N49P Piano-vocal score (2008) xiv + 118 pp. $55.00 The first version of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's secular cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First Walpurgis Night) was composed during the last years of the composer's decade-long friendship with the work's poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was premiered less than a year after Goethe's death, but despite his enthusiasm for the work Mendelssohn was unable to return to it as a publication project for several years. He did finally revise and publish it in 1842-44, and in that guise it won considerable acclaim, but by then Mendelssohn's professional standing had changed significantly, and so had the work itself. This edition represents the first publication of the young and unestablished Mendelssohn's early setting af Goethe's provocative ballad concerning the eighth-century conflict between paganism and Christianity in Germany. The work is masterful in its own right, and the similarities and differences between it and the later version offer telling insights into Mendelssohn's compositional development. The piano-vocal score incorporates Mendelssohn's own manuscript of a four-hand arrangement of the orchestral introduction.