The Gesualdo Hex: Music, Myth, and Memory 9780393071023, 0393071022

Citation preview

The O D L A U GES

HEX,

MUSIC, MYTH, AND MEMORY

WATKINS

ISBN 978-0-393-07102-3

USA

$39.95

Can. $50.00

In this vivid tale of adultery and intrigue, witchcraft and murder, Glenn Watkins explores the fascinating

life of the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo— a life suffused with scandal and bordering on the fantastical. An isolated prince, Gesualdo had a per-

sonal life that was no less eccentric and bewildering than the music he composed; his biography has often

clouded our perception of his oeuvre, which has

periodically been dismissed as a late Renaissance deformation of little consequence. Today, however, Gesualdo’s music, once deemed

so strange as to be unperformable, stands as one

of the most vibrant legacies of the late Italian Renaissance, with an undeniable impact on a host of twentieth-century musicians and artists. The incendi-

ary details of Gesualdo’s life recede, and his grip on our musical imagination comes to the fore. Watkins

challenges our preconceptions of what has become a nearly mythic persona, weaving together the cumulative experience of some of the most vibrant artists of

the past century, from Stravinsky and Schoenberg to Abbado and Herzog. Beyond questions of mere influence, however, The Gesualdo Hex offers a profound meditation on cultural memory and historical awareness: how composers attempt to shape the legacy they will bequeath to the world, and how music and history inevitably take on

a new guise as they are revisited by subsequent generations and reinterpreted in light of contemporary experience. In examining Gesualdo’s life, music,

myth, and memory intertwine with one another to reveal an uncanny affinity with our own time. With his elegant and engaging prose, Watkins asks us to

grapple with our understanding not only of art and the artists who create it but also of history itself.

Digitized by the Internet Archive In 2021 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/gesualdohexmusicO000watk

The Gesualdo Hex

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Il perdono, altarpiece, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Gesualdo, Italy. Photo courtesy of Fondazione

Carlo Gesualdo.

The

Gesualdo Hex We

See

Violins

ANID

MEMORY

Glenn Watkins

Preface by Claudio Abbado

W - W- Norton & Company, Inc.

|

L

* New York

London

Copyright © 2010 by Glenn Watkins All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or 800-233-4830 Manufacturing by RR Donnelley, Crawfordsville Book design by Margaret M. Wagner Production manager: Julia Druskin

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Watkins, Glenn, 1927—

The Gesualdo hex : music, myth, and memory / Glenn Watkins. — p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-393-07102-3 (hardcover)

Ist ed.

1. Gesualdo, Carlo, principe di Venosa, 1560 (ca.)—1613—Cniticism and interpretation. 2. Gesualdo, Carlo, principe di Venosa, 1560 (ca.)-1613—Influence.

Tebitle:

ML410.G29W43 2010 782.4'3092—de22 [B]

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

NW ANReVARY Ghhoy 0)

2009033798

For John Crayton

Even things seemingly unrelated and devoid of tradition have their secret connections to the past. —GyoOrGy

LIGETI’

Contents

Illustrations Preface by Claudio Abbado Acknowledgments

Prelude to a Vicenda

PART

COUNCE

Gesualdo and the Crisis of the Late Renaissance CHAPIERA2*

ThevHex Is Cast

CHAPTER 2. The Last Madrigals: Removing the Secret Veil CHAPTER 3. Magic, Melancholy, and Spiritual Exercises CHAPTER 4. Last Words

PeAbk 1 Schoenberg: Backward Glances,

(1 VWEO© 1940-1950

CHAPTER 5. Conversations at the Brink: A SchoenbergLeibowitz Correspondence, 1945-1950 CHAPTER 6. “On revient toujours”

99 fal;

CONTENTS

x

PAG Ril ae bulla ete Stravinsky: The Pastness of the Present, 1956-1966 CHAPTER 7.

Canticum Sacrum: Old and New at San Marco

DG:

CHAPTER 8. Sacrae Cantionum: Gesualdo Redux, 1603/1959

161

CHAPTER 9. Close Encounters: Monumentum

178

PA Ra The Prince in a Postmodern

and Movements

-RQrunk

World

CHAPTER 10. Stoking the Flame

207

CHAPTER

232

11.

Gesualdo Fever

PART

FIWE

Gesualdo and the Challenge to History CHAPTER 12. Retrospectives: Closure or Continuity?

249

CHAPTER 13. Reinventing History

263

Envoi

2688

Appendix 1: A Gesualdo Breviary

305

Appendix 2: A Gesualdo Portrait Gallery

309

Notes

che

Bibliography

3.63

Index

BS)

Illustrations

Il perdono, altarpiece, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Gesualdo, Italy

Frontispiece

Palazzo San Severo, Naples

Fe

Gesualdo’s suit of armor

Ze

Eleonora d’Este in restored, original version of II perdono

67

Eleonora d’Este in later, altered version of Il perdono

67

Gesualdo, Madrigals for 5 Voices, title page of Book I (1594)

74

Gesualdo, Madrigals for 5 Voices, title page of Book V (1611)

74

Gesualdo, Madrigals for 5 Voices, title page of score edition (1613)

75

Gesualdo, Responses for Holy Week, title page (1611)

75

Cosimo Fanzago, Jeremiah (1653), Chapel of St. Ignatius Loyola, Gest Nuovo, Naples

94

Cosimo Fanzago, David (1654), Chapel of St. Ignatius Loyola, Gest Nuovo, Naples

95

Aerial view of San Marco, Venice

145

Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft in Gesualdo castle

courtyard (1959) The rood screen with apostles, San Marco, Venice

150 157

eel

ILLUSTRATIONS

Canaletto, San Marco: the Crossing and North Transept, with Musicians Singing (1766)

The Gesualdo Madrigalists, including Marilyn Horne and Robert Craft

158

163

The Gesualdo Madrigalists, Santa Barbara concert program (1955) 165

Gesualdo-Stravinsky, “Da pacem Domine,” bass line in Stravinsky’s hand

170

Gesualdo-Stravinsky, “Assumpta est Maria,” bass line in Stravinsky’s hand

174

Kathy Thoma, Gesualdo Rising (2002), Chiesa della Santissima Addolorata, Gesualdo

Till Ansgar Baumhauer, Installation Et In Campania o Ego (2000/2001) Michael Sandle, Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1966-69)

Caves of Feudi di San Gregorio, Irpinia, Italy Thomas De Keyser, Constantijn Huygens Gesualdo, “Belta poi,” score edition (1613)

Map of Campania, Italy, showing Gesualdo and Venosa Gesualdo, Guido d’Arezzo, and Gio. Miers Fiammingo, allegorical

print (eighteenth century) Anonymous artist, Gesualdo (date uncertain)

Madonna of the Snows, Chiesa di San Nicola, Gesualdo (early seventeenth century)

Preface by Claudio Abbado

I mer

GLENN

Watkins

in 2003 1n Venosa: it could not have

been elsewhere. Here, in Gesualdo’s city, I heard him lecture, and

I also posed questions to him that had always stirred my curiosity. Years ago I happened to hear the music of Gesualdo and have remained struck by it, but there was something about the manner in which it was performed that basically failed to persuade me: it always seemed like listening to a fascinating, ancient language, but at a chasmic, stylistic distance as if a dead language. Certainly some things have changed since then. Today there are scholars and performers who attend to critical philological issues, yet it seems to me that many things still remain to be investigated. In this regard I have wished to approach the performance practice of Gesualdo’s polyphony in a less traditional manner. After having created an Institute of Gesualdo Studies at the University of Potenza (inaugurated together with Glenn Watkins), I organized a Gesualdo Festival in 2004, inviting to Italy for the first time a group of early musicians from Cuba, L’Ars Longa de la Habana, to perform Gesualdo madrigals. I had discovered this group in their own country and had noted their extraordinary capacity to sing and play sixteenth-century European instruments (the viola da gamba, for example) at the same time, just as the ladies of Ferxe

Ye

PREFACE

rara had so impressed the Prince of Venosa. I wished to work with these performers who came from such a distance with their stimulating enthusiasm, and together we learned much about the relationship of words and music in Gesualdo’s madrigals. This in turn led me once more to the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: to the Brandenburg Concertos of Bach, to anew manner of performing Mozart, and more recently to Pergolesi. This fundamental musician, dead at twenty-six years of age, was also a genial visionary who, as I see it, gathered traces from Gesualdo da Venosa, with whom he shared the capacity to create exceptionally innovative music through modulations, chords, and chromaticisms that succeeded in expressing sentiments such as sorrow, passion, and death.

The voyage Watkins describes in this book is one that I have completed, taking leave of the grand composers of the nineteenth century and turning back to Mozart, Bach, Pergolesi, Monteverdi,

and Gesualdo. The “chromatic labyrinth,” which has fascinated generations of composers, remains a chapter in the art of music so filled with positive energy that it can still reward the efforts of those who wish to study it seriously.

Acknowledgments

Ir Is ESSENTIAL as well as a pleasure who encouraged me during the many book was, unbeknownst to me, taking motivators, however, date back some view of Gesualdo’s complete music was

to record the names ofthose years in which the present shape. Three of the original fifty years, when the heady first coming into view: Igor

Stravinsky, Robert Craft, and Nadia Boulanger.

Much has transpired since then, and the list of enthusiasts who have provided inspiration or clarification along the way in more recent times includes: Claudio Abbado, Rocco Brancati, Claudio Cavina, Elio Durante and Anna Martellotti, Dinko Fabris, Richard

Goode, Marilyn Horne, Roland Jackson, Mark Katz, Tiziana Lepore, Gyorgy Ligeti, Stefano Mengozzi, Anthony Newcomb, Gerald Place, Edgardo Pesiri, Nino Pirrotta, Charles Reynolds, Wolfgang

Rihm, Anthony Rooley, Michael Sandle, Claudia Vincis and Paolo dal Molin, Tido Visser, and Michele Zarrella. Their roles are made

clear in the report that follows. I am especially grateful, moreover, to the Office of Vice President for Research of the University of Michigan for a generous subvention that made much of the artwork possible. Several composers, including Bruce Adolphe, Louis Andriessen, Pierre Boulez, Brett Dean, Luca Francesconi, David Gompper, Bo

Holten, and Alfred Schnittke generously shared with me their various encounters with Gesualdo’s world. Till Baumhauer,

XV

Michael

XVI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sandle, and Kathy Thoma graciously provided photographs of their works, and Jeff Matthews shot a fresh new image of the Palazzo San Severo especially for this book. Special thanks are due to Lawrence Schoenberg, Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, Ellen Adler, and Kathryn Beam for their assistance in clearing the Leibowitz correspondence and to William Bolcom and Anne Shreffler for the clarification of various post-World War II issues; and to the Kassiopeia Quintet for its generous gift of a performance of two Gesualdo madrigals, available at wwwnorton.com/books/the-gesualdo-hex. To my editors Maribeth Payne, Imogen Howes, Ariella Foss, and Michael Ochs, whose timely advice regarding an appropriate extraction or clarification was key to the book’s final form, I owe a debt of gratitude beyond words. Annibale Cogliano, the most extraordinary and indefatigable of Gesualdo archivists, was also especially helpful in clarifying numerous archival points and linguistic idioms, and Dinko Fabris, virtuoso organizer of an important series of events in Potenza and Venosa in 2003, once again graciously performed the role of intermediary as the book was about to go to press. Those who read early drafts of the book include Marvin Eisenberg, Wesley Stace, and John Crayton, and each in his own way made important observations crucial to the book’s final form. Amongst all of these John Crayton, professor, Renaissance scholar, clinical psychiatrist, and ardent musician, has been the undisputed enthusiast from the project’s inception, and his contributions were crucial in the loan of archival materials and the procurement of photographic materials, as well as to the shape and content of numerous portions of the early chapters. Clear of mind and passionate of heart for the subject at hand, he is the perfect Gesualdine, and I dedicate this book to him with admiration and gratitude.

The Gesualdo Hex

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Prelude to a Vicenda - . an Italian word that has no exact counterpart in English: vicenda.

A vicenda is a story that combines elements of mystery, scandal, and intrigue; it is often used by the Italian press in describing mafia plots or political corruption cases. Unfortunately, by its very nature, it also

lacks any conventional climax or resolution, petering out in a flurry of speculation, dropped charges, and contradictory accusations. —ADAM

GOODHEART'!

