I am not the most knowledgeable or appreciative classical music listener. If I try to talk about my preferences I often sound like a gruff know-nothing "I know what I like" kinda guy. I am not big on the romantics. I enjoy Stravinsky and Dvorak. I like some of the more go-for-the-jugular composers like Bartok and Ginastra. But I've never been one to hem and haw and know that this performance was better than that or this recording is the standard and that one falls short for reasons x, y, and z.
Anyway: lately I've gotten very into the late Renaissance Italian choral composer Carlo Gesualdo. He is famous for writing madrigals--you know, those multi part vocal things that Gentle Giant replicated on that one song per album that you never really liked and didn't save onto itunes when you digitized your record collection.
But he's more famous for killing his wife and her lover.
There is an embarrassing amount of confusion and misinformation about his biography. Herzog's documentary "Death for Five Voices" is taken as nonfiction by many sources, yet it is highly fictionalized and is more about the legend surrounding the composer than the actual facts.
The unsubstantiated myths include the following:
1. That a passing monk engaged in necrophilia with the dead wife of Gesualdo after her and her lover's bodies were tossed onto the steps of their Venice apartment. (They were never removed from the scene of the murder)
2. That he killed his three year old son by forcing him to swing continuously for 3 days without food or water, accompanied by a choir which sang madrigals to sooth the dying boy.
3. That the two previous husband's of his first wife had died from excessively enjoyable sex. (the fact that this absurd rumor has persisted in supposedly factual accounts of Gesualdo's life is strange and hilarious)
The ghoulish fascination with Gesualdo's personal life is fascinating--it is in a way a rosarch test for our current world's obsessions and fetishes: violent death, sexual deviancy, madness, etc. It also betrays the English speaking world's complete lack of understanding for the Medieval and Renaissance worldviews, and the social norms of pre-modern Italy and southern European religious expression of that era in general.
His murder of his wife was likely not the act of mad passion as it has been portrayed, but the fairly commonplace act of a noble person partaking in a violent crime so as to defend himself from public shame.
It is likely tat he did engage in his latter days in flagellation, but this was likely some attempt at exorcism fitting in with the dominant religious worldview of the time, and not the act of a deranged sado-masochist as is normally portrayed.
Sado-masochism sells, people. Even with classical music.
This Carvaggio-esque, vampiric history has given Gesualdo a strange audience among musical omnivores. A metal-head neighbor introduced me to Gesualdo a couple years ago as "this dude was a serial killer who wrote some really scary music, man. He was so ahead of his time that it took us 400 years to catch up". (The only classical cd I think he owns is a Wagner best-of).
And this is the flip side of the misinformation surrounding him: the idea that he was a truly out of left field composer who wasn't appreciated until Stravinsky pulled him off the slag heap and claimed him as an influence.
Now, Stravinsky did rejuvenate appreciation for Gesualdo, but that is a bit of a red herring. To the early 17th century listener, Gesualdo was a conservative, not an innovator. He was writing fiendishly complicated yet formally staid polyphony. His peers in the same geographic area were writing similar things, although not with the same panache as Gesualdo.
Basically, Gesualdo is the late-renaissance Anglagard. He is not a 17th century Velvet Underground, or Radiohead or Miles Davis.
He was a mannerist, writing pieces that were obsolete almost before he finished them.
But they are beautiful.
Some of his contemporaries (like Monteverdi) closed the book on this era in Western Music and ushered in the Baroque era of solo voices with dramatic bravado. This is the era of Bach and opera.
Gesualdo represents a dead end--a finger groping toward an alternate future of music which was abandoned and ignored. The human voice was to be displaced eventually by instruments, and later by electricity. His music thus sounds strange to us who are unaware that he was the end of the thread which had begun with the monastic chants of Medieval Christendom and the dawn of polyphony.
Me? I prefer Gesualdo every day of the week. I'm a religious person with antiquarian tastes and tried to truly enjoy Bach's cantatas of the Passion according to Matthew and John, but if I'm in a a contemplative mood I will go for Gesualdo every time.
I don't know music theory enough to comment on what makes me react to this stuff, but it is truly strange and wonderful.
He wrote a full set of Tenebrae responsories, setting to music the monastic readings which would go along with the old ritual of putting out the candles on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday night during Holy Week to symbolize the apostles fleeing Christ and the horror of the crucifixion. This is "Tenebrae Factae Sunt" or, in English, "Darkness Covered the Earth".
Gesualdo last two books of madrigals are particularly daffy. Here is a wonderful performance of "Moro Lasso", which many consider his masterpiece. This was from one of the musical interludes in the aforementioned semi-factual film by Herzog. It's amazing to see such a complicated work sung live. The human voice is truly the finest instrument.
There is a guitarist named Noel Akchote who happens to be vaguely associated with prog (he's worked with Fred Firth and Lol Coxhill, among countless others) who has overdubbed himself upon himself doing all the vocal parts from the Tenebrae settings and madrigals on guitar. Don't think of Uli Jon Roth's classical debaucheries. This is nearly a museum piece, and better for it. It is fairly restrained, but the guitar gives these compositions a very interesting new angle. He recently came out with a cd of Gesualdo's 5th book of madrigals recorded with him and four other guitarists, live from a monastery library.
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Originally Posted by Oreb
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