Carlo Gesualdo
(1566-1613)
—of Murder,
Madrigals, Beauty & Innovation
In the entry on Piazza San Domenico Maggiore,
I wrote:
The is one of the "haunted"
buildings in Naples! In 1590, prince Carlo Gesualdo,
famous composer of madrigals, killed his wife, Maria
d’Avalos, and her young lover, don Fabrizio Carafa.
They say that Gesualdo then killed his own tiny son
because of a resemblance, real or imagined, to his
wife's lover. (note *)
After the murders, Gesualdo went on to compose some
of the most beautiful and innovative pieces in the
madrigal repertoire. He married a second time and
died in Naples in 1613. Tradition says the ghost of
his murdered wife still walks the halls of the
building.
I see that I
used the phrase "beautiful and innovative"; however, Plato
and the Bible tell us, respectively, that "Beauty is in
the eye of the beholder" and "There is nothing new under
the sun," so I'm no longer sure of that phrase. Maybe
they're just empty words. While I vex myself with that,
here are further details about Gesualdo's personal life:
the murders occurred in 1590; Gesualdo married again in
1594 to the niece of the duke of Ferrara and lived in that
city for a couple of years before moving back to his
estate near Naples; his relationship with his second wife
was not good; and he is said to have grown morose, guilty
and depressed in the years before his death in 1613. He
was also known as Gesualdo di Venosa, a town about 130
km/80 miles east of Naples. The Gesualdo part of his name
is for the town of that name 70 km/45 miles to the east of
Naples, where his family had an estate and castle.
Musically, he gets
interesting. I said that he composed "some of the most
beautiful and innovative pieces in the madrigal
repertoire," and that seems to be the general consensus
after 400 years. A madrigal was a part song for 3-6 voices
sung without instrumental accompaniment. They involved
great amounts of polyphony or counter-singing and were
very popular in the 1500s and 1600s. Though "madrigal"
comes from the Latin word for "mother," the term has
nothing to do with the Mother of Christ, but stems from
"mother tongue"; madrigals were not ecclesiastical, but
secular and sung to texts in Italian, not Latin. (In the
case of Gesualdo, he put to music a number of poems by the
prominent poet, Torquato Tasso.)
Gesualdo and, later, Monteverdi
are two well-known composers of madrigal music. Madrigals
went out of fashion when opera and orchestras started to
get big (physically and culturally) in the 1600s.
Musicological literature is now
full of references to Gesualdo as a highly imaginative and
bold creator of harmonies and melodies as well as a
progressive bender of musical rules, the likes of which
would not be seen again until Wagner in the late 19th
century. Composers such as Stravinsky have paid lavish
tribute to Gesualdo. Most of the "rediscovery" of Gesualdo
seems to stem from the mid-1900s although there are a few
musicological references to him from the late 1800s as a
musical forerunner of Scarlatti. That is high praise.
The praise is not universal,
however. We do find this:
The dangers of the
madrigal became apparent in the works of
Gesualdo...rapid scale passages alternated grotesquely
with slow, solemn declamation, or torturously
chromatic passages in which harmonies followed one
another in extraordinary ways. (Crocker, p.216)
The author goes
on to describe Gesualdo's music as extreme but not novel.
That perhaps says more about the author's perception than
about Gesualdo, since there is an important caveat to
"bender of rules" —rules of harmony and such things as
major and minor scales and chords as we know them are the
result of musical evolution beginning in about 1600 and
lasting through 1900. Thus, Gesualdo was breaking rules
that did not exist yet. Other faint-praise comments on
Gesualdo include:
Gesualdo...stood
at the turning point of a new style; it remained for
other composers, notably Monteverdi, to carry the
madrigal into the seventeenth century and there to
change its style and bring it to another peak of
development.
(Ulrich, p. 183)
In other words,
Gesualdo was the end of something, rather than the
beginning of whatever was to come.
In deciding whether or not
Gesualdo was truly innovative, if that matters, we have to
look at what music was like in the 1500s and how musicians
viewed their music in relation to their own past.
Specifically, we look at Ferrara, the city where Gesualdo
lived in the mid-1590s. Ferrara was one of the vital
musical capitals of the high and late Renaissance in
Italy. Musicians were aware of their city as just such a
capital and of themselves as inheritors of a musical
tradition going back at least to the 1200s, when rulers of
the duchy had started what were to be centuries of
inviting, and providing hospitality to, composers from all
over Europe. Composers in Ferrara of the mid-1500s were,
thus, in a direct chain back to the great traditions of
northern European polyphony.
Gesualdo was a passionate
musician from a very early age, and in Ferrara he moved
into an environment of great experimental and different
music; some of it was rather bizarre, but that had little
to do with Gesualdo. A lot of it came from the generation
just before Gesualdo in the person of Nicola Vicentino
(1511-1575). He was obsessed with connecting the music of
his day to the principles of Greek music, including the
extreme use of chromatic scales and even microtones. He
claimed to have rediscovered the old chromatic tone
systems of the Greeks. And since the 1500s were all about
rediscovering antiquity, wouldn't it be grand, thought
Vicentino, to relate our music here in the mid-1500s to
that of ancient Greece? What cultural continuity that
would be! He then invented new instruments to that end,
including a keyboard instrument with 31 notes (instead of
twelve) to the octave!
