Abstract
The 176 verses (44 epigrams) of the Walpurgis Night's Dream in Faust, Part I, are structurally divided into three themes and contain elements of aesthetics, cognition theory, and social criticism. In the relationship between Walpurgis Night and Walpurgis Night's Dream, overlapping tendencies toward concrete characterization and abstract figure-allegories pave the way for that interrelation of the “big” and “small” world which is the basic principle of the artistic link between Faust, Part I, and Faust, Part XI. With polemical intentions, Goethe draws a series of types and characters which, as a body, must be understood in the sense of Hegel as an “abolition” of irony in romanticist comedies. In regard to tradition, borrowings from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night'sDream and The Tempest are combined with adaptations of Domenico Cimarosa and the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It is the inherent unity of seriousness and levity, of the tragic and the comic, of constructive profoundness and slapstick in all these elements which give Walpurgis Night's Dream an important but up to now functionally underestimated place in the complete work of Faust. (In German)
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