The first in-depth study of Mendelssohn's two settings of Goethe's Die erste Walpurgisnacht, in the context of scenes from Goethe's Faust and other works.
Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis Night addresses tolerance and acceptance in the face of cultural, political, and religious strife. Its point of departure is the Walpurgis Night. The Night, also known as Beltane or May Eve, was supposedly an annual witches' Sabbath that centered around the Brocken, the highest peak of the Harz Mountains.
After exploring how a notoriously pagan celebration came to be named after the Christian missionary St. Walpurgis [ca. 710-79], John Michael Cooper discusses the Night's treatments in several closely interwoven works by Goethe and Mendelssohn. His book situates those works in their immediate personal and professional contexts, aswell as among treatments by a wide array of other artists, philosophers, and political thinkers, including Voltaire, Lessing, Shelley, Heine, Delacroix, and Berlioz.
In an age of decisive political and religious conflict, Walpurgis Night became a heathen muse: a source of spiritual inspiration that was neither specifically Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim. And Mendelssohn's and Goethe's engagements with it offer new insights into its role in Europeancultural history, as well as into issues of political, religious, and social identity -- and the relations between cultural groups -- in today's world.
John Michael Cooper is Professor of Music at Southwestern University and author of Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony (Oxford University Press).

The Cultural and Religious Prehistories
Tolerance, Translation, and Acceptance: Goethe's and Mendelssohn's Voices in European Cultural Discourse to ca. 1850
Reality and Illusion, Past and Present: Goethe and the Walpurgisnacht
The Composition, Revision, and Publication of Mendelssohn's Die erste Walpurgisnacht
The Sources, Structure, and Narrative of Mendelssohn's Walpurgisnacht Settings
At the Crossroads of Identity: Critical and Artistic Responses to Goethe's and Mendelssohn's Walpurgisnacht Treatments
Preforming Identity and Alterity: Die erste Walpurgisnacht Then and Now