Poetic Intentions and Musical Production: "Die erste Walpurgisnacht"

MEREDITH LEE Poetic Intentions and Musical Production: "Die erste Walpurgisnacht" INAN18 June 1798 letter to August Wilhelm Schlegel, Goethe praised the Berlin composer Carl Friedrich Zelter for the quality of his musical settings , which, according to Goethe, were inspired not in some imaginative moment originating outside the text ("ein Einfall"), but rather conceived as a radical reproduction of poetic intentions. A year later when he wrote to Zelter for the first time, Goethe sought to provide him with a poetic text that would capitalize on his talents. He enclosed the ballad "Die erste Walpurgisnacht,"1 which he had completed only four weeks earlier. Goethe had rather high hopes for his somewhat strange poem with its Germanic druids and Christian oppressors and its historical explanation for the creation of the Walpurgisnacht legend. He was keenly interested in its potential as a text for musical setting. In his letter to Zelter, Goethe suggested that the dramatic ballad—that is, a ballad without a narrative voice, a poem whose tale is told fully through interactive dialogue—might be so crafted to serve as the text for a large-scale choral composition. He offered "Die erste Walpurgisnacht" for experimental setting: Ich lege eine Produktion bei, die ein etwas seltsames Ansehen hat. Sie ist durch den Gedanken entstanden: ob man nicht die dramatischen Balladen so ausbilden könnte daß sie zu einem größern Singstück dem Komponisten Stoff gäben. Leider hat die gegenwärtige nicht Würde genug um einen so großen Aufwand zu verdienen. (26 August 1799) Despite the self-protective disclaimer about the poem's value, Goethe was clearly asking Zelter whether he had succeeded in his announced purpose of crafting a text for the musical composition he imagined in broad generic outline. Zelter, as is well known, never set the ballad, writing instead to Goethe (21 September 1799) that he could not find a musical tone appropriate to it. The spirit that held it together eluded him.2 But many years later his pupil Felix Mendelssohn did set it and "Die erste Walpurgisnacht" has been acclaimed as the most significant secular cantata of the nineteenth century.3 Because Goethe so clearly states that he intentionally crafted the poem to facilitate its musical setting and in a new form, the text invites examination of how he did so. Such explicit assertion of intention is rather uncharacteristic for Goethe and therefore all the more deserving of note. I Goethe Yearbook XII (2004) 82 Meredith Lee will argue that a number of the poem's organizational characteristics are clear marks of a poetic intent to aid musical composition. Others, however , at least at first, appear to complicate the task and even seriously compromise it. But, then, Goethe uses the verb "ausbilden" with its expressed notion of taking a form beyond its usual limits and developing it to a new potential. This text was going to be something different from the ballads he had been writing and that Zelter and others had been setting to music with great success. In Zelter Goethe believed he had found the composer who would respond deftly to the musical intentions signaled by the text. There is ample evidence that by the late 1790s Goethe was increasingly attentive to music. He was particularly eager to have his ballads set and interested in the results. For example, when he completed the second of the Müllerin poems, "Der Junggesell und der Mühlbach," on his way to Switzerland in September 1797, he immediately offered it to Stuttgart opera director Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg (1760-1802) for setting.4 Among the poems that first attracted Goethe to Zelter's compositions was his setting of "Der Gott und die Bajadere" which he praised in a letter to Schiller as "original und wacker" (25 November 1797). In Zelter's initial letter to Goethe less than two years later (11 August 1799), to which Goethe responded with the Walpurgisnacht text, the Berlin composer indicated he had already also set "Der Zauberlehrling," "Die Braut von Corinth ," and "Der Junggesell und der Mühlbach," among others, all of these texts taken from Schiller's Musenalmanach.5 The critical literature has repeatedly emphasized the seminal importance of...