From Levarie (see sources):
The effect on the
Ferrara court was great...Gesualdo was so impressed
that he began himself to compose in a new vein...he
wrote with an amateur's lack of restraint that
actually anticipated many harmonic accomplishments of
the late-Romantic era... (p. 47)
More mixed
praise? "Amateur"? (That's ok, too. Einstein was an
amateur physicist who made a living from slogging through
patent applications.) In any event, the radical approach
of Vicentino —making music the way the Greeks used to (at
least according to ancient writers such as Boethius)— came
into conflict with the more conservative approach of the
Florentine Camerata, the poets and musicians of Florence.
Yes, they wanted to rediscover the classical world and
were as much in favor of cultural continuity as anyone, but they really just
wanted to tell stories set to music —new but
non-experimental, singable music. (They also made a
conscious decision to sing in Italian and not classical
Greek. A very
wise decision!) They were at the beginnings of the chain
leading from Iacopo Peri to Monteverdi and then to all
opera and orchestral music in Europe for the next 300
years. Music went its way along the now familiar path of
12 notes in an octave, major and minor scales, and chords.
Gesualdo, thus, did produce
"startling" madrigals (a common word in the literature to
describe his music) and he may have been impressed by the
experimenters. But —and this is important— we "moderns" are
much more startled by his music than were his own
contemporaries because we have been lulled by centuries of
more conventional melodies and harmonies. That fact seems
to escape those who want to describe Gesualdo necessarily
as innovative and not just a composer of beautiful music.
Chromatic passages, for example, wouldn't have bothered
anyone in the 1500s. (A chromatic melody is one that
employs a row of adjacent notes on a piano, using both
black and white keys. Such "chromaticism" is not
particularly common in our music although there are
memorable exceptions such as Habanera from Bizet's Carmen or the famous
circus march by Julius Fuĉik, Entrance of the Gladiators.) Microtonal
pianos (microtones are the notes "in the cracks" between
adjacent keys on a standard piano) might have bothered
some, maybe, but a melody based on a chromatic scale in
the 1500s? That would not have startled anyone used to the
mysterious and "startling" Aquitane chants from the 1200s,
for example.
Thus, you may have to decide for
yourself. Assuming that Gesualdo used at least some of
what he heard from the avant-garde
in Ferrara, does that make him innovative or not? I'm not
sure, either. That may not even matter, though. If you
listen to his music and think it's beautiful—behold! That
should be enough.
When Carlo Gesualdo left Ferrara
in 1597, he returned to the family castle in the town of
Gesualdo and set up a sort of permanent musical workshop
with himself at the center of activity. He hired virtuoso
musicians to perform his music. In all, he wrote well over
one hundred madrigals, divided into six books, and a
number of 5- or 6-part sacred songs set to Latin texts. He
is interred in the church of
Gesù Nuovo in Naples.
* note to "...murdered his own tiny
son..." (added Sept. 2013):
I am indebted to Geo Cosmos of
Budapest for reminding me of the “they say” aspect of
this rumor. While there is little doubt that Gesualdo
murdered his unfaithful wife and her lover and got away
with it, I am not aware of any documentation to support
the rumor that he murdered his infant son. Researchers
want “primary” sources: documents of the event, itself,
drawn up at the time in question —things like arrest
warrants, statements of witness, etc. (There are extant
primary sources that show that Gesualdo murdered his
wife and her lover.) A “secondary” source is someone who
tells you he has seen the primary source and claims to
confirm the content. (Such a source is termed “hearsay”
by modern standards of evidence and is not deemed
trustworthy.) As far as the law goes, you can forget a
“tertiary” source: “I know a guy who spoke with
someone who interviewed a witness.” Go beyond that and
you are in the realm of “they say” —a rumor. Many
accounts of Gesualdo's life speak of “a
19th-century source” that says Gesualdo killed the
infant by “swinging him around until the breath left his
body,” but that source does not seem to have a name. (If
you know, please tell me.) Correspondent Cosmos mentions
the novel about Gesualdo, Madrigal, by Laszlo
Passuth (2nd ed. Szepirodalmi Konyvkiado, Budapest,
1968), in which the author, a stickler for detail in his
novels says that the son in question actually lived into
his thirties. He adds, “It does matter for me and all of
us if [Gesualdo] was acting within the cultural customs
of his day [by exacting revenge on his wife] or whether
he was completely insane and murdered a baby.”
Fair enough. (^back to
text)
sources:
—Crocker, Richard
L. A History of
Musical Style. Dover Pub., New York. 1966.
—Gleason, Harold and Warren Becker.
Music in the Middle
Ages and Renaissance (Music Literature Outlines
Series I). Bloomington, Indiana. Frangipani Press, 1986.
—Levarie, Sigmund. Musical Italy Revisited.
Macmillan, New York, 1963.
—Ulrich, Homer
and Paul A. Pisk. A
History of Music and Musical Style. Harcourt,
Brace & Jovanovich. New York. 1963.
—Vicentino, Nicola. (1555) L' antica musica ridotta
alla moderna prattica. Antonio Barre, Rome.
Translated by Maria Rika Maniates: Ancient Music Adapted to
Modern Practice. Yale University Press.
I am
grateful to Mr. Luciano Mangiafico for suggesting
I put up a separate entry on Gesualdo.
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