GESUALDO, CARLO

Prince of Venosa, progressive Renaissance composer; b. Naples, c. 1560; d. Naples, Sept. 8, 1613. He lived chiefly at his country estate of Venosa, although his travels in Italy (especially a three-year sojourn in Ferrara) brought him into contact with poets and musicians of the highest rank. He knew Tasso and set several of his poems as madrigals, of which seven books have been preserved. At Ferrara he probably met marenzio, Luzzaschi, and vicentino, whose experiments with subtleties of tuning and temperament may have influenced Gesualdo's sometimes bizarre harmonic vocabulary. This he used as a means of heightening expression in already vivid verbal texts, applying this in some degree to his religious music, most of which he had published in two books of Sacrae cantiones (1603) and a volume of Responsories and other compositions for Holy Week (1611). These are all of excellent quality, although somewhat eclipsed by the subsequent fame of the madrigal books. His reputation has always been clouded by the story, based on substantial evidence, that he ordered the murder of his wife and her lover.

Bibliography: Gesamtausgabe, ed. w. weismann et al. (Hamburg 1960–). Tres sacrae cantiones, completed i. strawinsky (New York 1960). c. gray, Carlo Gesualdo (London 1926). g. r. marshall, The Harmonic Laws in the Madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo (doctoral diss. microfilm: New York U. 1956). h. f. redlich, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. f. blume (Kassel-Basel 1949–) 5:41–45. "Gesualdo and the Italian Madrigal," Listener 48 (1952) 481. e. lawton, Enciclopedia della musica (Milan 1963–65) v.1. a. einstein, The Italian Madrigal, tr. a.h. krappe et al., 3 v. (Princeton 1949) 2:688–717. d. arnold, Gesualdo (London 1984). l. bianconi, "Carlos Gesualdo" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, v. 7, ed. s. sadie (New York 1980) 313–324. h. meister, "Ausdruck und musikalische Gestalt der Madrigale Gesualdos" (Ph.D. diss. Köln, 1973); "Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von Text und Vertonung in den Madrigalen Carlo Gesualdos," Kölner Beiträge zur Musikforschung 74 (1973), 1–205. d. m. randel, ed., The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (Cambridge, Mass. 1996) 304. n. slonimsky, ed. Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, (New York 1992) 616.

[d. stevens]