IN Marcu 1968 Igor Stravinsky stated that except for the ongoing search for the lost book of Carlo Gesualdo’s six-voice madrigals, “the major goals are reduced to two: the recovery of performance style (a by-no-means-impossible quest) and the recording of the complete music.’” Both of these latter objectives having now been accomplished, it seems reasonable that we should be able to say “case closed.” Why, in a word, should anyone want to retell the story of a Renaissance prince, a tale that has been so vividly replayed, recharged, and reimagined in the past half century? The short answer is that a decade earlier Stravinsky himself had already helped to set forces 1n motion that were destined to have unforeseen consequences, and, far from being closed, the parameters of the Gesualdo story were destined to mushroom exponentially. The path to a reevaluation was not to be unobstructed, however. The historians, while conceding the apparent genius behind Gesualdo’s art, had already considered, or would in time consider it “closet music” destined never to be performed (Paul Henry Lang); as a “stillborn” art (Joseph Kerman); as having “ended up a blind alley” (Hans Redlich); as music whose “historical influence . . . was slight” (Lorenzo Bianconi); as “virtually without consequence” (Carl Dahlhaus); or even judged as “sadly amateurish” from the standpoint of

4

THe

GESUALDO

HEx

compositional technique (James Haar). These astonishingly repetitive and accumulating opinions by some of our most prominent historians have been countered, however, not only by Edward Lowinsky, Claude Palisca, Anthony Newcomb,

and Lorenzo Bianconi

himself, but by a number of extraordinary developments, including the emergence of vocal ensembles that have taught us that the music, performed with meticulous attention to tuning in tandem with linguistic precision and expressive command, provides one of the most vibrant legacies of the late Italian Renaissance for the seventeenth century and well beyond. Even so, it should be understood straightaway that the story that unfolds here is not intended as an argument with former perspectives but rather as a recapitulation and analysis of the transformation that has taken place with respect to the central figure of our drama. It should also be clear that Gesualdo’s attraction for our time has continued to hang to a seemingly unconscionable degree on the fact that he murdered his first wife, abused his second, and in his final

days became a troubled victim of the nefarious ploys of a group of witches who took up residence in his castle and were eventually tried and convicted. These incendiary details, nonetheless, in turn force examination of other more fundamental issues: the composer’s relation to the Counter-Reformation Inquisition and the contest of authorities between church and state as well as the vivid questions of magic, melancholia, and the Renaissance artist. We begin here, then, with a review of the social, musical, and political context of Gesualdo the man, his heritage, and his calling,

summarizing some of the more striking details available elsewhere in more complete detail while introducing other newer perspectives essential to an estimation of such a complex figure. In turn this initial probe serves as a prelude to the central themes of the book that follows: the mythologies that typically envelop all great artists over time and, as a corollary, the twin topics of late style and reception history, both of which are entwined in larger problems of historiography—the varied ways in which historians over time write all of this down. Biography colors our view of art; the two alternately enlighten and confound each other. Did Gesualdo’s art really “end up a blind

PRELUDE

TO

A

Vicenda

5

alley” without significant influence for succeeding generations? How does Susan McClary’s recent and persuasive test of the music against fading Renaissance modal tenets place him in this regard? Or Richard Cohn’s investigation of “uncanny” harmonic features traceable from Gesualdo through a series of such unlikely successors as Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, and Arnold Schoenberg?} Whatever the angle, history confirms that the lure and the puzzlement of the “chromatic labyrinth” became a preoccupation in theory and practice over the next century and a half following Gesualdo’s death and ultimately pointed the way toward a variety of twentieth-century preoccupations.* The even more pointed question, then, revolves around the role of revolutionaries who seemingly close out a period and yet claim relevance for the unfolding of a new order. All of these issues persist in the present account and in turn help to clarify the reasons behind Gesualdo’s variable reception and his appeal to the imagination of our age perhaps as in no other.’ Most sobering of all in this quest for a balanced report is the need to confront the poststructural proposition that holds to the idea that if historical truth is available at all, its validity must be seen as deriving only from a particular vantage point.° Following the opening chapters, all of these perspectives continue to dominate in the examination of the late styles of two twentiethcentury musical giants, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. This abrupt turn might at first glance seem both odd and incongruous. Yet, strikingly enough, parallels between the historical position of Gesualdo and Schoenberg had been forwarded as early as 1916 by Egon Wellesz, musicologist, composer, and first private pupil of Schoenberg. Then thirty years later a candid assessment and review of the modern crisis of tonality unexpectedly surfaced in a previously unpublished correspondence between Schoenberg and his Parisian acolyte René Leibowitz that came into the possession of the University of Michigan Library. Leibowitz, with a keen eye to history, intriguingly argued that Schoenberg’s dilemma was parallel to the gradual turn from modal to tonal perspectives as the Renaissance gave way to the Baroque. Backward glances and forward projections, he argued, had typically been made by composers of both eras in the process of laying the foundation for a considered use of

6

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GESUALDO

HEx

the total chromatic. Although Leibowitz encouraged Schoenberg to purify his new language and lay aside all vestiges of an old order, he ultimately gave way to Schoenberg’s insistence that connections between the two were inevitable and in no need of concealment. It is a perspective that invites linkage between Gesualdo and much of Schoenberg’s late period in that the language of the two remained only partially susceptible to the scrutiny of familiar but fading analytical models, whether neomodal or serial. Ultimately we are forced to realize that, when dealing with periods of stylistic turnover, any analytical paradigm functions principally in its ability to spot a crisis. In the present instance it becomes apparent that the crisis of 1600 can no longer be summed up solely in the art of Claudio Monteverdi, despite the fact that in 1950 Leo Schrade dubbed him the “creator of modern music.” It was specifically Stravinsky’s and Robert Craft’s infatuation with Gesualdo during the period 1954-60, however, that launched the

most lasting round of reflection on this question. It was an interest shared at the time by Ruth Adams, Nadia Boulanger, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Dallapiccola, Aldous Huxley, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Francesco Vatielli, Wilhelm Weismann,

Guido Pannain, the pres-

ent author, and others that helped to propel the initial revival onto its present course. Then, shortly after Stravinsky’s several Gesualdo compositions and verbal encomia around 1959-60, reviews by Paul

Henry Lang and a monograph by Edward Lowinsky appeared that inflated the topic into one of heated debate regarding Gesualdo’s relation to the contemporary scene. In the immediate years after Stravinsky’s death, a group of contemporary composers and artists of extraordinarily diverse inclinations began, individually but in astonishing concert, to advertise their attraction to Gesualdo’s art. Among others Bruce Adolphe, Louis Andriessen, Francesco D’ Avalos, Peter Maxwell Davies, Brett Dean,

Luca Francesconi, David Gompper, Gyérgy Ligeti, Alfred Schnittke, and Salvatore Sciarrino have showered us with a remarkable collection of compositions and perspectives. Indeed, Gesualdo’s publicized role in the composer’s workshop of the past fifty years may reasonably claim to be as prominent as that of any composer who lived before Bach, not excluding such early giants as Monteverdi, Guil-

PRELUDE

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Gi

laume de Machaut, or Josquin des Prez. Cinematographers, including Werner Herzog and Bernardo Bertolucci, as well as novelists and other authors, sculptors, painters, and installation artists have

also joined the list. And, finally, a surprising assemblage of performing musicians outside the early music group—including Claudio Abbado, Alfred Brendel, Richard Goode, and Maurizio Pollini—

has broadly showcased admiration for Gesualdo in programs and commentaries ranging from Carnegie Hall and the Salzburg Festival to Tokyo, Ferrara, and Potenza. This rich and diverse collection of figures and events impacts the primary goal of the present story: an assessment of the varying ways in which Gesualdo’s music has been reviewed and critiqued over time. The corollary is forwarded that just as paradigms change, so our perspectives (both analytical and aural) are modified. Every age hears a previous music anew through contemporary experience, and the transmission of its most salient features is riddled with numerous

backward loops that defy the notion of an orderly sequence. The present book thus serves in a somewhat unusual way as a study in historiography, a consideration of the various ways that history is written down, and how it tends to congeal around a few principal figures whose allegedly fixed position and profile are nonetheless subject to continual relocation. It also tests the idea of the influential art historian George Kubler “of a linked succession of prime works with replications, all being distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same kind of action.” Every book, however, belongs to its time, and Hayden White has helped us to understand that all historical perspectives are awash in a mixture of raw data, selectively culled and seasoned by contemporary prejudices that inevitably result in, at best, an elegant and reasonable fiction—in the sense of something “fashioned or framed” from a particular viewpoint, that is to say, not a falsehood. Interestingly enough Francesco Patrizi, a philosopher at the court of Ferrara during Gesualdo’s time, who was one of the first to bring a historical study of texts to the world of philosophy, had already suggested that the basis of history was to be found in the fable—stories that carry the essence of some abiding truth and encourage the mind to further reflection. The American historian Gordon Wood,

in yet another

8

THE

GESUALDO

HEX

appraisal of the historiographical revolution that began in the 1960s and the advent of the New Historicism, has reviewed and helped us to reconsider the place of the historical grand narrative—only recently considered an impossibility—as well as the categories of influence, anachronism, fiction, and continuity, all of which, as we

shall see, impact our Gesualdo story.® What follows, then, might well be called a notebook: part cultural history, part analytical historiography, part autobiographical memoir. The reader is, perhaps, best alerted in advance to the last of these perspectives. For as Wood has warned, participants in the act do not have “a privileged access to knowledge of the events” in which they are involved. He argues, in fact, that the opposite may be true: that the historian positioned at some distance from the events of which he speaks is more ideally suited to bring the varied and frequently contradictory reports of the principal participants into credible focus.? One might argue conversely, however, that this very report from a distance inevitably increases the probability of further invention and distortion. The reader will have an opportunity to test this issue in the very first chapter. Which, for example, would the reader prefer in the following account of Gesualdo considered as murderer: the inquest containing testimony of the immediate witnesses to the crime as reported by the Grand Court of the Viceroy; or the ongoing palimpsest of the Corona Manuscript, an account riddled with fabrication whose earliest version occurs no earlier than the middle of the seventeenth century and which continued to be revised well into the eighteenth? The final perspective of the present narrative hopefully transcends what might at first glance appear to be a rudimentary collection of related events and personal accounts in that it also attempts to interpret some of the issues behind a group of fundamental studies of the past fifty years regarding continuities in art, the nature of scientific revolutions, and the idea of late style and its variously perceived relation to the grand tradition. At the same time I have tried to keep the technical terms and details to a minimum in order to forestall the sense of isolation for the general reader that typically follows such analytical excursions. The occasional musical test has, nonetheless,

PRELUDE

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Vicenda

9

been introduced for those interested in tracking the argument a bit more closely. Even such a broadly constituted array of perspectives cannot, of course, exhaust the Gesualdo saga for all time. Nor should its collective assessment here be taken as an attempt at a coronation. Rather, given such an erratic estimate of Gesualdo’s art over the centuries, I have attempted to clarify how and why he has been embraced with such an unpredictable intensity in our own time. In trying to move beyond the recounting of a familiar story, I have had to face, as a test case, the nature and force of a radical artist’s trajectory: the points of entrance and exit as well as the ebb and flow of the critical response over time and its impact upon historical discourse. Finally, the invitation to a reappraisal today is virtually demanded by the cumulative experience of some of the most vibrant musicians of the past half century, individuals who with gusto have alternately confirmed and contradicted the previous historical record and left us to ponder a new account.

