Il 'medioevo musicale' di Giovanni Tebaldini: restituzione e conservazione

The discovery of the ancient music started between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In that period the Italian musicologists identified the ancient music with the sixteenth-century music and with the "Gregorian chant", which was considered as the highest expression of the lost Christian monody. They excluded, indeed, the rest of the music production of the Middle Ages. Giovanni Tebaldini was influenced by the neo-mystical historiographic perspective and by a certain 'worship' of the past. According to Tebaldini, the Middle Ages is "imagined and expressed" taking inspiration from a spiritual and Catholic view of human history, in which the figures of Dante and Palestrina are considered the greatest exponents of the Italian Middle Ages: they are convergent and coincidental, because they are moved by the same Christian spirit. This thought allows the Brescian musician to create an ideal union between the two Italian masters; according to the eventual history, this link is consciously diachronic, but it appears synchronic for their Christian intentions and premises of poetry and music. Tebaldini used this concept of Middle Ages in the Trilogia sacra dantesco-palestriniana, which he composed on commission of the sixth centenary of Dante's death committee and which was executed in Ravenna in 1921 for these celebrations. The theme of 'affinity between the two Greats' remains central in Tebaldini's work (theoretical, musical and pedagogical production), in his public lectures, and in the correspondence, particularly with the composer Francesco Balilla Pratella and the librarian Santi Muratori, who attended the Trilogia