3871–911: Goethe here explicitly adopts an operatic treatment (cf. Note 77) as in the latter part of Act III of Part Two.
3879 f.: among various strangely shaped rocks in the Brocken area (with names such as Devil’s Pulpit, Witch’s Altar, etc.) two are known as the ‘Snorers’ owing to a peculiar local sound-effect in high wind.
3914–33: ‘Mammon’, as the diabolic personification of gold and material wealth generally, appears in the New Testament, the medieval mystery plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost, etc. The Harz Mountains have for centuries been an important mining area for silver and other metals, though the yield of gold has been very small and there is no mine on the Brocken itself. Goethe had some expertise in geology and mineralogy, and it is on his own knowledge and local observations that Faust’s fantastic vision of glowing gold in the valleys and cliffs is partly based. His source Prätorius also mentions veins of metal in the ‘Blocksberg’ area. On the ‘diabolic’ nature of buried treasure cf. Notes 64 and 86.
97 3959, Lord Capercailzie: the original is Herr Urian, a name for the Devil formed from Ur-jan, i.e. ‘Ur-Hans’, a kind of primal male figure (cf. Old Nick, Auld Hornie, etc., and Note 65). It also became popularly identified with Urhahn or Auerhahn (capercailzie, wood grouse; Hahn=cock). In one episode of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus (1947) the Devil appears as ‘Mr Capercailzie’.
3962, Baubo: a figure from classical mythology (the lewd nurse of the earth-goddess Demeter).
3977: according to Goethe’s sources, witches who had been made pregnant by demons would sometimes get rid of their offspring by miscarriage as they rode to the sabbath.
4008, witch-unction: the witches smeared a magic ‘salve’ on themselves and their supposed means of transport; the reference may be to hallucinogenic drugs rubbed into the skin to induce sexual excitement and fantasies of flying. Prätorius reports that salves derived from the corpses of newly born children who had been murdered before baptism would bring about a trance-like state in which the soul left the body and flew to the Blocksberg.
4013: the Brocken summit is rounded, with very scanty vegetation.
4023, Voland: an old name for the Devil which Goethe found in Prätorius. The medieval forms fāland, vālant, etc. are associated with earlier Germanic words meaning fear or horror.
4096–113: the pedlar-witch may have been suggested to Goethe by one of his pictorial sources. For the list of her wares there are possible approximate parallels in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (the ingredients of the witches’ cauldron) and in Burns’s poem Tam o’ Shanter (1790). In the latter, the hero witnesses a sabbath in which ‘auld Nick’ in the form of a black shaggy dog (cf. Note 23) sits playing the pipes, and an altar is covered with sinister objects recalling bloody deeds. It has also been suggested that the objects peddled by Goethe’s witch have an associative connection with the Gretchen tragedy (poison, jewels, a sword). We should note, however, that Goethe treats the motif even more ironically than Burns (esp. in 4110–13).
4119: ‘Lilith’, as a kind of mythical primal witch, was to be found in Prätorius and in the Blocksberg literature generally. From the fact that the Book of Genesis offers two versions of the creation of Woman, Rabbinical tradition had concluded that Adam must have been married twice, and his first wife acquired the name Lilith, meaning a kind of demon. The word occurs in the Bible only once, in a passage (Isaiah 34:14) from which it has been variously translated (screech owl, night hag, lamia, kobold).
4138 f.; 4142 f.: the German words corresponding to these indecent particulars have generally been replaced by dashes in the printed editions since 1808.