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=a F Ercole Bottrigari recorded the wedding festivities in La mascara, overo Della fabbrica de’ teatri (1598); Ercole Pasquini composed a favola boscareccia, Ifidi amanti; Vincenzo Rondinelli dedicated a treatise on acoustics to him, De soni,

e voci; a book of wedding epithalamia by various poets was printed, bound in white leather; and in 1623 Alessandro Piccini recorded that he had presented two of his archlutes to Gesualdo in 1594. One of

the most exceptional presentations was Duke Alfonso II’s gift of a suit of armor, which is preserved to this day in the museum of Konopi&té Castle near Prague (See Figure 1.2). Celebration shortly turned to concern,

however,

as word

of

Gesualdo’s maltreatment of his bride began to surface, a factor that was to escalate in the years ahead. Indeed, the distance between the couple is signaled early on when the prince’s initial residency in Ferrara was interrupted by a return trip to Gesualdo without his new wife as early as

15 May 1594, only three months after the wed-

ding ceremony. On the way home he stopped at Venice, remaining incognito but praising the musicians of Ferrara even as he denigrated those in Venice, including Giovanni Gabrieli; probably arranged future publication with the Venetian printer Gardano; and at Padua visited Costanzo Porta. His absence lasted over seven months until 4

December of that year, at which time he returned to Ferrara. The return voyage brought further extraordinary encounters. For this time Gesualdo stopped in Florence, where he met Jacomo Corsi, principal musician of the Camerata following the departure of Count Bardi for Rome in 1592, and where monody was bloom-

ing and opera was in the process of being born. Giulio Caccini, one of the important monodists and early composers of opera and also under Corsi’s protection, had been removed from the court payrolls in July 1593 because of his involvement in a brawl the previous December. Amazingly, the prospect of settling in Ferrara had found Caccini attending Gesualdo’s marriage to Eleonora d’Este the previous

THE

GESUALDO

1.2 Gesualdo’s suit of armor. Photo c

HEx

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THe

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22

February.*® Yet, despite Gesualdo’s exposure to such personalities and developments as well as his own prowess as a lutenist (described by Fontanelli in a message to Duke Alfonso II on the wedding journey to Ferrara), little evidence survives of any compositional activity on his part in the realm of lute music or accompanied song. The single tantalizing exception is a notice from Fontanelli that Gesualdo had written a piece for three sopranos at the court of Ferrara, possibly in emulation of Luzzasco Luzzaschi. As the foremost composer at the Este court, Luzzaschi had composed a collection of madrigals for one, two, and three sopranos with instrumental

accompaniment as early as 1585. Reserved for performance at Ferrara, it was not printed until 1601, following the death of Duke Alfonso II in 1597. Gesualdo could hardly have escaped famillarity with this repertoire during his stay in Ferrara, where the Duke’s “singing ladies” were so renowned that they lured several of the crowned heads of Europe and even the Pope to visit the Este court. Gesualdo’s response to such developments remains open to speculation. Whatever the whole story and regardless of Gesualdo’s having referred to Luzzaschi as “the only enemy I fear,” in the publishing contest that was to ensue Gesualdo ignored Luzzaschi’s achievements in the realm of embellished vocal music with instrumental accompaniment. The idea that the art of counterpoint posed a greater challenge than solo song and reflected the most advanced art of the composer is clearly inferred. The other side of the argument was already under way, however, with the likes of Vincenzo Galilei and Girolamo Mei insisting that, following the model of the Greeks, only solo song could promote a true display of the affections. Even this was eventually to provoke a countercharge. Gesualdo’s reluctance to publish whatever adventures he may have had in solo song aside, it is clear from these several encounters that he had been liberally exposed to the art and artists attendant to the birth of monody and opera. The idea is further confirmed in the figure of Francesco Rasi, singer and lutenist, an early member of Gesualdo’s court who had even traveled with him to Ferrara for his second wedding. It was he who took part in Peri’s Euridice and Caccini’s II rapimento di Cefalo in 1600, sang the title role in Monteverdi's

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Orfeo in Mantua in 1607, and performed the role of Apollo in Marco da Gagliano’s Dafne in 1608.”” Furthermore, as a virtuoso lutenist himself, Gesualdo would naturally have been attracted to Rasi and,

as a consequence, aware of the degree to which solo song flourished during the last decade-and-a-half of his life.** It is therefore evident that despite Gesualdo’s exposure to activities in Florence, Mantua, and elsewhere, it was only with his return to the court of Ferrara, the historic center of chromaticism from the

time of Nicola Vicentino earlier in the century, that he made those quite different contacts that were ultimately to prove decisive for his own future career as a composer. In a word, contrary to what some later writers would have us believe, it was Gesualdo’s confrontation

with avant-garde developments in Ferrara that provided the catalyst for his change to a new and miraculous expression—not the murder of his first wife that drove him to madness and to the composition of an unstable music. Obviously, however, personal experience would necessarily factor into his art. We have now set up a series of conundrums to which we will return later. Further, darker biographical complications lurk, however, before we can finally turn our atten-

tion to the question of his music and its chronologies. The Witch Trials. By February 1597 we know that the Prince of Venosa had returned permanently to his castle in Gesualdo, once more without his wife. He had been gone for slightly over two years, but Ferrara, where the lightning pace of his musical vision had unfolded (accelerated by the presence of ducal musicians and printers), was now relegated to a time and place never to be revisited. Trips to his former residence in Naples, the Palazzo San Severo, where the murders had taken place, understandably also ceased. We gather this from Gesualdo’s letters to Duke Alfonso and Don Cesare, his wife’s brother, insistently urging them to send his wife to him in Gesualdo. Both replied by suggesting that he return to Ferrara to fetch her, though this was rebuffed by our prince under the pretext of bad health and his physician’s advice. It would seem that Eleonora’s distaste for joining her husband in the south was due not only to patterns of physical and psychological abuse that had already become apparent while Gesualdo was still

THE

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DS

in Ferrara, but no doubt also in part to her reluctance to leave the lively artistic milieu of the Este court for a remote castle in Campania. No doubt in partial response to this, at the time of his permanent return to the south, Gesualdo had undertaken to resuscitate

the traditions of his father and, in the process, to emulate Ferrara by re-forming a court of musicians and composers. Although Giovanni de Macque had left for Naples, some familiar names appear on its registers: the lutenist Fabrizio Filomarino, the singer and viol player Ettore Gesualdo,

Scipione Stella, Pomponio

Nenna,

and Mutio

Effrem, the last of whom was still in Gesualdo’s employ at the time of the latter’s death. Finally we have a letter of 8 September 1597 from Gesualdo indi-

cating that his wife had arrived safely in Gesualdo with their young son. Within a month, on the ninth of October, the Duke Alfonso

d’Este II died, and with his passing the glory of Ferrara slipped away. The curtain had come down not only on a princely court but also on its extraordinary sponsorship of musical artists and activities. Ferrara now returned to the papacy, and Eleonora’s brother, Cesare (1562-1628), became Duke of Modena, whither the former Ferrara court was now removed. Complaints are repeated in this letter regarding the Princess’s resistance to the cold air in Gesualdo, and it concludes with the notice that “she has been advised to be very careful and vigilant if she wants to avoid being poisoned.” Poisoned? Could she really have meant this literally, or was she delusional in light of her husband’s sustained behavior? While reports regarding the increasingly poor health of both the prince and the princess as well as the former’s unfaithfulness in the period of his wife’s second return to Gesualdo have been generously documented, the reasons behind many of these complaints have only recently been clarified. The death in October 1600 of little Alfonsino, the only child from Gesualdo’s second marriage, is a matter of record. But within the next three years a series of events occurred that were both sensational in nature and that paint a vivid picture of the composer’s enormous psychological and spiritual stress during the final decade of his life. Actually, this part of the story has been long unfolding. For as early as 1892 the historian Luigi Amabile had indicated that there was some-

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thing more to the Gesualdo story that was brought to a head in the year 1603.°° The only problem with his report, based upon documents in the Archivio di Stato in Naples, was that Amabile thought the principal figure involved was Emmanuele, Gesualdo’s son, rather than the Prince of Venosa himself.3' A review of the sources undertaken by John Crayton in 2001 now makes clear beyond any doubt that the issue at hand related to Carlo Gesualdo.*” What was the story? It involves a new dimension to what would seem to be an already overloaded tale. The issue is manifold and includes

witchcraft,

demons,

life-threatening

illnesses,

Renais-

sance medical practices, the Inquisition, and a struggle for authority between church and state. This much seems clear: the inquiry that led to a trial was initiated under pressure from Gesualdo’s wife, who had finally come to the end of her patience not only on the matter of physical abuse but on her husband’s extramarital behavior. Over time she had become aware that he had been a repeated adulterer on the very premises of the castle and that his concubine had been involved in the practice of witchcraft. Furthermore, Gesualdo’s declining health, of increasingly suspicious origins, was also now a subject of growing concern. The stage had been set. Something had to be done. The essence of the ordeal and the principal figures in the case are made clear in the reports of Cesare Staibano, counsel in Gesualdo’s service. Addressing the Viceroy of Naples, Staibano tells us that the Bishop of Avellino had ordered an expedited hearing regarding proceedings deemed to pertain to the Holy Inquisition. Then in late August 1603 he forwarded copies of the depositions, which resulted in Staibano’s final report to the Viceroy of a pair of confessions, made under torture by a certain Aurelia d’Errico and a Polisandra Pezzela, regarding sorceries and love potions concocted and given by them to the Prince of Venosa. Both church and state had now become involved.*3 Here is the complete text of the report: Informative report to the Viceroy from the baronial governor of the house of Gesualdo, Cesare Staibano, regarding witches and sorcery, and on the state of the trial against Aurelia d’Errico e Polisandra Pezzella.34

IMECHEXGiSs

CAST

Bay

Most illustrious and excellent Master,

On the order of your Excellency, an investigation has been carried out against Aurelia d’Errico from Gesualdo because of the love potions she gave to His Lordship, the Prince of Venosa for him to drink, as well as other sorceries carried out against him; it has been proven against the aforementioned via the proofs below: That the aforementioned Aurelia had been involved with the aforementioned Prince for ten years is proven by several witnesses and by the deposition of the defendant. That for the past five years, since he married the Princess, he stopped frequenting the aforementioned Aurelia is established through the

deposition of the defendant and by several witnesses. That the aforementioned Aurelia, seeing herself forsaken by the

Prince, frequently lamented it, is evident from the testimony of five witnesses at the hearing and because of the complaints of the defendant. Some of the witnesses add that when she lamented, she used to

say “The Prince has left me, I will do something to him so that he will have to keep me eternally, and if he will not be with me, I don’t want him to be with other women.”

That the aforementioned Aurelia made the Prince drink her menstrual blood as a purgative is established by four witnesses to extrajudicial confessions by the defendant. That menstrual blood is a kind of poison which, if not treated immediately, will eventually lead to a person’s death is established through the depositions of four physicians, who also say that they judged the Prince’s indisposition to be supernatural, caused by harmful drinks and other sorceries, because many natural remedies that were used were of no avail, thereby indicating the supernatural nature of the poison. That Polisandra Pezzella from Gesualdo went to the home

of the

aforementioned Aurelia and spoke to her in secret, and after the

THE

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aforementioned Polisandra left, when the aforementioned Aurelia

was asked by Bionda from Enea—who was in the home of the aforementioned Aurelia—what they had secretly spoken about, Aurelia declared that the aforementioned Polisandra had told her that if she would take a slice of bread and place it inside her “nature” and after it was saturated with her own seed, she would

give it to the Prince to eat with sauce, is established through the deposition of the aforementioned Bionda through an extrajudicial confession by the defendant and also through the deposition of the selfsame Aurelia given intra-judicially and without torture. And when examined under oath, Polisandra testified that she brought the slice of bread to Aurelia, like the one given to her by Don Antonio

Paulella from Montemorano,

and who

had told her to

bring it to the aforementioned Aurelia, and that after she had slept with the Prince, she would place it inside her “nature” and, soaked with the seed of them both, she would then give it to the Prince to eat in a sauce. It is established through the doctor’s deposition that the seed is harmful.35

That the aforementioned Aurelia more than once said that “He wants me to be a Princess, my Prince will be mine from the waist down,

and from the waist up the Princess’s, so that she can only have kisses” is established through three witnesses.

That the aforementioned Aurelia met with Antonio Paulella of Montemarano repeatedly in secret over two or three days, and that he is known to all in Gesualdo and Montemarano and neighboring places as a sorcerer is established through several witnesses. Through three witnesses it is established that the defendant would say that the Prince could not get well unless he went back to her; she said this when she heard that the Prince was sick.

It is established through Aurelia’s extrajudicial confessions to three witnesses that she would say that even though she had given him the menstrual blood and done other sorceries to him so that he would love her, she did not do it to hurt him.

