Bärenreiter has published the first critical music edition of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s major Goethe cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht. The composer reworked the piece several times following its premiere. In this new edition his version of February 1843, edited by John Michael Cooper, is made available to performers for practical use for the first time.
Mendelssohn’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The first Walpurgis Night) is a work fraught with ambivalence and paradox. Most striking among these problems is the fact that it is a major work by a major composer based on a text by a major poet and cannot be overlooked in any substantive discussion of Mendelssohn’s life and works, yet until now it has never been published in a source-critical edition. The editions that have gradually replaced those overseen by the composer himself have ineluctably corrupted the work’s musical text, organization, and even paratextual materials.
This edition sets out to rectify that problem. It is based on the authorized first edition of the full choral/orchestral score, which was carefully prepared and overseen by Mendelssohn himself. It notes the many and substantial variants that were introduced over the course of the work’s compositional history. It includes original and other early variant readings of passages that were included in the manuscript and, in some instances, the first performance, but deleted or significantly modified prior to publication of the definitive version. It incorporates the English text prepared by his preferred English translator, William Bartholomew, rather than substituting a corrupt translation or omitting it altogether. It thoroughly documents the work’s background, genesis, and source-situation. The hope is that this edition will empower performers and interpreters of every persuasion as they approach one of Mendelssohn’s most provocative masterpieces.
To modern audiences and performers, the Walpurgis Night is familiar as a springtime nocturnal revelry based, more or less fantastically, on the notion of a Witches’ Sabbath; in myth and history it is also strongly associated with with the summit of the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz Mountains in central Germany. But modern audiences are generally unaware that for Goethe, Mendelssohn, and their contemporaries the Night was far more than a light-hearted holiday. Rather, it was a calendrically concentrated commemoration of centuries of strife, conflict, mystery, and violence – all centering on religious intolerance and the murky boundaries between the natural and supernatural, the known and the unknowable. Goethe and Mendelssohn naturally invoked these more troubling societal elements in their respective artworks dealing with the Walpurgis Night.
The immediate source for Mendelssohn’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht is a 1799 poem by the same title that Goethe sent to Mendelssohn’s eventual teacher, Karl Friedrich Zelter (1758 – 1832) on 26 August of that year. Zelter was never able to set the poem to music, but it is difficult to imagine that he did not have some – unfortunately undocumented – role in its eventual arrival in the hands of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who began studying with him in 1819 and quickly emerged as his star pupil.
The genesis of Mendelssohn’s cantata falls into two main stages. The first stage spanned the years 1830 to 1833 and yielded a complete setting that was successfully premiered in Berlin under the composer’s direction and initially slated for publication but ultimately withheld. Mendelssohn became increasingly dissatisfied with that setting over the course of the later 1830s, and by the early 1840s he was ready to take up the work for revision again. The revisions became more and more extensive as the composer devoted more attention to the project, however. The changes introduced before the première of the revised version in February 1843 were further augmented in the months leading up to the production of the piano/vocal score, and yet more substantive changes were introduced between the publication of the piano/vocal score in late 1843 and the printing of the full score in the spring of 1844.
The present volume represents the first source-critical edition of that final setting. In that version, the work was premiered under Mendelssohn’s direction as the close of a concert given on 2 February 1843, with Sophie Schloss, Maria Heinrich Schmidt, Wilhelm Pögner, and August Kindermann as vocal soloists. The program for the concert included, beneath the soloists’ names, an unattributed explanatory note enclosed in quotation marks and parentheses that clearly draws on Goethe’s 1812 summary of an conjectured historical explanation of the origins of the Walpurgisnacht legends that had become common in German travel literature in the late eighteenth century:
(“In the last days of paganism in Germany, the druids’ sacrifices were subject to punishment by death at the hands of the Christians. Nevertheless, at the beginning of springtime the druids and the populace sought to regain the peaks of the mountains so that they could make their sacrifices there, and to intimidate and chase off the Christians (usually through the latter’s fear of the devil). The legend of the first Walpurgis Night is supposed to be based on such attempts.”)
To those who are familiar with the pronounced self-critical faculties that led Mendelssohn to withhold many extraordinary compositions and delayed the publication of many others, it will come as no surprise that Die erste Walpurgisnacht underwent significant revisions between its premiere and its publication. More surprising is that in the published score he replaced the prefatory note just quoted with an excerpt from a letter that Goethe had written to him on 9 September 1831 -- and by so doing backgrounded the Walpurignacht’s literal historical subject while foregrounding what poet had described as the “elevated symbolism” suggested by that subject. The new prefatory note reads:
“… For in the history of the world it must eternally be repeated that something old, established, proven, [and] reassuring will be compacted, pushed aside, dislocated, and, if not abolished, then corralled into the tightest space by emergent new forces. The middle period, in which the hatred is still capable of reacting, and still may do so, is presented here succinctly enough, and a joyous, indestructible enthusiasm flares up once again with brilliance and clarity…” (Letter from Goethe to Mendelssohn, 9 September 1831).
John Michael Cooper
from [t]akte 2/2010