Mito classico e leggenda medievale nella visione musicale neoclassico-romantica

In the complex historical-aesthetical period corresponding to the early 19th century, when Neoclassicism and Romanticism converged in a new sensibility, the ancient heroes and the conception of the characters belonging to myth and tragedy gradually disappeared, even if they were still present in Gluck's reform and in Goethe's classical works, and were replaced by a new vision of the myth itself, the 'Neue Mitologie'. This was promoted by Herder, who united the melancholic nostalgia of the golden age and the spiritual tension of Romanticism. The persisting acceptance of the validity of these visions, that is to say the transformation of the hero's dimension from the 'tragic' to the 'sublime', through the metamorphoses of Prometheus, Faust and Don Giovanni, and the old myth of the 'Knight Errant' in a spiritual and messianic procedure, introduce us to a new sphere of ecstasy and abyss. In this perspective, the aulic elements of the ancient past and the cultured reappraisals of the ancient folklore come together in the symbolic metaphor of the 'new' romantic legends.