THE

Hex

Is Cast

That the aforementioned Don Antonio from Montemarano had several people [who were traveling between Montemarano and Gesualdo and back], that he would send her what he had promised, and that he knew what she had done is established through several witnesses.

It is established through several witnesses that four different sorceries were found, including two small statues pierced by nails and with cords tied around their bodies, and two others, including a locket [masco]?° found buried outside a castle door through which the Prince often passed, and another, consisting of two iron pieces with some small lead coins placed into a hole in the castle wall; inside the locket were hair, nails of dead people, and other lascivious objects. By the power of the preeminence of the Great Court given by Your Excellency, I tortured the aforementioned Aurelia, and she confessed

to having given the menstrual blood to drink and the slice of bread soaked in the seed to eat, in the way described above, and hav-

ing done all the above-mentioned sorceries through the aforementioned Polisandra; and of her own

accord, she said that Polisandra

had brought her a vessel full of water treated with wax that had been sent by the above-mentioned Don Antonio of Montemarano, saying that the spirit was inside it, and that the aforementioned Polisandra

spoke to it inside the chamber to find out what the Prince was doing, and Aurelia heard from outside the chamber that the spirit replied in a voice that sounded Greek, which she could not understand,

and she confessed to more things spontaneously that together with a woman called Totia she buried a small cross of brass?” with a small

loaf of bread under the ground for the effect described in her deposition, and the aforementioned Totia Correa has fled, fearful of such confessions.

I tortured Polisandra as well, by the power of the confession of the aforesaid Aurelia and of Polisandra’s own spontaneous confession, about the slice of bread she brought to Aurelia, as was said above,

and she confessed to having done all the things described above, both to having given the menstrual blood to drink and given the bread in the sauce to eat, as well as the sorceries found along the way which

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were included in her deposition under torture, in agreement with the deposition of the aforementioned Aurelia and by her order she put the slice of bread in the reduced sauce** with the preservative-like coagulated matter, for the reason described in her deposition and also that she spoke with the spirit, consistent with Aurelia’s deposition, thereby reaffirming their depositions given under torture. It is furthermore established through eight witnesses that Polisandra is believed to be a witch by the general public, and that she is the daughter of a sorcerer priest, and that she always led a wicked life, always being friendly with priests with whom she bore children, and having her tongue pierced for speaking blasphemy.*?

Two trials were ultimately held, and Staibano argued on behalf of Gesualdo that Aurelia and the witches be sentenced to death in a civil trial. The Episcopal Diocese of Avellino and the Holy Office in Rome, however, asserted their power to judge the witch and Aurelia d’Errico, and threatened Staibano with excommunication.

Hoping to avoid scandal, Gesualdo sought the intervention of the viceroy, and the case dissolved in a struggle between secular and ecclesiastical powers. It is interesting to note that over time not only

had the Protestant rejection of the Inquisition transferred a great deal of jurisdiction to the secular courts in northern Europe, but that this had also become true of Catholic areas where the assumption of secular jurisdiction increasingly prevailed over matters of witchcraft. Gesualdo, in fading health and in a desperate fight for his own life, finally won the case but was denied his proposal (obviously promoted by his wife) that the two witches be hanged. They were, instead, imprisoned in Gesualdo’s castle, and Eleonora informs us

that they remained there until 1607, after which time they disappeared from the records. What an odd solution. Given Gesualdo’s attraction to Aurelia, her continued presence in the castle, what-

ever the nature of her confinement, would obviously have presented continuing opportunities for the Prince and at the same time served as a constant thorn in Eleonora’s side. The history of witchcraft and its trials can claim a variety of traditions with respect to the roles of church and state, which were often

Migs

Iebexc ig CAC

Bet

at odds with each other on such matters. But it has been pointed out that those countries that remained solidly Catholic throughout the Reformation, such as Spain and Italy, rarely indulged in witch hunts and had few executions.*' Furthermore—and the case just described notwithstanding—restraint in the use of torture by both the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions had also helped to quiet the witch hunt in the Mediterranean world. Furthermore, a skepticism promoted by Italian intellectual circles, clearly traceable to strong traditions of humanism there, was also pivotal in countering the rising tide of witchcraft in the north.” The most potent intersection of witchcraft with the Catholic Church

occurred in 1409 with the Great Schism, when the two

contending popes, Gregory XII and Benedict XIII, were both tried by the Council of Pisa on charges of witchcraft. Behind such charges was an attempt to depose both of them in order to end the schism. While the prosecution of witches may have lacked a strong tradition in Italy, in the early fifteenth century there had been a series of notorious witch trials in the Alpine region.** However, it 1s equally important to note, particularly in light of Gesualdo’s dates, that the great surge of witch trials in Europe did not take place in the Middle Ages and that many more took place after 1600 than before. Important, too, is the fact that the wave of interest in witchcraft

received its most considerable thrust through the invention of the printing press, which played a substantial role after 1486 with the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches).* Written by two Spanish monks, this openly misogynistic work graphically forwarded traditions of popular witchcraft that connected sado-erotic pacts with the devil as well as the witches’ Sabbath and night flight to the image of women as “more carnal and sexually indulgent” than males.*° With its explicit turn from Christian orthodoxy, the book soon entered the popular imagination and rendered the humanist movement and any hint of rationality virtually powerless'to check it?’ It is of special interest to learn that Carlo Borromeo had continued to press charges of heresy against witchcraft in Milan and the north, and that, contrary to more cautious policies in Rome and the Mezzogiorno, Carlo Gesualdo had sided with his uncle on this very matter.

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Borromeo’s ongoing and specific condemnation of a group of ladies not as witches but as heretics does not tell the whole story, however. For apparently Borromeo’s outrage was attributable not only to the profanations and sacrilegious behavior of the witches, but also to explicit reports of sexual intercourse with devils. It was this obscenity that had led Borromeo to order them burned at the stake.** Although in Naples the witch hunt had never escalated in the manner that it had in the north, we know that another of Gesualdo’s

uncles, Alfonso, Archbishop of Naples and announced pretender to the papacy, had promoted “a severe stand against magic and popular devotion.” As a result his pastorate was even brought under the surveillance of Rome for correction in this matter, and pressures were applied, here as elsewhere, suggesting that it was better to attempt to bring the offenders back into the fold of the Church than to punish them.#? Once again Counter-Reformation zeal, reshaping what it considered a failure of moral education, continued to make adjustments in the face of Protestant stands on the subject. Gesualdo, now threatened on multiple fronts, began his own private retreat and the search for an appropriate response, both personal and musical. The Final Years. Following the conclusion to the trials, it was not long before Eleonora began to correspond with her brother Cesare providing a running commentary regarding the continuing maltreatment by her husband. That the situation had finally become acute we can judge from a letter of 27 September 1603 written by her brother Cardinal Alessandro to her other brother, Duke Cesare, following his return to Rome from a private visit with Eleonora. The witch trials had just ended, and he speaks therein of the Prince’s ridicule of his wife, noting that “sometimes he grabs her arm violently and throws her to the ground.” He further notes that Gesualdo spoke of the House of Este “with impertinence and dishonor,” and that matters had been made worse because he “now enjoys his mistress under the eyes of the Princess, and all others in the castle without regard and without temperance.”’° By now Gesualdo’s former witch-mistress was already under guard or convicted, but Gesualdo had established a new liaison, purportedly with one of the ladies Eleonora had brought from Ferrara as part of her entourage.

THE

Hex

Is Cast

RR

In addition, however, there were genuine physical ailments. Gesualdo, who had been perilously ill following the poisonings by Aurelia, found that his asthma and chronic constipation also now took a turn for the worse. As a result it is not surprising that Gesualdo’s castle became the locus of a continual parade of magicians and medical advisors. From ancient times witches had been te primary healthcare providers, and as women were for the most part also the cooks and midwives, it was they who were especially suspect of practicing sorcery.’ The various attempts to alleviate the symptoms of Gesualdo’s multiple illnesses only highlight the extraordinary range of contemporary cures. One of the more fanciful ones was an extract from the horns of cows, peddled by charlatans as having been prepared from the horns of the mythical unicorn. This “unicorn powder” was favored as a cure in many European courts as well as by the Papacy, and Gesualdo reportedly responded positively to it.* This should not minimize the ongoing reports of suffering on the part of either the Princess or the Prince, both of whom were reported near death on numerous occasions.*? What role the earlier ingestion of poisonous concoctions made by Aurelia for Gesualdo and/or the Princess may have had on the continuing health of either party can only be conjectured. But following the incarceration of the witches in 1603, the long-range effects of previous or possibly new poisonings were clearly on Eleonora’s mind when Michele Neri, a salaried employee of her brother, wrote that she constantly lived in fear of being poisoned.** Whatever the reality of the situation, and whatever the source or proportion of the various poisons or medical cures that may have been administered, the standard diagnosis of illness is clear. According to tradition, personal health was determined by the properties and amounts of the “four humors”: blood, yellow bile or choler, black bile, and phlegm. A disruption of any of these, or an imbalance among them, would lead to ill-health—either psychological or physical. Sorcery, exorcism, bloodletting, and various other treat-

ments were familiar medical remedies well known to Eleonora from the Este court, and their employment both in Ferrara and Gesualdo was completely ad hoc.’’ One simply moved through a series of treatments until a positive response, however momentary,

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was found. Furthermore, as Babb has put it, “during the Renaissance, physiology and psychology were no more separable than they are today. 2256

The End. Already as early as November 1601, Eleonora had expressed a desire to leave Gesualdo the next spring for an extended visit to Modena for reasons of health. Nothing happened during the period of the witch trials of 1603, however, and it was only follow-

ing a request of April 1607 to her husband from her brother Cesare that she was given permission to leave. She would have to delay her departure, however, until the marriage of Gesualdo’s son by Maria D’ Avalos, Emmanuele, to Donna Maria Polissena of Furstemberg on

22 October 1607. Although Gesualdo had given his wife permission to stay only through the spring of 1608, she did not leave Modena until October of that year, and upon her arrival back in Gesualdo she once more fell gravely ill. Suspicion obviously resumed. While Aurelia was no longer a threat, psychologically or physically, one can only speculate who may have surfaced to take her place. A little less than a year passed before Gesualdo again agreed to send Eleonora back to Modena for six months. Arriving on 7 November 1609 she remained for a year during which time the Princess’s brothers pursued the possibility of a divorce. A request was ultimately made, and the pope was reported to have actually approved it, even as Eleonora continued to resist the idea for reasons of family honor.*’ In 1609, prior to Eleonora’s second return to Modena in the fall,

there were at least a few happier moments on the domestic front, however, and apparently even reconciliations midst all the turmoil. Among the most telling was a public celebration, entitled “‘I] Palio dell’ Alabarda,” or “The Battle-Ax Competition,”’* that took place between the Prince of Venosa and his son Emmanuele on 2 March 1609. According to a letter the Principessa Eleonora wrote to her brother, Cesare, we learn: “My son, Sig. Don Emmanuele, is here,

and was greeted with the greatest joy by his father, who put aside all the bad blood that has passed between them, to the great joy of everyone and particularly of me, who loves him so much.” Gesualdo, happy at the return of his son, personally established the ceremony of the palio, and it is a festival that continues to be reenacted annually in

THe

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Is Cast

B55

the village during August to this day. The costumed cast includes the Prince, Princess, Emmanuele

Gesualdo and Polissena Furstemberg,

his wife, together with a cast of several hundred supernumeraries. A report of 1632 by Don Ferrante della Marra describes the composer’s miserable last years as one “afflicted by a vast horde of demons” and given to beatings by young men. “And in this state,” he concludes, “did he die miserably at Gesualdo, but not until he

had lived to witness . . . the death of his only son Don Emmanuele, who hated his father and had longed for his death . . .” The estrangement between father and son is in accord with Eleonora’s letter, and

other reports confirm that the son had inherited not only his bellezza from his mother but also an insolent temperament so that he continually refused to obey his father.*? Unstated is Eleonora’s report of a reconciliation between father and son. In a striking coincidence Emmanuele, Gesualdo’s only surviving son, died on 20 August 1613 in a riding accident only two weeks prior to his father’s passing. Gesualdo, grief-stricken, retired to a room in the castle adjacent to his music room, the “camera del Zembalo,’® where he lived, ate, and finally died on September 8

after having recently revised his will.’ Yet, for all his wealth and far-reaching properties, music was destined to be his most important legacy. This Gesualdo had understood and clearly signaled, when only two years earlier he had put his compositional house in order through meticulously prepared editions of his final, most mature compositions—editions that released them to the world from his private control. Yet, though the life of a musician during this period has seldom been preserved in such resplendent detail, a central question remains: In what way do any of the official and domestic details of such an extraordinary life affect the way we ought to consider or hear the music?