4144–75, Mr Arsey-Phantarsey: Goethe’s word is Proktophantasmist, from πρωκτóς (anus) and ϕάντασμα (apparition); the last syllable is also homophonous with the German word for dung (Mist). The victim of this rancorous satire was Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811), a critic and minor writer from Berlin who in his day had been a worthy representative of the German literary Enlightenment. In 1775 Nicolai had written a parody of Goethe’s recently published novel, The Sorrows of Werther, and the young Goethe had replied with a verse epigram even more scatological than the Walpurgis Night passage. For Goethe and his friends Nicolai typified the worst kind of narrow-minded ‘enlightened’ philistinism, and he remained a target of satire. At about the time when the Walpurgis Night scenes were being written, this arch-rationalist and dedicated campaigner against superstition was plagued for weeks on end by inexplicable ghostly apparitions; he attributed these to high blood-pressure, and was cured of them by the application of leeches to his backside (4172–5). Having little sense of the ridiculous, he then gave a lecture on his experience to the Berlin Academy, which was published in 1799. This bizarre incident was mercilessly exploited by the young Romantic writers as well as by Nicolai’s old enemy Goethe, who had vowed in 1775 to punish him by making him appear in Faust. The resulting ‘Proktophantasmist’ passage is an amusing if tasteless in-joke for some of the poet’s contemporaries, but like other satirical material in the Walpurgis Night sequence (4072–95, 4210–398) and in A Witch’s Kitchen (esp. 2390–428, 2448–64) it seems wholly irrelevant to the Faust story.
4161: in 1797 hauntings had been reported in the head forester’s house in Tegel, just north of Berlin; they had been investigated by a commission which concluded that they were a practical joke.
4169: Nicolai was also a tireless travel-writer, whose Account of a Journey through Germany and Switzerland in the year 1781 had appeared in twelve volumes between 1783 and 1796.
4203–8: apparitions presaging imminent or future executions are a folklore motif. A book which Goethe is known to have read (The Infernal Proteus by Erasmus Francisci von Finx, 1690) contains the anecdote of a maidservant who has killed her illegitimate child and who sees in the moonlight the ghost of a woman carrying her severed head in her hands.
4209–22: these last fourteen lines are a later-written transition to Sc. 25 (cf. Note 111).
4223–398, A Walpurgis Night’s Dream: this ‘intermezzo’, so called because it was originally to have been followed by another Blocksberg scene (cf. Note 121 and Introd., pp. xxxix (.), consists entirely of a series of satirical epigrams about half of which had been written in 1797, two or three years before the Walpurgis Night itself, and had at first not been intended as part of Faust at all. In his periodical The Almanach of the Muses for that year, Schiller had published a collection of about 400 epigrams in the classical distich style, written in collaboration by himself and Goethe; they were caustically satirical, directed against all and sundry on the contemporary German literary scene, and appeared under the ironic title (borrowed from Martial) of Xenia, i.e. ‘parting gifts’ for guests. Later in the same year Goethe offered Schiller a further series (this time in rhymed quatrains) suggesting that they should appear in the 1798 Almanach as a sequel to the Xenia. Schiller, however, did not wish to continue this campaign which had stirred up much animosity, and Goethe agreed that the idea should be dropped, adding surprisingly that the new epigrams, the number of which he had now doubled, ‘might well be best accommodated in Faust’. Goethe’s references to Faust in his letters to Schiller at this time of resuming work on it are often ironical (cf. Introd., p. xxvii), and most commentators take what seems to be the common-sense view that the forty-four Dream epigrams remained essentially irrelevant to the play and were simply dumped into it, rather as Goethe also inserted miscellaneous collections of aphoristic material into his novels Wilhelm Meister and The Elective Affinities. None of the epigrams alludes to Faust or Mephistopheles or indicates that either of them is present; some (evidently among those written later) maintain a tenuous connection with the Walpurgis Night theme by mentioning devils or witches, or by the recurrent suggestion that some kind of unruly dance is in progress, accompanied by an ‘orchestra’ of animal noises. Most of them seem to be veiled allusions to minor and forgotten contemporaries of Goethe, though the conclusive identification of these is usually no longer possible and is
of little interest in any case. The title of the intermezzo is of course whimsically derived from that of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Goethe passingly includes figures from this play (Oberon, Titania, Puck) and from The Tempest (Ariel), but these Shakespearian associations are quite undeveloped and their significance remains unclear. Nor is there the slightest explanatory value (as some commentators suppose) in the fact that Goethe may have wished to allude to the verse romance Oberon (1780) by his older contemporary Wieland, or to the operetta Oberon, King of the Elves by another minor contemporary, Paul Wranitzky, which he had himself produced at the Weimar court theatre in 1796. In practice the Walpurgis Night’s Dream contains no substantive allusion to either of these works, or to Shakespeare’s play, beyond the mere use of the names at the beginning and end of the sequence.
