The Mad Madrigalist

Young Don Carlo, third Prince of Venosa, eighth Count of Consa, 15th Lord of Gesualdo, etc., etc., was content with the carefree luxury that befell his lot as a second son. He rarely went home to his small and dull town of Venosa, instead lived in nearby Naples, gathered the finest Renaissance musicians and poets around him, and himself became famed as a lutanist and singer. Of an evening, he would put to sea with one of his poet friends, and spend the night improvising songs and madrigals. He might have sung away his whole life, but his elder brother died when Don Carlo was about 25, and he had to assume the responsibility of being the Prince of Venosa.

Perhaps hardest on the Prince was his obligation to provide his house with an heir, for he was not the marrying kind. He eventually chose his 20-year-old cousin, Donna Maria d'Avalos, a girl of "surprising beauty," and even more surprising reputation: her first husband had reportedly died from trying to appease her insatiable sexual appetite. In due course, she presented Don Carlo with two children, but Gesualdo lost interest in his wife, and she fixed hers on a handsome nobleman.

The cuckolded husband broke into their bedroom on the dark midnight of Oct. 16, 1590, and slew the lovers, or had them slain. Later, convinced that the second child was not his, he shook the cradle so ferociously that the infant could not catch her breath and suffocated. Thereupon Gesualdo settled into a life of remorse and debauchery--he was so beset by evil "demons" that he had himself whipped daily--out of which came some of the world's most remarkable music.

Ahead of His Time. Between 1594 and 1611, Gesualdo published six books of madrigals that contain such daring harmony and such sensitivity that many historians consider him centuries ahead of his time, see in him a musical contemporary of Richard Wagner. Until recently, the modern public has had little chance to savor the sorrows of Gesualdo, but now a first-class LP has been released on the Sunset label with five singers led by young (28) California Conductor Robert Craft, a protege of Composer Igor Stravinsky. The album is "presented by" Author Aldous Huxley, who has long been fascinated by Gesualdo's violent career, and is now equally fascinated by his madrigals. They are, writes Huxley in his program notes, "a kind of musical miracle, in which seemingly incompatible elements are reconciled in a higher synthesis."

Madrigals were the popular songs of Renaissance intelligentsia. Five or six singers joined their voices in these minor gems; they sighed contrapuntally of love unrequited and requited, moaned of the terrors of death and giggled at impertinent conceits, e.g.:

A bold little mosquito bites the fair breast of her who consumes my heart . . .

Instead of returning to repeat the melody of the beginning, like modern pop tunes, madrigals always go forward from one musical idea to the next, and instead of relying on instrumental accompaniment, the harmony comes from the singing voices themselves. Gesualdo became a radical in his extreme alertness to word meanings in a day when most music was still rather deadpan. Every time the words morire (to die) or languire (to languish) appear in his text, the music clouds over, and if the words continue in an unhappy vein, the harmonic colors sink deeper and deeper into velvety darkness. But let gioia (joy) turn up, and the music lifts itself, sometimes by astonishing shifts of level, and then tumbles into giddy rills of fun. It keeps the listener in a constant state of surprise, but also soothes him with its strange logic.

End of the Line. Modern psychology would say that Gesualdo sublimated much of his own troubles in his music. He lived to see the death of his son, and he died in 1613 in the realization that his family's line had ended. Yet as one of the poems he set to music puts it:

I shall be silent, but in my silence

tears and sighs

Shall tell my anguish.

And, should I die,

death shall still cry out on my behalf.

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