanciful depictions and the historical and fictitious sources discussed in chapters 1 and 2 as well as his own imagination, he touched on these themes countless times in his diaries, personal correspondence, and scientific prose, and drew inspiration from them in numerous literary productions.
A narrative reconstruction of Goethe's various lifelong engagements reveals a tightly woven web of intertextual relationships among the various literary manifestations of his interest in the legends and lore of the Brocken and the themes of Self and Other, so that the ballad “Die erste Walpurgisnacht,” the Urfaust, the Faust Fragment, some of the Faust-related Paralipomena, the “Walpurgisnacht” and “Walpurgisnachtstraum” scenes from Faust I, and the “klassische Walpurgisnacht” from Faust II emerge as complementary literary commentaries on a central theme.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis NightThe Heathen Muse in European Culture, 1700–1850, pp. 54 - 77Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007