Il Palästinalied di Walther von der Vogelweide nella musica moderna: alcuni casi di studio

This paper aims to investigate some modern musical rewritings of Walther von der Vogelweide’s Palästinalied. The contribution starts with an investigation of both academic and popular reception of the Lied, with an emphasis on the development of textual criticism during the 19th and 20th centuries. In Italy, Maria Vittoria Molinari’s essays represent a crucial defense of the exploitation of the ‘reality of the text’s historical life’ through the safeguard of the value of the varia lectioinstead of the predilection for a unique witness. In the last section of this paper, it is highlighted that, on the contrary, the case study bands were mainly interested in the musical component of Palästinalied, while presumably overlooking any in-depth textual investigation. While the melody preserved in Z were rapidly chosen as the only appreciable musical basis for any cover, the lyrics show that bands keep on extrapolating texts from editions based on A and/or C, which are still nowadays quite widespread at a popular level.