Strap on your goat leggings! Tonight is Walpurgis Night, the eve of the feast day of 8th century abbess Saint Walpurga. It’s a great witches’ holiday – the “other” Hallowe’en – and therefore a popular celebration in Europe, where they still know how to make everything festive creepy. And more power to them.
Music lovers and devotees of German romantic literature, of course, already know a thing or two about Walpurgisnacht. It’s the night Mephistopheles escorts Faust to the Harz Mountains, where they encounter witches and warlocks cavorting on the Brocken. It’s also the night Faust, Mephistopheles and Homunculus travel to ancient Greece to encounter the shade of Helena (a.k.a Helen of Troy).
Mendelssohn wrote a fairly tame cantata, “Die erste Walpurigisnacht” (“The First Walpurgis Night”), on another Goethe poem about prankish Druids freaking out some Christians. Brahms wrote a song, “Walpurgisnacht,” about a mother freaking out her daughter, by telling her a thunderstorm is actually the sound of witches celebrating on the Brocken; as if that isn’t enough, she tells her she herself is a witch. Ha ha! So German.
It is a holiday for leaping over bonfires, vandalizing neighbors’ property and rioting, all in the name of welcoming spring. It is not to be confused with St. John’s Eve (June 23), the night the demon Chernobog emerges from the Bald Mountain. More on that later, I’m sure.
Have fun, but remember… keep Walpurga in Walpurgis Night!
Samuel Ramey doing his thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuRZUlAnXVc
“The Goat of Mendes! The Devil himself.”
PHOTOS: Goya’s “Walpurgis Night”, The Goat of Mendes from “The Devil Rides Out,” Norman Treigle as Mefistofele