Gesualdo: Madrigals Book VI [Excerpts]

Gesualdo was only 45 in 1611 when he published his last two madrigal books, but the horrendous series of events the immediately preceding years and his own declining health had clearly forced him to face the issue of his final legacy as a composer. The overtly defensive tone of the prefaces to these last two books advertises that at the close Gesualdo was not buoyed by an unperturbed confidence, and also, perhaps more important, that he suffered considerable anxiety over a protocol demanded by his station that his name not appear on the title page of his collections. Indeed, for all the bombast of his declarations, the composer’s ego is revealed as conspicuously fragile.

—Glenn Watkins; The Gesualdo Hex: Music, Myth, and Memory, 2010

Like Liszt, [Gesualdo] explored strange new regions in his final years: ordinary chords glance against one another with little regard for conventional logic, creating fractured, kaleidoscopic patterns. One can look to Gesualdo’s biography for a psychological explanation; in his youth, the composer discovered his wife in bed with her lover and ordered both of them killed, and he displayed symptoms of a troubled mind ever after. But similar oddities color the late-period motets and madrigals of Orlando de Lassus, which appeared a decade or two earlier. The hothouse atmosphere of the Mannerist period in art allowed, even demanded, idiosyncrasy, and it was no different in music; Gesualdo, toward the end of his not very long life, chose instability as his natural idiom.

—Alex Ross, End Notes: The Brentano Quartet performs late works, 2008

The third installment in the project podcast series explores the late style of Gesualdo.

This work was performed on the second concert of PCMS' Departure & Discovery Project at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater.