“Im Legendenton”: reinvenzione dell’arcaismo e infanzia dello spirito

In the Germany of the XIX Century artists and philosophers idealize the Middle Age as the period of Holy Roman Empire and consequently of the religious and political unity of his country. In the sphere of music this nostalgia leads to frequent hints to Gregorian music or simply, diatonic choruses in Palestrina’s style. Very interesting is the correspondance between poetry, romances, painting and theoric writings, from Wackenroder to Runge, from Schlegel to Tieck; and in this common context musicians try to suggest poetic distance and stilistic naïveté through inserts ‘im Legendenton’, according to Schumann’s terminology (Phantasie op.17). But, if Thibaut protests the superiority of this ‘a cappella’ style, normally the composers underline the impossibility to come back and give up the modern conquests of musical language: the ‘Legendenton’ survives also regularly, but as a memory of past, as a citation, as a nuance: symbolic related to religious song’s texts (Loewe, Schumann, Wagner, Wolf) or even used in the instrumental music, as a well-known allusion to the past, to the utopy of a lost simplicity.