español | français Carlo Gesualdo Peter Holman 10 CDs for a desert island : Magdalena Kozena Gregorian chant   54 - 53 - 52 - 51 - 50 - 49 - 48 - 47 - 46 - 45 - 44 - 43 - 42 - 41 - 40 - 39 - 38 - 37 - 36 - 35 - 34 - 33 - 32 - 31 - 30 - 29 - 28 - 27 - 26 - 25 - 24 - 23 - 22 - 21 - 20 - 19 - 18 - 17 - 16 - 15 - 14 - 13 - 12 - 11 - 10 - 09 - 08 - 07 - 06 - 05 - 04 - 03 - 02 - 01 - CARLO GESUALDO Perhaps this is why the Prince’s pain and guilt, his supposed sadomasochism and homosexuality and obviously, the murder of his first wife, have been used to explain his music. There had to be a reason behind such strange music and the strangeness of his private life was just the thing. However, Gesualdo’s music did not receive the same reception during his lifetime. The fact that he was considered an extraordinarily sophisticated composer, an expert in counterpoint and a very refined though never crazy and far from incomprehensible composer, forms a veritable enigma. It was not so important whether the prince killed Maria d’Avalos and her lover Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria with his own two hands or whether he ordered his servants to do so; nor whether the crime was committed using firearms, as the text from the report of the proceedings of the Grand Court of the Vicaria of Naples seems to indicate, or whether it was a multiple stabbing. Nor even whether Don Carlo Gesualdo effectively needed his valets (some say his second wife Leonora d’Este) to beat him so that he could ‘go to the stool’. But the greatest mystery of all lies in the naturalness with which the intellectual circles of the Italy of 1600 appreciated this music, which still sounds surprising to the present-day ear. Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, nephew of the cardinals San Carlo, Alfonso (Archbishop of Naples) and Federico Borromeo, the grandson of Pope Pius IV, and the husband and assassin of his cousin, Maria d’Avalos, exalted by Stravinsky during the twentieth century and the subject of an opera by Alfred Schnittke, nevertheless remains in the shadows For loving, I die During the 1960’s and 70’s, structuralists dreamed of being able to reduce all existing texts to even numbers and binary forms. The poems Gesualdo chose for his madrigals would have delighted them. ‘Sorrowful joy’, ‘sweet pain’, ‘grateful torment’, ‘pain and desire’, ‘I both live and die’ are just some of the opposites and oxymorons that served as a pretext for his exploration of contrasts. This resource wasn’t new and didn’t end there. In L’astratto (The distraction), the composer Barbara Strozzi, born in 1619, six years after Gesualdo’s death, employs a formal structure that mimics the succession of arias and recitatives, alternating cantabile passages with a clear rhythmic dance pattern, and recitar cantando passages in the stile nuovo, plagued with dissonances. Both serve to theatrically mark the passage with one state of mind or another. The narrator says she wants to distract herself, to forget, “to sing, because singing will rid me of my suffering”. And, of course, the discourse of pain bursts in over and over again. The story (and the character’s torment) is constructed precisely according to this alternation. The constructive principle is the same as the famous opening to the Lamento della Ninfa (published in Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals, in 1638), in which the words “her pain” are set as acute dissonance. The succession of quick-slow, ternary-binary movements, in the instrumental pieces that were first published during this period, function according to the same principle. Other madrigalists (such as Giaches De Wert, Luzzasco Luzzaschi, and Philippe De Monte) had also experimented with the use of musical opposites associated with narrative opposites. The intensive use of chromaticism wasn’t new either. Nicola Vicentino, the composer of a masterpiece of extreme chromaticism, L’aura che’l verde lauro, set to a text by Petrarch, had been deeply admired by Pomponio Nenna, Gesualdo’s teacher. And to a great extent he anticipates many of Gesualdo’s most characteristic features (movement by chromaticism in various voices simultaneously, unprepared and unresolved dissonances on strong beats). The unique qualities of Gesualdo’s style have more to do with the profusion with which these resources are used. At some point in time his madrigals began to be widely labelled as mannerist, establishing a doubtful analogy with certain trends in painting from the beginning of the Baroque—and in accordance with that age-old custom of assessing (or crediting) by discrediting. The word extremist would be much more accurate. Although it is certain that neither the coarse humour of the dark images of his poetry, nor the dissonance of his music were exclusive to Don Carlo Gesualdo, he took both to the most extreme limits possible. Biography Work catalogue Discography Goldberg Articles ABOUT US | CONTRIBUTE   web map - home page - cover Legal warning Copyright 2003, Goldberg. info@goldberg-magazine.com