Carlo Gesualdo - Biography
Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa was born probably in Venosa near Naples circa 1560 and died in Naples on September 8th 1613. Gesualdo was a nobleman related to the powerful Borromeo family and his wife was the niece of a Pope. As a young man he became proficient in the lute, guitar and harpsichord.
He married his cousin Donna Maria D’Avalos in 1586 and they had two children. We now come to the most notorious incident in classical music history; Gesualdo was suspicious that his wife was having an affair. As a ruse he went on a hunting trip, he returned the night of his departure caught his wife in the act with her lover and hacked both of them to death with his sword and a knife. Evidently in order to humiliate the lover he forced him to put on his wife clothes before slaughtering him. He was also suspected of killing his younger son who he suspected was not his; though this only a rumor. As a prince he was immune from prosecution, but he left Naples for his ancestral castle in Gesualdo to avoid vengeance from the families of the murder victims.
Gesualdo’s musical fame come from his six sets of Madrigals the first set was written while in Ferraro a forward looking musical center in Italy and unbelievably while there he contracted for a second marriage with Leonora D’Este the niece of a Duke. Gesualdo returned to Castle Gesualdo in 1595 since he was a wealthy man he hired his own singers and instrumentalists to perform his music. Gesualdo’s madrigals are among the first known music to fully exploit the chromatic scale. This scale in simple terms jumps unexpectedly from a note to a distant note in a scale creating an unsettling and unexpected musical effect. Gesualdo uses this to tonally underline and give tension to specific words in a text. Along with the Six Books of Madrigals he wrote shortly before his death a wrenching setting of the Tenebrae Responsporia, reflections on Christ’s death performed during Holy Week. Gesualdo died in 1613, whereupon there was speculation that his second wife murdered him; since this marriage was also a failure and his wife despised him.
Gesualdo for centuries was a subject for scholars and his fame as it was involved his scandalous notoriety, no less than the great French writer Anatole France wrote a novel base on his life. This was to change when two great intellectual figures of the Twentieth Century Aldous Huxley and Stravinsky took great interest in him. Stravinsky was to write a work in his honor Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1960) and his friend and assistant Robert Craft made pioneering recordings of his music. Gesualdo has also been taken up by the Italian musical Avant Garde. Even for the more casual listener Gesualdo’s music can have a moving and unsettling affect.