4223 f.: Johann Martin Mieding, whose death in 1782 Goethe commemorated in a poem, had worked as a stage carpenter at the Weimar court theatre.
4255 f.: the description evokes some grotesque creature, possibly a frog; a similar motif seems to occur in 4259 f. The satire in both these quatrains is perhaps literary, as in 4263–6.
4303–18: for the polemical ‘Xenia’ cf. Note 111. One of their victims was August von Hennings (1746–1826), a totally unimportant littérateur who edited a periodical at first called The Genius of the Age and later (after 1800) The Genius of the Nineteenth Century. He also published in 1798 and 1799 a six-volume anthology called Der Musaget, i.e. the leader or master of the Muses, in which some of Goethe’s work was referred to disparagingly.
4323–6: according to Goethe himself in a conversation with Eckermann in 1829, the ‘crane’ is the Swiss religious writer and preacher Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801). As a young man Goethe had been friendly with him for a time, but later found his narrowly doctrinaire Pietism distasteful. Lavater is further alluded to in the following epigram and possibly also in the preceding one.
4347–54: the two philosophical positions here parodied are that of post-Kantian, especially Fichtean, subjective idealism which regards the external world as a product of the mind, and that of realism or empiricism which insists on its objective reality.
4360: the ‘flames’ seem to be the spectral flickerings that are supposed to lead the initiate to buried treasure (cf. Note 86).
4367–82: these quatrains probably refer to various émigré types of the years following the French Revolution.
4383–6: the allusion is probably not to the revolutionary masses in a literal sense, but once again to what Goethe elsewhere calls ‘literary sans-culottes’; the ensuing comments by Puck and Ariel (4387–94) also seem to suggest this.
4393 f.: Ariel’s summons to the ‘hill of roses’ (Rosenhügel) remains obscure, and no light is cast on it by pointing out that there are rose-bushes round Oberon’s palace in Canto 12 of Wieland’s epic (cf. Note 111). Ariel’s words may possibly be a reference to the dawning day, as are perhaps those of the next quatrain which closes the ‘dream’.
(after 4398): Goethe originally (cf. Introd., p. xxxix) intended a further scene at this point, in which the Walpurgis Night sequence would end climactically with a satanistic ritual at the top of the mountain. His surviving manuscript draft for it includes the following disjointed notes:
After the Intermezzo. Solitude A wild place Trumpets sounded Lightning and thunder from above Pillars of fire, smog, fog. A rock jutting out. It is Satan. A great crowd round him. (…] Satan’s speech etc. Presentations. Investitures.
There are some verse sketches, mainly satirical material of a trivial and indecent kind (notably a passage in praise of Satan’s enormous anal cavity) but also further prose jottings in a more serious vein:
Midnight. The spectacle vanishes. Volcano. Chaotic dispersal. […] On red-hot ground. The apparition naked Her hands behind her back Not covering her face or her private parts Singing Her head falls off The blood spurts up and puts out the fire Night A rushing sound Witch-children chattering From which Faust learns that Faust Meph
The ‘apparition’ seems to be the ‘pale young girl’ taking the form of Gretchen (4190; the word Idol is used in both passages), and the last words of the note seem to lead directly into the scene A Gloomy Day (Sc. 26) in which Faust has learnt of Gretchen’s plight.
(Sc. 26, 27, 28): these last three Urfaust scenes were all omitted from the 1790 Fragment, which ended with Gretchen fainting in the cathedral. They were originally in prose, and at the Fragment stage Goethe evidently felt that he could neither versify them nor publish them unverified (cf. Introd., pp. xxiv, xl f.). When he finally turned his attention to them again in 1798, he versified and considerably extended the Prison scene itself, but decided to leave the other two as they were, with only slight emendations, and adding the title A Gloomy Day. Open country to Sc. 26. The short Sc. 27 (Night. In open country) may have originally been thought of as prose, but in the German it has a strong rhythmic character and the first and fifth lines do in fact rhyme; the editions have accordingly always treated it as if it were free verse and resumed the line-numbering at 4399. A Gloomy Day is thus of special interest as the only prose scene in Faust, as well as for other reasons (cf. Notes 124 and 125).
