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TLS 7.11.9: Hugh Macdonald: Darker tones
MENDELSSOHN, GOETHE, AND THE WALPURGIS NIGHT. The heathen muse in European
culture, 1700-1850. By John Michael Cooper. 284pp. University of Rochester
Press. $75;distributed in the UK by Boydell and Brewer. Pounds 45 - 978 1
58046 252 5.
The mythology of Walpurgisnacht was familiar to Germans from medieval
times. At the height of the witch- hunting craze, the Brocken, or
Blocksberg, in the Harz mountains to the south east of Hanover, was held
to be the scene of demonic revelry every year on May 1, the day sacred to
St Walpurgis, a blameless eighth-century nun. Stories of witches on
broomsticks, devils in monstrous form, and unfettered sexual frenzy
circulated freely for many centuries before the Enlightenment succeeded in
puncturing the superstition and reining in the cruelty it had engendered.
In 1777, Goethe, on an expedition from Weimar to study mining conditions
near Erfurt, took the opportunity to climb the Blocksberg in misty
December weather and gaze at the clouds with a scientific eye from above.
He had already planned to include a Walpurgisnachtstraum in the
long-gestating Faust, and it was this image of the Brocken and its demonic
cults that became familiar to European readers, whether in Goethe's poetic
text or in the many operatic versions of Faust (particularly Act Five of
perhaps the most famous reworking, by Gounod).
The lure of sorcery and witches' sabbaths was irresistible in the Romantic
theatre, but such a craze was only possible because the devil and his
deeds were no longer truly frightening to theatregoers, just as horror
films today are designed for comfortable, unthreatened audiences. The
Walpurgisnacht scene in Faust, Part Two has a classical background, while
Goethe's short ballad "Die erste Walpurgisnacht" (1799) treated a
different aspect of the mythology, namely the conflict between Christians
and Saxons in the time of Charlemagne, in which the lands between the
Rhine and the Elbe were the frontier between paganism and Christianity. In
his searching curiosity about the many religions of the world, Goethe did
not take the Christian side, but presented the pagan druids as legitimate,
wholesome celebrants of their particular rites on the slopes of the
Brocken.
John Michael Cooper's new book is primarily concerned with Felix
Mendelssohn's setting of this ninety-nine-line poem -a work with a
complicated history since the composer typically suffered from the desire
to revise and improve his own music, even to the point of not allowing
publication of some of his most polished pieces. Cooper digs deep into the
history of the Walpurgis mythology, into Goethe's many treatments of it,
and into the reception of both Goethe and Mendelssohn during the
nineteenth century. The tale of Mendelssohn's remarkable friendship with
Goethe, sixty years his senior, has been told many times, but the most
significant work that links them, Die erste Walpurgisnacht, for soloists,
chorus and orchestra, has been sidelined in the twentieth century, despite
the author's claim that, worldwide, it is among the most frequently
performed of all choral-and- orchestral compositions. In fifty years of
concert-going, I have heard it only once.
Not a pebble is left unturned in Cooper's exhaustive discussion of every
conceivable detail of the music: the sources, the sketches, the structure,
performance issues, critics' responses from different countries, the
Victorian English translation (very good), and so on. Many pages of the
score are reproduced in the text. Readers in our own time are naturally
intrigued by the spectacle of a devout Christian of Jewish origin setting
a poem in which the Christians give way to the authentic identity of
pagans. But it seems doubtful that Mendelssohn was ever as troubled by
this as modern critics might suppose (or wish), or that he thought of his
Jewish origins as even relevant in this case. Cooper is at pains to stress
issues of identity and alterity, of Self and Other, though the gains of
doing so are far from obvious, especially when Other often turns out to be
Self and vice versa. It is hard to imagine that these concepts would have
meant anything to Goethe or Mendelssohn, neither of whom, with their vast
erudition and profound engagement with languages, science, history and
world culture, can be straitjacketed by binary categories such as these.
When Cooper has a story to tell, he does so with fluency, enthusiasm and
an eye for detail. When he adopts a critical stance, anxious not to omit a
single possible avenue of argument, the prose is quickly overladen. The
musical analysis is marred by the desire to show that themes and motifs
that have barely anything in common contribute to the work's organic
unity. Mendelssohn knew very well how to organize his large-scale design
without resorting to resemblances that only a squinting eye can see. This
half-hour cantata/oratorio (it never had a handy designation) does indeed
deserve to be better known. If English audiences cannot take druids
seriously, this work will probably not persuade them to, although the
music is fine, especially the symphonic picture of stormy weather that
serves as an overture. The choral writing is vigorous and deft, and even
if we never see any Mendelssohn in the theatre, Die erste Walpurgisnacht
suggests that his dramatic gifts were real. |
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