—_)

——

The Last Madrigals: Removing the Secret Veil 4lao

Like Beethoven in the Grosse Fuge, Gesualdo turns to exploring the back alley of his system, leaving it to those who care to do so to

retrace his steps. If both Beethoven and Gesualdo in their middle periods build gradually to their moments of greatest experimenta-

tion, they will eventually dare to start right off with their affronts to normative behavior. —Susan

MCCLARY'

A RELENTLESSLY troubled life. A daring cabinet of works. Yet from either perspective, can a life that lasted only forty-seven years have a late style? If so, can a middle period be restricted to three years, a late style to two or less? The German expressions Spdtstil and Alterstil suggest a potential distinction between a clearly discernible late style, typically defined as a final, potentially somewhat wilful stage of artistic maturity, and those works simply identified as having been written in old age, often implying a time in which artists presumably lived more within themselves than in the world. While there is an arbitrariness to such distinctions, it is worth not-

ing that a late style has with reason been claimed even for Mozart, whose thirty-five years were briefer and much busier than Gesualdo’s forty-seven. Theodor Adorno has even claimed, rightly or not, that Mahler, whose Ninth Symphony was written in the shadow of death when he was only forty-nine, was the first composer since Beethoven to have a late style. 36

Tue

Last

MapRIGALs:

REMOVING

THE

SECRET

VEIL

Ay

The idea of late style is thus commensurable with a variety of ages, given the evidence of a sufficiently rich and relatively continuous creative activity. Our extended knowledge about Gesualdo’s personal life now provides the essential basis for a consideration of his last works and the possibility of attendant new perspectives gleaned from these biographical details. With Gesualdo, however, even the question of what constitutes his last works demands careful evaluation beyond the simple notice of publication dates. Last works within a given medium—the fifth and sixth books of five-voice madrigals? Last works of a lifetime—the Holy Week Responsoria? All three of these volumes were published only two years before his death in 1611. Yet, according to Gesualdo’s claim, the six secular collections were all completed by age thirty (1596), and the two motet collections were created no later than their publication dates of 1603, at age thirty-eight. The question of stylistic development within the madrigal form, and Gesualdo’s own pathway to final maturity therein, 1s anything but a simple one. Given the puzzling sixteen-year gap between the publication dates of the fourth book of madrigals,

1595, and the

fifth and sixth books, 1611, it has been assumed until recently that the latter date explained the intense and startling language of those collections even as they announced a late style, a final maturity in the form immediately prior to the composer’s death. The answer to this delay, first noticed only a few decades ago, is to be found in the preface to the initial printing of the latter two publications.* Here the announcement is made that it was the composer’s original desire to avoid publication of their contents altogether and to keep these madrigals strictly for domestic consumption. The statement provides an unambiguous proclamation of the late-Renaissance concept of musica reservata as described by Vicentino in 1555—music,

that is,

of an advanced, frequently chromatic idiom written expressly for private use. Well enough, but that is not all. For in the preface to Book V Gesualdo’s editor, clearly the composer’s alter ego, protests that the composer’s express wish to keep this extraordinary music to himself had been compromised; that the attempt to forgo publication had led to the circulation of carelessly made copies; and that certain

38

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composers, taking advantage of this opportunity, had “attributed to themselves many beautiful passages of the works and innovations” to be found in his fifth book of madrigals. He then concludes with the claim that not only had the collection been composed fifteen years earlier and that efforts over a ten-year period to keep them at home had been in vain, but that these compositions were now circulating in corrupt versions and that passages had also been adopted in newly composed madrigals, which he likens to “precious jewels embedded in lead.” G. P. Capuccio, his editor, concludes with the

announcement that he is now forced to bring this music to publication, offering the world a fresh look at Gesualdo’s works “freed from the fraud of others.” There are few prefaces in the history of music that are more loaded, that ring with such protestations of privacy, originality, and plagiarism. Furthermore the sentiment is repeated in the preface to Book VI, dated 25 July 1611, to the effect that its contents were “composed in the same years as those of the fifth book,” that is, as

early as 1596, and that like Book V had been the object of pilfering. Gesualdo was not the first or only composer of the period to engage in retrodating in an age when the practice of musica reservata

flourished. In fact Gesualdo had a good model for such practice in Luzzaschi’s extraordinary collection of Madrigali ad una, due, et tre voci published in 1601, whose preface states that the music contained therein had been composed fifteen years before, in 1586. The claim rings true. The music had been written for Duke Alfonso II’s renowned “singing ladies” of Ferrara, and following his death in 1597 and the dissolution of the Este court there, the label of musica

reservata would have largely dissolved. Later Monteverdi would make a similar claim, in his Madrigali guerrien et amorosi of 1638, regarding his invention of the stile concitato, which he also retrodated by fifteen years. Here there is a difference, however. Monteverdi concluded by stating that those who imitated his inventions did him honor, while Gesualdo judged such practices as inoperable and could, indeed, bring a charge of plagiarism. The charge, as unusual as it was strong, was introduced later, though less

surprisingly, in Mutio Effrem’s Censure . . . sopra il sesto libro de madrigali di M. Marco da Gagliano. Effrem, a member of Gesualdo’s inner

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circle until the latter’s death in 1613, was the editor of Gesualdo’s posthumously published madrigal collection for six voices of 1626. In his Censure, Effrem, with only a modicum of evidence, accused Gagli-

ano of plagiarizing passages from Gesualdo’s fifth and sixth books of madrigals. Though he cites specific sections of two Gagliano madrigals as being lifted from Gesualdo’s, a comparison reveals that not only are the texts completely different, except for the incipit of the second, but that similar musical details are almost totally absent.‘ Effrem was upholding his role as keeper of the flame and had learned his lessons from Gesualdo well. Or perhaps Gesualdo himself had been encouraged by Giulio Caccini’s preface to his Le Nuove Musiche of 1601, wherein he claims to have invented accompanied solo song. He also retrodates the contents of the collection by fifteen years and charges that singers, having obtained manuscript copies of his songs, had incorrectly followed his guides for improvised ornamentation and had consequently “torn them to tatters.” In sum, while the charges forwarded in the dedicatory preface of Gesualdo’s fifth and sixth books had ample precedence for both retrodating and accompanying charges of the misuse of circulating manuscript versions, no one had previously entered charges of outright plagiarism in such strong terms. With Gesualdo the venerable Renaissance concepts of imitation and emulation had come under attack. Yet the hubris as well as the insecurity noted previously in the psychological profile of Gesualdo’s early career had now reappeared and been compounded dramatically. The rationale behind it? Confronted with his own mortality, Gesualdo obviously felt it imperative to close accounts and set the record straight. His most mature collections, both sacred and secular, had been taken off the reserve list.

Gesualdo’s central accusation of plagiarism was probably directed at Pomponio Nenna, a fine composer in Gesualdo’s academy until around 1599 and whose output shares a number of concordant texts as well as a series of blatant similarities—all published after 1596

(the year Gesualdo claimed for the composition of his Books V and VI) but before 1611 (the date of Gesualdo’s initial printing of these volumes).’ Gesualdo’s claims to originality were also rooted in an unambiguous but completely different way in his relationship with Luzzasco Luzzaschi. In the latter instance the defense mechanism

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was initiated at the very beginning of Gesualdo’s career, prior to the publication of any music of special notice, but at the same time announcedly motivated by a profound respect for Ferrara’s most important court musician. Indeed, Alfonso Fontanelli had unambiguously reported in 1594

that Gesualdo “says that he has abandoned his first style and has set himself to the imitation of Luzzasco, aman whom he greatly admires and praises, although he says that not all of Luzzasco’s madrigals are equally well written, as he claims to wish to point out to Luzzasco himself.”® How interesting: emulatio, implying respect for the original model even before a critique is undertaken and an exception declared, is a viable pose for Gesualdo vis-a-vis Luzzaschi; the same,

call it imitatio if you prefer, is not permitted someone like Nenna vis-a-vis Gesualdo.

Gesualdo strikes the difference with Luzzaschi,

however, largely through the inclusion of a series of contradictory details, while Nenna’s approach to the setting of Gesualdo texts is largely through the appropriation of a series of conspicuously similar ideas. Gesualdo’s promised critique of Luzzaschi, he now suggests in his prefaces to Books V and VI of 1611, had been quick in coming, although not made public at the time. Why, one wonders, were these collections not published in 1596? Early on, Gesualdo had announced his personal challenge to Luzzaschi privately through Fontanelli. At the same time, withholding publication also speaks to the tradition of musica reservata or musica segreta—music considered so exceptional that it was purposely restricted to the eyes and ears of a privileged few, initially those of the Este court and later Gesualdo’s circle in the south. Not for sale, unsigned, and printed in limited quantities, his first four books of madrigals were intended primarily for courtly consumption. The extraordinariness of the final two books understandably made them an even more private matter, and Gesualdo had kept them unprinted and restricted for personal use. Fifteen years after their composition, and faced with impending death, he now proclaims that the issue is in need of clarification. Gesualdo’s claim that Books V and VI were composed in 1596

carries several implications. First, given the dates that Gesualdo forwards, he clearly implies that Ferrara was their birthplace. Second,

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Luzzaschi’s publication of three books of madrigals in three successive years immediately upon Gesualdo’s arrival in Ferrara points not only to a quickened pace but something of a developing contest with Gesualdo. Most important of all, of the sixteen concordant texts set in all volumes by the two composers, Gesualdo set nine of the texts used in Luzzaschi’s Book VI of 1596.7 In light of Gesualdo’s

earlier promise to demonstrate to Luzzaschi how his madrigals might be improved, the issue appears to have been met head-on. Any compositional date much later than 1596 would have carried little impact with respect to Gesualdo’s announced challenge, particularly in light of Gesualdo’s permanent departure from Ferrara in February 1597. We are left with two possible conclusions: either Gesualdo fabricated the date of composition for his last two books of madrigals, or they were, indeed, written at reasonably white heat in a spirit of contest immediately following the appearance of Luzzaschi’s Book VI and prior to his final return to Gesualdo.* Two books of madrigals in a little over a year? Hardly impossible either, if only by comparison with Luzzaschi’s output at the same time, and especially in light of the rich musical life at the Este court, which could only have left Gesualdo spellbound. Imagine his excitement at the possibility of hearing virtuoso performances of such challenging new music—a challenge fundamentally inspired by and grounded in Nicola Vicentino’s presence 1n Ferrara from 1540 on, which had marked this city

as the capital of chromaticism. While the total stylistic evidence points to Gesualdo’s respect for Luzzaschi during these crucial years—especially in his embrace of the rapid flourishes of the so-called “luxurious style,” Luzzaschi’s more traditional, only occasionally adventurous, harmonic voice would rarely be mistaken for the former. Indeed, for all of his expressive brilliance, Luzzaschi’s relatively conservative harmonic orientation was to change little throughout the course of his madrigal production. It has been further noted that the profile of Luzzaschi as an inveterate chromaticist has been misleadingly reported in modern times in some considerable measure because of the publication of two highly exceptional chromatic examples: “Quivi sospiri” (Book II) and “Itene, mie querele” (Book VI).