, vulgar diversions: this phrase, occurring as it does in the Urfaust text, may indicate that even at that stage the young Goethe was planning to incorporate in Faust a Walpurgis Night scene or something equivalent to it. There is already a fleeting allusion to the Blocksberg in the Urfaust version of Auerbach’s Tavern (made clearer in the revised Fragment text, 2113 f.), though this may not be significant.
f. Oh infinite Spirit and Oh you great splendid Spirit, etc.: it is dear that Faust is addressing the Earth Spirit, who ‘deigned to appear to him’ (481 f.) and who, in the archaic Urfaust conception which these passages vestigially represent, was evidently thought of (at least by Faust) as having control over Mephistopheles and as being responsible for the latter’s relationship to Faust (f.; cf. 3243 f.). On the question of the status of the Earth Spirit cf. Introd., pp. xvi f., xxiv f., xxxi f., and Notes 14 and 72. It may be noted that Faust’s present description of the Spirit () as a being who ‘knows my heart and my soul’ seems hardly consistent with its scornful attitude to him in 512 f. and in the scene of its appearance generally (cf. also 1747), and some commentators have even speculated that there was another (lost) Urfaust scene in which it reappeared and treated Faust more benignly.
, the form of a dog … his favourite shape: this, too, seems to be a surviving archaic conception, peculiar to the Urfaust, of Faust’s dealings with Mephistopheles. In it, the latter not only assumed the shape of a dog as in the old Faust-book (cf. Note 23) but also frequently accompanied Faust in this form. The breed of dog is not specified, but it was evidently large enough to terrify ‘innocent wayfarers’. This curious scenario is compatible with the chapbook material but in no way compatible with Goethe’s final version, where Mephistopheles adopts canine form only once, to insinuate himself into Faust’s company at their first meeting, in the comical shape of a poodle (1147–323). As usual Goethe did not delete the earlier dog passage when revising the prose scene, and it therefore remains as another detail which we can explain historically but not dramatically.
4399, gallows-mound: in German Rabenstein, literally ‘ravens’ rock’. When criminals were hanged or broken on the wheel, the rough stone-built mound on which (for better public viewing) they were executed was generally outside any town, because their bodies would be left there unburied and would attract ravens and crows. Such places were of course uncanny. Faust and Mephistopheles ride past one on their way to the town in which Gretchen is awaiting her relatively merciful execution by beheading in the market-square (4588–94), after which she evidently expects to be buried (4521–6). The witches at the gallows-mound are reminiscent of those in Macbeth; the scene is also thought to have been influenced by Gottfried August Bürger’s famous Storm and Stress ballad Lenore (1774), in which a lover returning from the grave to fetc
h his mistress carries her off through the night, and on their way they ride past a place of execution with spirits hovering round it.
4412–20: in the Shakespearian parallel scene, the crazed Ophelia in Hamlet sings ‘snatches of old songs’ which like much else in her wild talk have a folkloristic character. The source for Gretchen’s song at this point is the old tale of the Juniper Tree, of which many versions are known in Europe. In it a little boy is killed by his mother or stepmother and unknowingly eaten by his father; his sister buries his bones under the tree, whereupon he turns into a bird and sings:
My mother she killed me,
My father he ate me,
My sister Mary-Annie
All my bones she found,
My bones in a silk cloth she bound,
And laid them under the juniper tree:
Kee-witt! kee-witt! what a fine bird am I!
At the time of writing the Urfaust in the early 1770s Goethe must have known some version of this story, or at least of the song (probably he had heard the tale from his mother as a child). In 1809, a year after the appearance of Faust Part One but quite independently of it, a Low German version of The Juniper Tree (Von dem Machandelboom) was sent to the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm as a contribution to their forthcoming collection of folk-tales, and in 1812 they published it in their first volume. In Gretchen’s version the song is poignantly distorted to fit her own case, the boy calling his mother ‘the whore’ who killed him. In 4449 f. she again refers to an old Märchen or folk-tale (not necessarily the same one) which she feels has some reference to herself. On the relevance of folk-culture to the Gretchen drama generally cf. Introd., p. xviii.