Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis Night: The Heathen Muse in European Culture, 1700–1850 (review)

In Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis Night John Michael Cooper sets out to discuss Mendelssohn's musical and Goethe's literary treatments of the Walpurgis Night legend in its broadest possible context. While Mendelssohn's Die erste Walpurgisnacht, op. 60, is the obvious focal point of this musicological study, Cooper decided to move "gradually from context to text, and then on to reception" (p. xiv). The seven chapters therefore move from the "general, historical, religious, and biographical contexts for the creation of Goethe's and Mendelssohn's treatment of the Walpurgisnight" (p. xiv) to tracing the genesis and interpretation of these highly influential works; the book closes with a brief reception history and some thoughts on performance practice. The common theme throughout all these different discussions is Goethe's and Mendelssohn's "handling of the Walpurgis Night as a cultural, historical, and social topos" (p. xiii), portraying these influential artists as mediators in societal conflicts between Self and Other.

While the broad summary of the cultural and religious prehistories surrounding the Walpurgis Night in chapter 1 seems at first far removed from Mendelssohn's Die erste Walpurgisnacht, Cooper quickly and convincingly demonstrates the relevance of the historical context to his cultural interpretations of Goethe's and Mendelssohn's narratives. In fact, Cooper's masterful synopsis of the various cultural meanings of the history and legends surrounding the Brocken (the highest peak of the Harz mountains in central Germany and the geographic center of Walpurgis Night celebrations in modern sources) legitimizes his ambitious claims regarding the poet's and composer's intents by outlining the subtle meanings of the history of Walpurgis Night in Germany and explaining their significance to the society of Goethe's and Mendelssohn's generations. The breadth and depth of the source materials referred to in this chapter attests to the rigor and completeness of Cooper's research.

Chapter 2 lays out the other main components of his argument for Goethe and Mendelssohn as culturally engaged artists by presenting very insightful ideas about their chosen roles as translators/ intermediators of cultural expressions based on their identities and beliefs, which, while locating them on the fringe of society, afford them insights and privilege to give voice to not only tolerance but acceptance of the Other. Although Cooper's use of Goethe's Mahomet and Mendelssohn's Athalia serve as convincing examples in this chapter, the majority of especially Mendelssohn's oeuvre seems to suggest a somewhat lesser "activist" agenda then Cooper wants to invoke. The ensuing discussion of Goethe's three treatments of Walpurgis Night in the ballad, Faust I, and Faust II gains its strength and credibility once again from Cooper's contextual interpretation of these works.

In chapter 4, "The Composition, Revision, and Publication of Die erste Walpurgisnacht," Cooper does an excellent job of tracing the evolution of Mendelssohn's cantata as documented in the composer's correspondence. The composer's sense of a personal Jewish identity, however, seems overstated. Direct proof for Cooper's claim about the enormity of the risk to Mendelssohn in setting a poem in which non-Christian protagonists outwit Christians does not seem to be substantiated in any of the many letters quoted. Furthermore, Cooper's assessment that choral/orchestral psalm settings "whose Old Testament texts immediately recalled the ancestral Jewishness of their composer, and whose symphonic dimensions dwarfed all of Mendelssohn's other explicitly Christian sacred works published by the early 1840s" (p. 79) seems argumentative in order to support his main points. One could just as easily argue for Mendelssohn's psalm settings as Christian works, as the psalms have served as a main text for Christian worship since the beginning of the Church. In fact, stronger musical arguments can be made for Mendelssohn asserting himself as a German Lutheran with his composition of sacred cantatas during...