Strap on your goat leggings! Sunday 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. This Thursday morning on WPRB, we’ll have music in celebration of Walpurgis Night and May Day.
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). We’ll hear appropriate selections from Arrigo Boito’s opera, “Mefistofele.”
Mendelssohn wrote a fairly tame cantata, “Die erste Walpurigisnacht” (“The First Walpurgis Night”), on another Goethe poem about prankish Druids freaking out some Christians. (EDIT: Sandy Steiglitz tells me she’ll be playing this piece as part of this week’s Sunday Morning Opera with Sandy. The featured work will be Franz Lehar’s “Paganini.” Tune in to WPRB to hear it this Sunday between 5:30 and 10 a.m.)
Brahms composed a song, “Walpurgisnacht,” about a mother scaring the living daylights out of 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 that she herself is a witch. Ha ha! So German.
Among our other works will be Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Beltane Fire,” Gustav Holst’s “The Morning of the Year,” Nikos Skalkottas’ “Mayday Spell,” and Benjamin Britten’s “Spring Symphony,” a piece which climaxes in a setting of the 13th century May Day round, “Sumer is a-cumen in.” It’s all verrrry Wicker Man.
We’ll be leaping naked over bonfires, this Thursday morning from 6 to 11 EDT, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. Keep Walpurga in Walpurgis Night, with Classic Ross Amico.
