Carlo Gesualdo, detail from the Altarpiece of the Pardon (1609), Santa Maria delle Grazie, Gesualdo. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Naples, the night of 16 to 17 October 1590, Palazzo San Severo. Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, comes home with armed men and finds what he knew he would find: his wife Maria d’Avalos with her lover, Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria, the handsomest man in Naples according to the chroniclers. He has them butchered, and takes part. The next morning the bodies are put on display in front of the palace, so that the city can see.
What makes the case unique is not the crime, which in the Spanish Naples of the sixteenth century was almost a legal institution: it is the documentation. The records of the inquiry by the Gran Corte della Vicaria still exist, with the servants’ depositions taken while events were fresh, hour by hour. And the conclusion: no trial. A prince’s honour killing, committed on catching adultery in the act, was not something that was judged. Gesualdo withdrew to his castle in Irpinia, had the woods around it cut down for fear of hired killers sent by the offended families, and from there began his other life, the one for which we know him.
Because here is the paradox: the murderer was the most daring harmonist in Europe. His last two books of madrigals, the fifth and sixth of 1611, contain chromaticism that music would not dare again for almost three centuries: chords that slide into one another without belonging to any scale, dissonances held until they hurt, on texts that speak obsessively of death, guilt and pleasure. Moro, lasso, al mio duolo. When the nineteenth century rediscovered those pages it could not believe them; Stravinsky made a pilgrimage of it, and in 1960 orchestrated three of the madrigals for the 350th anniversary. The musicologist Glenn Watkins, who wrote the standard biography of Gesualdo, notes that no other composer has ever enjoyed publicity like it: four centuries of shivers bought with two corpses.
The uncomfortable question, which has to be asked out loud, is whether we would listen to Gesualdo the same way without the crime. Probably not: biography works as an amplifier, and the concert market knows it. But the reverse holds too: the crime without the madrigals would be a line in the archives of the Vicaria, like a hundred others. What keeps Gesualdo in the repertoire, which is a ranking, is not the blood: it is that those harmonies, four hundred years later, still sound like something that should not exist. The blood brings the audience to the door. Inside the room, waiting for them, there is only music.