To view Goethe's and Mendelssohn's artistic engagements with the theme of the Walpurgis Night from a latter-day perspective is deceptively simple. Figuring centrally in the foreground are the colossus of the Walpurgis Night scene in the first part of the Faust tragedy and the final version of Mendelssohn's cantata, which, while dwarfed by Goethe's Walpurgisnacht treatment in Faust I, nevertheless ranks among the most-performed choral/orchestral compositions worldwide. Surrounding these are Goethe's 1799 ballad on the subject, which is known primarily through Mendelssohn's music, and the “Classical Walpurgisnacht” of Faust II, whose reception even today might be reasonably compared with the reception of the works from Beethoven's late Vienna period prior to the 1860s. Finally, somewhere on the peripheries are the Walpurgisnachtstraum scene from Faust I, the reportedly analogous Scherzo from Mendelssohn's Octet for Strings (Op. 20) and the orchestrated version of the latter from the London version of Mendelssohn's C-minor Symphony, Op. 11, and Mendelssohn's first setting of Goethe's 1799 ballad.

That image becomes plainly one-dimensional if one considers the two artists' Walpurgis Night treatments in the context of their creators' biographies and reception histories, and still more so in the context of other nineteenth-century artistic engagements with the Night as cultural topos. These contexts add color, depth, and perspective to the image of the artistic contributions discussed in the previous paragraph. For if the Walpurgis Night had become integrally bound up with societal and political issues by the time Goethe came to it, his creative engagements with it also made it into a legitimate subject of artistic discourse.