The Luzzaschi collections that came forth from the Gesualdo

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presses in 1611 and 1613 preserve two settings set by both composers, “Itene, mie querele” and “Gioite voi col canto,” and offer what

Gesualdo must have intended as a pointed critique: direct parallelisms are rarely visible without a telling degree of transformation, including a sequence of overtly contradictory musical details or textual alterations.'° But equally important was the publication of two Luzzaschi anthologies by the publisher who had set up his workshop in Gesualdo’s castle expressly for the purpose of bringing into print our prince’s final two madrigal collections—a venture that only italicized the respect for Luzzaschi that Gesualdo had proclaimed to Fontanelli before the two had ever met. The chronological frame, the beginning and end of a brief career as madrigalist, is telling; the promised critique equally so. Gesualdo died in September 1613, one month before the second of Luzzaschi’s two volumes appeared, and one can hardly fail to conclude that Gesualdo had a hand in organizing both of them." Gesualdo was only forty-five in 1611 when he published his last two madrigal books, but the horrendous series of events of 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 suf-

fered 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. As we shall see, Gesualdo would eventually be impelled to break this code of anonymity when it came to the publication of his sacred works. A Psychological Profile. What can we make of such an avalanche of material on Gesualdo’s life, personality, connections, and daily

habits? The details of the murder of his first wife have for centuries tended to paint him as a psychopath, and new developments regarding the period of his second marriage do not help to clear the air. However, any reconstruction of an artist’s personality and character almost four centuries after his death is fraught with difficulties owing

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not only to the fragmentary nature of the information but the variety of hands through which it has inevitably passed.” Furthermore, even evidence corroborated by several sources may simply reflect that they borrowed details from one another. We have only to remember the history of the Corona Manuscript, the seventeenth-centuryand-later embellishments on Gesualdo’s life, in order to understand

how multiple hands can embroider and inflate to the point of total fabrication. There is abundant evidence from various sources, however, that

helps us to spell a series of basic personality traits. Two familiar reports from 1594, for example, confirm the essentials of Gesualdo’s compulsive nature with respect to music. We hear from the Este ambassador in Rome, for example, that Gesualdo “appears . . . to be lost in music, since he talks of it and nothing else.” And Emilio de’ Cavalieri, following a visit in Rome

with Gesualdo, who was

on his way to Ferrara for his wedding, reported that “The Prince of Venosa, who would like to do nothing but sing and play music, today forced me to visit with him and kept me for seven hours. After this, I believe I shall hear no music for two months.”

Another report, from Alfonso Fontanelli, confirmed Gesualdo’s musical obsession, stating that “about music he spoke at such length that I have not heard so much in a whole year. He makes open profession of it and shows his works in score to everybody in order to induce them to marvel at his art.”’* The point is underscored in a report of his behavior in Venice, where after sternly reproving a group of musicians following a performance, he began to lay snares for a meeting with Giovanni Gabrieli, about which Fontanelli predicted that “he, too, will fall into the nets and, having made an

appearance, will not leave without feeling sick and tired of him.” Costanzo Porta, another composer, was also in Venice at the time

and was invited at once, but, we are told, he was “just about to leave

for Padua.” Fontanelli adds, “Fortunately for him.”” This is unusually frank commentary, given Gesualdo’s social status. The pattern, however, is clear. Gesualdo obsessed about music to

such a degree that he often tried the patience even of accomplished musicians. Fontanelli’s report that Gesualdo admired Luzzaschi but hoped to point out his shortcomings provides further evidence of a

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rather extraordinary degree of hubris.'* Not only does he typically berate the music of all other composers and promote his own, but he will also go so far as to make a charge of plagiarism if anyone should borrow a detail from his music.’ The psychological fragility behind such a posture is apparent, especially in an age when competitive confrontation among composers was the mode of the day. Further indication of Gesualdo’s erratic social behavior is reported by Giovan Battista Spaccini, a chronicler of the time, who couples the issue of his role as a husband to his sexual orientation. An entry in Spaccini’s diary for 21 September 1613, only thirteen days after Gesualdo’s death, refers to both issues:

In the meantime he had a very beautiful concubine who attracted him in such a way that he had no eyes for the Princess Eleonora. Yet when the Princess was far away, he would die of passion to see her, and then when she returned, he would not pay much attention to her. He could never sleep unless someone stayed with him, embracing him in order to keep his back warm. And for this purpose he had a certain Castelvietro of Modena, who was very dear to him, who

continuously slept with him when the Princess was away."

Once again Gesualdo’s largely unsuccessful search for interpersonal fulfillment on all fronts is forwarded. The presence of a concubine and a male sleeping companion in the same report has inspired repeated conjecture that Gesualdo was homosexual. The testimony that we have from and about Aurelia d’Errico in the witch trials suggests otherwise, however. An ambivalent sexual orientation, perhaps. But even then such a verdict requires placement within the societal practices of the period. For, as Michael Rocke has detailed,

sexual ambivalence, while not openly approved in either secular or ecclesiastical quarters, was a familiar fact of life in Italy during much of the Renaissance that “had little to do with current notions of sexual orientation or identity, but was organized instead around notions of gender and life stages.””"? Certain constraints, that is to say, were typically in place: the mature adult should be the dominant figure, and the passive partner was required to be a young boy between fourteen and nineteen or twenty years of age in his “transition to

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sexual adulthood,” after which he would become the dominant personality. Sexual engagement between two male adults, however, was a totally different matter. Crayton’s elaborate psychological profile is more cautious, however, forwarding the possibility that “it is likely that the more fundamental basis for this relationship was not primarily sexual, but based upon a need for nurturing, consolation, and companionship.””° Whatever the age of the young Castelvietro or Gesualdo’s sexual inclinations, any such relationship would only have added to Gesualdo’s already perpetual fears of eternal damnation, in light of his deep Catholic upbringing. Desperation lurks, since such liaisons, unlike male heterosexual adultery, held little or no legal protection—not to mention religious sanction—in any quarter at the time. Automatic

sentences of imprisonment for adult homosexual conduct were not uncommon, and one of Savanarola’s first acts after overthrowing the Medici in 1494, for example, was to declare sodomy a capital

offense. We are told that Florence and Lucca became notorious centers of such activity and that “in Florence between 1432 and 1502 as

many as 17,000 males were incriminated and some 3,000 convicted for homosexual relations.’’”’ Finally, homosexuality was perceived to have become so rampant in Venice during the Renaissance that it was ultimately coupled with charges of heresy in order “to increase the seriousness of a crime of sodomy in the eyes of the Church.”” Melancholy and the Renaissance Artist. On Gesualdo’s initial trip to Ferrara, Alfonso Fontanelli had reported to the Duke that “he talks a great deal and gives no sign, except in his mien, of being a melancholy man.” What an interesting observation. In addition to noting that Gesualdo was a compulsive chatterbox, was Fontanelli perhaps on the outlook for signs of melancholia as an indication of artistic temperament, an association vividly endorsed in all fields of creative endeavor throughout the Renaissance? In Elizabethan literature the primary melancholic man was typically described as one ‘who resents the world’s neglect of his superior abilities.”** Could part of Gesualdo’s melancholy and loquaciousness stem from what he saw as unavoidable public neglect since, because of his aristocratic station, his own name did not, in fact could not, appear on the title

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page of any of the madrigal collections printed under his guidance in Ferrara or Gesualdo?* We know, of course, that during the late Renaissance, melan-

choly could readily merge into madness, a subject that was soon to be taken up in Italian opera and drama. The balance between sanity and madness in real life is a more difficult thing to determine. Yet, even Gesualdo’s friend Torquato Tasso, much revered as the

supreme Italian poet of his age, suffered such extreme melancholy and ultimate madness that even Michel de Montaigne, the master essayist of the French Renaissance, was moved to pay him a visit in order to observe the personality of such a great artist.*° It has been persuasively argued that much of the pervasiveness of the first-person singular (io in Italian), typically redolent of angst and melancholy in Gesualdo’s mature texts, can be viewed as familiar stylish conceits of the late madrigal and their epigrammatic nature reflective of the literary taste of the times. Thematically there is only one subject, amore. Its seeming anxiety and brooding melancholy are now charged to an obsessive, first-person Arcadian rhetoric of the late Renaissance, the pastorale dell’io. We note that throughout Gesualdo’s madrigals, his texts deal with ceremonial courtship, unfulfilled promises, and an eternally resurgent sense of hope that ultimately leads to but one conclusion: life is nothing but a delusion, a series of conjugal misunderstandings and too easily encountered love aftairs.*° Yet dreams of consummation are eternally fired, and, in Gesualdo’s last books there is a sense of joyous exaltation and fulfillment that previously had been totally absent. It has been suggested that, amidst the composer’s spiritual afflictions and mortification of the flesh, he may have sought removal from reality by substituting the names of Filli, Licon, or Amarilli for his former celebration of the “singing ladies” of Ferrara (Lucrezia, Tarquinia, or Laura). Such apparitions could only have been seen as representing something more beautiful than could be found in real life: “Creatures of an imaginary and more perfect world, ministers of a unique reality, the anxious isolation of the self, totally absorbed, too immersed in oneself.”

The argument is best corroborated by noting a madrigal such as the final number

of Book Six, “Quando

ridente e bella,” where

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luxuriant joyousness is persistent and the absence of any appreciable degree of angst, either in the text or in the music, is extraordinary. Coloratura flourishes invade all the voices and, at the penultimate line, which begins with “I rejoice,” a single, repeated measure of triple meter releases the idyllic and parallel hyperbole for the whole world.” It is a mental posture so rarely associated with Gesualdo that, in light of the preceding examination, it may be reasonable to wonder if it reflects an attempt on Gesualdo’s part to ward off an even more profound depression. Quando ridente e bella Piu vaga d’ogni stella Mi si mostra Licori E seco scherzan lascivetti Amori,

When smiling and beautiful prettier than any star Licori reveals herself to me And lascivious Cupids play with her,

Tutto gioisco e si di gioia abbondo _I rejoice and with such joy

Che de la gioia mia gioisce il mondo.

abound That the whole world rejoices at my joy.”

“Gia piansi nel dolore,” the immediately preceding madrigal, similarly puts human cares aside (“Formerly I wept in my grief, now my heart rejoices”), and a comparable attraction to the bittersweetness of love is prevalent in a half dozen other madrigals as well.*° In all of these the absence of “death” as metaphor is noteworthy. There is even a note of humor in the poet’s desire to suffer the same fate as a mosquito squashed on the breast of his beloved in “Ardita zanzaretta.” From a more practical side, the attraction of the pastoral for the late Renaissance gentry 1s not centrally located in what would seem to be superficial amorous trysts, however. Indeed, the pastorale has been judged as anchored chiefly in the prevalent desire among the aristocratic classes to pursue the contemplative life, to withdraw to their country estates and hence from organized society.*’ The Prince of Venosa’s removal from Naples to his castle in Gesualdo can be assessed as emblematic of this very tendency. At the same time this gentrified explanation fails to take into account the obvious fact that >

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Gesualdo’s flight to the country must also have been triggered by a genuine fear of retaliation by the Andria and D’ Avalos in-laws. A majority of the madrigals in Gesualdo’s final collection still allow no respite from the grief of unrequited love, however. Yes, they may be read as the formulaic expressions of literary pretense and, as such, in accord with the epigrammatic structures favored at the time. Yes, Arcadia may be the setting, idealized in the extreme, but Gesualdo is there, too—in person. For these stylizations are joined in the pursuit of a state of happiness that repeatedly remains elusive and characteristically ends in an acute sense of personal failure. In light of the abundant biographical information we have rehearsed about Gesualdo, it would be perverse to pretend that in the chosen texts of his last works, typically anonymous and clearly created for his express use, the underlying psychological distress of his life has been so shored up that they fail to reflect the tortured soul of a prince. As a consequence we are all but forced to conclude that the isolated exuberance near the end of his final book reflects the fleeting, manic expression of a bipolar personality—something that may be inherent in a great deal of madrigalian poetry, but that in Gesualdo’s texts 1s pushed to an extreme. A sample of a few of the texts in Gesualdo’s final collections reveals the oxymoronic, love-death, bitter-sweet qualities typical of the majority. The range of sentiments is limited, indelibly and repeatedly proclaimed, and “death” surfaces as an insistent presence. “Deh, come invan sospiro,” for example, concludes with the charge that the cruel beloved brings joy to others, but “‘to me only death,” and “Resta di darmi noia” finishes with the proclamation that “For me all joy is dead, nor can I ever hope again to find happiness.” Even in Gesualdo’s most famous text of all, “Moro lasso,” we find

the lover dying not an orgasmic death but a spiritual one: “O woeful fate! That the one who can give me life, alas, gives me death!” Here we witness the final collapse of the oxymoron, and the mind struggles to grasp the meaning. That “death” in such madrigal contexts should not be taken literally but rather as an explicit metaphor for sexual orgasm has been customarily, even obsessively, proposed throughout the madrigalian literature. Yet in the examples cited above, such a construal fails completely. Here we witness the final

