Gesualdo, Irpinia, 1611. The Neapolitan printer Giovanni Giacomo Carlino moves his workshop into a room in the prince’s castle, at the top of the village. From those presses, in the same year, come three books: the fifth and sixth books of madrigals for five voices by Carlo Gesualdo and the Responsoria for Holy Week, the music sung in the dark, candle after candle, in the three days before Easter. It is rare for a composer to have a print shop brought into his home. It is rarer still when the man doing it has spent twenty years trying to atone for a crime.
The crime is the one of 1590, wife and lover killed in Naples, which in these pages we have recounted starting from the records of the Vicaria. The atonement is just as well documented. In 1609 Gesualdo has himself portrayed kneeling in the altarpiece of the Pardon for the Capuchin church he founded. He writes dogged letters to Cardinal Federico Borromeo to obtain relics of his maternal uncle, Carlo Borromeo, proclaimed a saint in November 1610. Biographers report that he had himself beaten every day by his servants. In his last years, according to the same sources, he sinks into depression.
In this same man lives a meticulous editor. The dedications of the two madrigal books are signed by Don Pietro Cappuccio a month apart, and the one in the fifth explains why the prince wanted to print at home: he wanted to leave a text free of errors, and he followed the printer’s work closely. The same dedication adds an accusation. Some composers, it says, tried to make up for the poverty of their own invention by appropriating fine passages of the prince’s. The fourth book had come out in Ferrara in 1596, from the presses of Vittorio Baldini; the fifth arrives fifteen years later, and with Carlino the relationship with the Ferrara printer ends. That sentence can be read as a claim of priority more than as the denunciation of a theft: the prince wanted it known who had been the first to invent that way of writing.
That way of writing is the one we know. In the sixth book there is Moro, lasso, al mio duolo, with its chords that slide one into the next without belonging to any scale. In the Responsoria, twenty-seven responsories for six voices divided among Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the harshest dissonances fall on the words of the Passion and on those of Peter’s guilt, as he denies his master. Anyone who wants to find an autobiography in them finds it easily. The sure fact is another: in the same year and from the same workshop come the music of penitence and that of pleasure and death, printed with the same care, under the same roof, at the will of the same man who, biographers tell us, had himself flogged.
Gesualdo died in the castle on 8 September 1613, less than three weeks after the death of his son Emanuele. In the same year, in Genoa, Giuseppe Pavoni printed the Partitura delli sei libri de’ madrigali a cinque voci, edited by Simone Molinaro, maestro di cappella of the cathedral. The six books were in a single volume, with the five voices one above the other, readable together as one reads an orchestral score, and no longer scattered across five separate partbooks, one for each singer. It was an edition suited also to those who wanted to study those harmonies, not only to sing them. The musicologist Francesco Saggio, who has devoted a study to it, has counted twenty-two surviving copies and has shown that modern editors worked from Molinaro’s score, all the way to the great complete edition of the twentieth century.