Poetic Intentions and Musical Production: “Die erste Walpurgisnacht”

Summary

IN AN 18 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,” 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)