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and exasperated retreat from a world where, following repeated and abortive attempts at love, Gesualdo (who is surely the poet, too) acknowledges his failure to find a meaningful relationship in life, both in and out of marriage. A brief technical detour is required here, which even the nonmusician should be able to follow in spirit. Two of the most powerful and most extreme examples of a harmonic event can be found in “Merce grido piangendo” from Book V. (Example 2.1) Here the opening cry for mercy (“Merce”) sounds fair warning of impending desperation. But it is the final line, broken into three discrete musical ideas and culminating this time in the “little death” of sexual orgasm, that leaves the listener gasping: “Potessi dirti / pria ch’io mora: / “Io moro!” (Would I might tell you / ere I die: / “I die!”’). Here the opening two words are chordally presented without chromatic inflection, then blandly repeated. The next segment of the concluding line, “pria ch’io mora” (foreseeing literal death), confronts us with a classic example of what has been labeled the “uncanny” progression. It can be explained simply: the juxtaposition of two triads, one major and one minor, the root of the latter lying a major third lower. What interests us—and our ears—most is that the two triads contain no common tones and collectively display a hexachord of six different pitches.’ It is a progression with a rich history, whose genesis finds one of its earliest fluorescent candidates in the music of Gesualdo. Two citations of the progression can also be heard at the opening and final cadence of Gesualdo’s infamous “Moro lasso,”33 another

pair from the middle of“Languisce al fin.” “Mercé grido,” however, brings an extra charge through its placement not at the beginning of a phrase (as in “Moro lasso”), which invites continuation and reconciliation, but near its end, where it is presented twice, each

time surprisingly and without warning terminated by a rest.** (Both madrigals may be heard at wwnorton.com/books/the-gesualdohex.) Make the analytical argument of your choice, but listen to “Mercé grido” first, and at “pria ch’io mora” be prepared to experience corporal levitation.* Unlike the opening of “Moro lasso” (Example 2.2), where the major triad precedes the minor one (C# major—A minor) and the floor momentarily drops out on its way to

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2.2. Gesualdo, “Moro lasso,” Book VI, opening.

EXAMPLE 19. Gesualdo, “Moro, lasso, al mio duolo”

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Mercé erido piangendo

Mercy! I cry as I weep

Ma chi m’ascolta? Ahi lass, io vengo meno;

but who listens? Alas, my strength is failing;

Morro dunque tacendo.

I shall die, then, in silence.

Deh, per pietade almeno,

O, in the name of pity,

Dolce del cor tesoro,

my sweetest heart’s treasure,

Potessi dirti pria ch’io mora: “Io moro!”

would I might tell you ere I die: “I die!”

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an authentic cadence, at the end of “Mercé grido” the minor precedes the major triad (E minor—G# major) followed by a rest in all voices. Here the body continues to ascend though the elevator has stopped. Then, as if this were not enough, the passage is transposed and repeated (A minor—C# major), a typical feature of Gesualdo’s most extravagant inventions.

The madrigal is brought to a close with a three-note, chromatic motif on “Io moro,” variously and unpredictably rising and falling, periodically overshooting, then correcting itself in a labyrinth that audibly, almost physically, induces delirtum. The two “uncanny” statements of “pria ch’io mora” (before I die) had employed only nine of the twelve pitches; at “Io moro” (I die) all twelve pitches are laid out in a fluctuating maze. Yet, as in the classic labyrinth, there 1s an exit if one knows the way, and at closure the voices securely, and seemingly effortlessly, lock into place with an authentic cadence.*° Listeners are left where they started, in a world where promises typically end in surprise and where tortured chromatic harmonies characteristically find a magical tonal as well as a contrapuntal solution.3” The combination of such technical and psychoanalytic observations has been linked to a variety of assessments. In a fundamental study of the modal foundations of the Renaissance madrigal, Susan McClary has suggested that “judging from contemporary testimony, Gesualdo may well have been a nut case, but he was an exceptionally talented artist as well—one capable of producing searing beauty and astute psychological insight in his music.”* The obligatory review of his dementia is forgivable (though “nut case” may be a first in the Gesualdo lexicon), but the judgment that Gesualdo’s solutions betray “an exceptionally talented artist” provides a prudent and necessary conclusion. Couple this observation with her claim that, although Gesualdo was in a position to pursue his musical fantasies because of his wealth, he also “needed to absorb enormous amounts of highly technical information.”?? Now this is sobering, and it emphasizes that for all the supposed bizarrerie of many of his mature examples, his secure grounding in the classic art of counterpoint is not only palpable but of virtuoso proportions. Beyond such technical observations, however, why should anyone want to claim that the issue of Selfhood, which is typically but a pose

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for other madrigalists, is genuine and inescapable with Gesualdo? Why should anyone want to stress the personal melancholy of these texts and introduce in addition the prospect of sexual excitement? It would seem that the details of Gesualdo’s life virtually demand it, even if we were not aware of the attendant fashion of melancholy in the artistic genius of the Renaissance or the reported details regarding his sexual behavior. Indeed, a host of writers of the period confirm that for such people melancholy is not an alternative but a prerequisite—not a pose but something that inhabits the physical and psychological body of the genius. It could therefore be argued that, as a self-proclaimed artist of rare qualities and a friend of Tasso, Gesualdo was virtually obliged to advertise the full trappings of his melancholy. In addition to such factors, the issue of social station was sub-

tly forwarded by Monteverdi in 1605 when he acknowledged the aristocratic stamp of the avant-garde in proclaiming his list of seconda pratica composers.*' For after Cipriano de Rore, the founder of the practice, Marc’Antonio Ingegneri, Luca Marenzio, Giaches de Wert, and Luzzaschi, the remainder of the list is devoted not

to professional musicians but to noblemen: Carlo Gesualdo Prince of Venosa, Emilio de’ Cavalieri, the Count of Camerata (possibly Girolamo Branchiforte), Giovanni del Turco, Tomaso

Pecci, and

Count Alfonso Fontanelli. Monteverdi undoubtedly had his reasons for fashioning his list from this group: such a list formed from the social and cultural elite was less vulnerable to attack. At the same time it also indicated the importance Monteverdi attached to these composers in the formation of a new expression. The nobility, formerly required to exhibit bravery on the battlefield, had now manned the ramparts in the formation of a bold new platform, and Monteverdi had taken special notice of it.* Among the lot of them, however, Gesualdo stands out as someone apart. It is worthwhile noting in this regard that while in 1605 the full maturity of Gesualdo’s fifth and sixth books of madrigals had yet to be published, one can suspect that Monteverdi may have seen or heard examples from these rare collections circulating at the time, as Gesualdo claims, in

illicit manuscript copies. Whether we consider Gesualdo’s “melancholy” as Arcadian scrim or personal sign, his health, both physical and mental, was

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clearly a classic example of a type, and its connection with his art and his genius was well understood. At the same time, he was not just another reputable—or disreputable—composer of music. For the final expression that Gesualdo achieved in his mature art, whatever its genesis in received forms, was clearly remarkable, by either contemporary or later standards. He had not only helped open up a new and vivid chromatic space that, for all its contrapuntal linear origins, demanded an independent aural focus on harmony; he had also helped pen the valedictory to an inherited form. Though the madrigal would live on yet awhile, Gesualdo had not so much sounded its death knell as assisted in breaking through its expressive range to the dawn of a new musical sentiment. That is to say, for all the occasional chromatic adventures of an Orlande de Lassus (“Carmina chromatico” from the Prophetiae Sybillarum, c. 1560), the expressive chromatic intensity in the late style of Rore (“Da le belle contrade oriente,” 1566), of Marenzio (“Solo e pensoso” or “Parto o non parto,”1599) or of Luzzaschi (the remarkable “Quivi sospiri,” 1576-77), Gesualdo had pressed the issue further not just with a sample or two but insistently and in search of a new and powerful expression with special attention to the “dolorous”’ affect. “Joy” is there by way of contrast, of course, but that sentiment had already been well established. “Dolore,” “languire,” “morire,” frequently placed in oxymoronic contexts: these are the affects that Gesualdo plumbs and where he strikes gold. The compelling serenity and power of the High Renaissance déploration as practiced by Jean de Ockeghem and Josquin des Prez had been reconfigured, and the full force of Ferrarese chromatic explorations from midcentury had been absorbed into a language previously shaped by numerous other madrigalists of the highest rank.# Yet the composite nature of Gesualdo’s language was so extraordinary and so personal that few composers were tempted to enter its precise domain in the realm of the madrigal in the immediately following years. Failure by comparison loomed. To be sure, Sigismondo

D’India, Michelangelo

Rossi,## and a few others did

provide some exceptional examples in the first decades of the seventeenth century, suggesting that a new expression was destined to be remembered,

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quarters. For Gesualdo, while still relying upon a graphic vocabulary of Renaissance madrigalisms that promoted the idea of music as an imitative art and its resemblance to nature, had now unleashed

the power of music to “affect the listener” in such dramatic terms that music’s superficial role of mimicking a text had been consigned to a footnote.*> This, it must now be added, is the magical point at which Baroque “affect” begins to trump Renaissance “madrigalism,’*° a factor forwarded by Athanasius Kircher in his Musurgia universalis of 1650 in his citation of several Gesualdo examples as expressions of “affect.” The pervasive attention given to melancholy not only by the Renaissance artist of true genius but also by pretenders who adopted a range of eccentric behaviors has been repeatedly noted. Yet a distinction between music’s roles in this encounter has also been drawn: as a provider of an objective representation of the melancholic condition or, alternatively, as a kind of palliative to relieve melancholy.*” Gesualdo offers a third solution that is less objective than subjective, less palliative for others than sprung from personal need. A related question then arises regarding the point at which music, independent of a text, began to assert its capacity to portray a range of affects. Providentially, one might say, I had an unexpected encounter with the issue when I visited the town of Venosa at a Gesualdo conference in 1997. The teacher of a group of elementary school students from the town asked me prior to the opening session if I would be willing to be interviewed by his students at the end of the morning lectures. The questions were short and to the point, all well thought out, and read by the students, notebooks in hand.

The most interesting of these questions, to my mind, came from a fourth-grader who asked with charming simplicity as well as insightful innocence: “Since the music was initially intended as a reflection of the text, how could listeners in Gesualdo’s time have made sense

of the sound divorced from the words when they heard a purely instrumental performance?” The question was not only good but extraordinarily intriguing. It would not have been sufficient to cite the earlier Renaissance practice of instrumental intabulation. For the moment I could only

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respond by hypothesizing that Gesualdo’s exaggerated contrasts between diatonic happiness and ultrachromatic melancholia allowed the music to portray the attendant affects independent of the text. I then added that perhaps listeners at the time were more familiar with the words than we are, and could supply them in their own mind, much as we might do with a popular tune today. This could not have been true, of course, except for the small group of people who had been repeatedly exposed to texted, vocal performances of this very music. Then, again, the two audiences (for vocal and for

instrumental performance of this music) would most surely have been the same. The necessity of connecting with the original text was, of course, implicit in the argument made by Monteverdi in response to Giovanni Maria Artusi, who had charged him with taking contrapuntal licences and making use of unprepared dissonances. Monteverdi countered that the older prima pratica of Ockeghem and Josquin des Prez had placed a premium on the beauty of the contrapuntal writing. The new seconda pratica, however, which he specifically attributed to Gesualdo and a small group of composers beginning with Cipriano de Rore and ending with Giulio Caccini, held counterpoint and rhythm as subordinate to the text, and harmonic dissonances unacceptable in the prima pratica were now rationalized by the fact that they were inspired by and joined to a text. So we return to the question asked by our ten-year-old inquisitor in Venosa: How do we account for Gesualdo’s text-dependent madrigals being frequently played only by stringed instruments? We are forced to conclude that in some manner the resulting music, devoid of text, could carry its own expressive charge, much as Franz Liszt’s piano transcription of Robert Schumann’s “Widmung,” for example, would do for a later age. Though instrumental performances of vocal music (frequently fortified by ornamental diminutions) were common throughout the Renaissance, we have evidence not only that Gesualdo’s music was performed instrumentally in his day but that it was specifically associated with melancholy. For in 1635 Giovanni Battista Doni made an astonishingly direct proposal regarding the adaptation of music to the character of the action in the theater. Thus, he said,

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after a happy act, one plays perhaps a pavane, or a ricercare, which similarly expresses gaiety, on the viola da braccia, harp or cembalo. For a more moderate situation, one brings forth a lute or theorbo sonata; and for action of a melancholy nature one plays a madrigal of the Prince of Venosa on the viols.**

Something had happened. Happy and moderate situations could be mirrored through the adoption of any number of textless instrumental types (pavane, ricercare, sonata), while for melancholy music one was obliged to turn to a collection of madrigals by a specific composer (Gesualdo), now senza parole, which alone was understood to be capable of carrying this specific assignment. The potential legacy of this music for the future in forms far removed from the texted madrigal is announced and secured. Furthermore, in the period around 1600, performance of music on string instruments had also struck at powerful notions of magic associated with the phenomenon of sympathetic resonance between multiple players. Indeed, as Francis Bacon

(1561-1626) would have it, music per-

formed on strings had become “the archetypal example of natural magic.2 Instrumental performance brought its problems, however, and in his I] Desiderio, published in Ferrara in 1594, Bottrigari warned

against the inevitable dissonances that could accrue from accompanying madrigals simultaneously with instruments from the three different families of instrumental tuning: the “stable” keyboards and harps; the “stable but alterable” lutes and viols (which can adjust their basic temperament by “touching their frets a little higher or a little lower’); and the “completely alterable” violins and trombones. We know that at the Barberini court in Rome,

Girolamo Fresco-

baldi had a group of Gesualdo madrigals performed on string instruments, of which order we are not certain, but Don1’s prescription of performing Gesualdo’s madrigals only with viols clearly signals his awareness of the problem.* Hypochondriacal Melancholy. Previously recorded details regarding Gesualdo’s purportedly abnormal masochistic behavior now beg for a more complete assessment with respect to the issue of melancholy.

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Don Ferrante della Marra, for example, reported in 1632 that Gesualdo was “assailed and afflicted by a vast horde of demons that gave him no peace for many days on end unless ten or twelve young men, whom he kept specially for the purpose, were to beat him violently three times a day, during which operation he habitually smiled.” Tommaso Campanella confirmed della Marra’s contemporaneous version in another way in his Medicinalium juxta propria principia of 1635: “The Prince of Venosa, one of the best musicians of his

age, was unable to go to the stool without having been previously flogged by a valet kept expressly for the purpose.”*' And the Genoese Michele Giustiniani, following a visit to Gesualdo’s castle many years later in 1674, clearly embellished on the same story. Noting that the Prince of Venosa had died in this very place on 3 September 1613, he concluded that his death had been hastened by “a strange illness that made it soothing for him to be given blows on the temples and other parts of the body by putting over those parts a small bundle of rags.”’* With these familiar diagnoses in mind, we turn to Felix Platter (1534-1614), a contemporary of Gesualdo, the first German sciena human body, and a performer on the clavichord,

tist to dissect

lute, and spinet, with a personal collection of over forty instruments counted at his death. He also penned a valuable perspective on the issue of melancholy as judged by his contemporaries. Offering an analysis that is startlingly in concordance with Gesualdo’s personal life, Platter indicates that among the various types of melancholia there is one that they call hypochondriacal—a condition from which we know Lassus suffered and for which he sought treatment. Platter notes that while people thus afflicted can typically carry out their other duties,

still they complain ofa continual sweating, of pulse, rumbling in the bowels, belching, vomiting, expectorations, headache, vertigo, ringing in their ears, throbbing arteries, and other innumerable disorders

which they feel and which they imagine. They importune their doctors, beg for cures, try various remedies, and unless they are soon

relieved, they change their doctors and their drugs.®3

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Compare the above description with Gesualdo’s exposure to the deathly concoctions of the witch Aurelia over a period of ten years and then to his continuing search for a variety of drugs, potions, and other medical solutions from a series of medicine men and magicians from 1603 on, following her incarceration. All sadomasochistic

interpretations regarding servants retained to beat him, as well as the charge by Campanella that such actions were necessary before he could go to the stool, point to the classic diagnosis of hypochondriacal melancholia. These beatings can thus be readily interpreted as therapeutic massages intended to alleviate intestinal and respiratory difficulties, which contemporary medicine had no other means of classifying or treating. At the same time they could just as easily be read as a manifestation of an exorcism, intended to rid the body of demons.** Such self-injurious practices derivative of both cultural and psychological sources, Crayton explains, could have a quite specific function to help such “hollow” people feel alive. Gesualdo’s early religious experiences were in the hands of the Jesuits, and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola prescribed flagellation and other acts of self-inflicted injury in order to achieve humility. In addition, he would have seen processions of flagellants in the streets of Naples, often bleeding profusely from their self-inflicted wounds. Gesualdo’s smile during his beatings, then, shares both a religious reference—as an indication of spiritual ecstasy—and a psychological one—as an indication that the emptiness he felt had been replaced by a feeling of being alive and whole again.*°

As bizarre as such practices may seem, similar behavior has been observed in Opus Dei, a group in existence to this day and recently made familiar to the general public in The Da Vinci Code. A report in the New York Times on 7 February 2006 corroborates the reality of numeraries wearing a cilice, a chain with points, under their clothing for a period of two hours a day, adding that “it does cut and it does leave little blood pricks.”** Furthermore once a week they are said to beat their backs with a small cord in the act of reciting their prayers, claiming that “corporal mortification is an ancient Catholic

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practice that promotes penance and identification with the suffering of Christ.” In sum, Gesualdo’s indulgence in flagellation may not set him all that much apart from certain religious followers, both then and now. It is important to stress that such a perspective is far removed from the view of Gesualdo as a violent psychopath, even as it seeks to position the artist within more normative behavioral patterns of the creative artist and believer of the period. At the same time there can be no doubt that his mood swings, ranging from “overbearing self-confidence and arrogance” to “deep-seated insecurity and loneliness”’’ betray an artist whose principal liberation came in the composition of his music.°** Having lived through such a parade of horrors by his thirtyseventh year (1603) and his work as a composer of madrigals having effectively come to an end by 1596, how might Gesualdo have found resolution for such a perturbed existence in the last decade of his life? One need not look far for clues. For, predictably, his profound religious inheritance ultimately became the most controlling aspect of his character and, as we shall see, provided the pathway to a sense of personal salvation.

—

3 —

Magic, Melancholy, and Spiritual Exercises In any creative activity, art is madness, craft is sanity. The balance

between them makes the work. —SIMON

CaALLow'

THE MEDICAL Basis of melancholy and its association with thinkers and artists had been articulated as early as Aristotle with the following query: “Why is it that all men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry, or the arts are melancholic, or are infected by the diseases rising from black bile?” Throughout the ages the topic has occupied philosophers and physicians, including Aristotle, Marsilio Ficino, Robert Burton, Immanuel Kant, Sig-

mund Freud, and Walter Benjamin. Such persistent attention to the term does not imply consensus as to its meaning or its causes, however, and to this day writers continue to flesh out its relation to the currently familiar term “depression” as well as its opposite implied in the expression “bipolar disorder.” During the Renaissance it was widely emphasized that the melancholy state typically accompanied extraordinary creative fervor and was even viewed as a prerequisite to it. The idea’s great flowering occurred with Florentine Neoplatonism, in particular with the writings of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), whose book on the subject in turn influenced English writers like Robert Burton (1577-1640).

As we shall see, Ficino also introduced a new emphasis on astrology in tandem with Aristotle’s perspectives on melancholy as an attribute of the man of genius. Here it needs to be further stated OI

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that belief in astrology was pervasive in virtually all classes well into the seventeenth century and was shared by luminaries ranging from Queen Elizabeth and Miguel de Cervantes to Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Tycho Brahe—the latter, a native

of Campania, who was burned at the stake in 1600 for heresy and assorted magical beliefs.: Given the evidence of a life riddled with guilt, betrayal, murder,

ill health, and perhaps a search for sexual identity, Gesualdo clearly suffered under various degrees of mental distress for most of his mature life. At the same time, given his religious inheritance and training, his turn to exorcisms, astrology, witchcraft, and obscure

medicinal cures ought not surprise us. For as Jerome Groopman of Harvard Medical School has proposed, “The root of most mindbody narratives is the Bible and other religious writings that describe the struggle against ‘possession’ by demonic forces.”* Yet, even if we acknowledge that this was the case, how do we account for Gesualdo’s extraordinary productivity, frequently in intense creative bursts? One need search no further than the commonplace advice articulated by Burton in 1621 to the effect that “There 1s no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, no better cure than business.””® In light of his family connections to the highest circles of the Church and his religious education from birth that prepared him for the cardinalate, Gesualdo’s turn to the writing of sacred music in the period following his removal from court life at Ferrara was virtually predetermined. The guiding force behind Gesualdo’s attraction to religious subjects is further certified in the third partition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy of 1632, wherein he distinguishes a separate category of “religious melancholy” characterized by religious fanaticism and a morbid fear of damnation. The underlying causes, he states, could be attributed to the ascetic behavior practiced by especially zealous penitents. Accordingly, Burton suggests that such a person is given to solitariness, anxiety over the future of one’s soul and salvation, and the fear that they are not among God’s chosen. Fear of being condemned to eternal torment at the Last Judgment, he concludes, can provoke a dreadful melancholy and even lead to the execution of monstrous crimes.°

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Religious Melancholy and “Il perdono.” If the texts of Gesualdo’s sacred motets continue to emphasize the images of despair, suffering, and death familiar to the world of the madrigal, here “death” is no longer a metaphor, as visions of his own life’s conclusion move conspicuously to the fore. That the perpetual note of suffering belongs not just to Christ’s last hours but to a repentant sinner, whose personal anguish is coupled with self-accusation, is also writ large in Gesualdo’s commissioning of the altar painting, Il perdono, where elements of the Last Judgment and the search for pardon are principal themes. This preoccupation with themes of death was symptomatic of the waning of the Renaissance, on several counts. Ars moriendi, or

the art of dying, had become a familiar conceit in literature of the time and had begun to escalate under the promotion of the Jesuits.’ That Gesualdo was intellectually and spiritually attuned to their ideologies is dramatically demonstrated in his designated burial site, a chapel devoted to St. Ignatius Loyola in the Neapolitan Jesuit church of Gesu Nuovo. In Gesualdo’s two books of sacred motets of 1603, a series of

implorations in Latin remove desperation from the secular world of amorous fantasy to the personal and sacred act of confession and the search for salvation: Hei mihi: “Woe is me, O Lord, because I have sinned greatly in my lites

Reminiscere miserationum tuarum: “Remember, O Lord my God, thy tender mercies and thy loving kindnesses, and remember not the sins of my youth.”

Peccantem me quotidie: “Because I sin daily and do not repent, the fear of death disturbs me, for in hell there is no redemption. Have mercy upon me, my God, and save me.”

8

Already in his first published work, the motet “Ne remuinisacris Domine delicta nostra” (“Remember not our sins, O Lord”), Gesualdo can be heard addressing the force of guilt and the search for forgive-

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ness. The year was 1585, and although Gesualdo was only nineteen years of age at the time and the murder of his first wife was still five years away, it was a period of personal loss that saw the passing of his uncle, Carlo Borromeo, as well as the death of his older brother.

One of the most personal texts set by Gesualdo was “O vos omnes,” taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah: O vos omnes qui transitis per viam, attendite et videte si est dolor sicut dolor meus. (All ye that pass by, attend and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.)

Eschewing the typically calm, modal polyphony of many of his predecessors, Gesualdo set the text three times—as motet, responsory, and responsory verse (in “Caligaverunt oculi mei’), appropriating Jeremiah’s lament as a personal cry of distress. The technical means for the opening of his motet setting involves a progression of triads, all major, whose roots move down by alternating minor and major thirds: C, A, F, D, Bb, G. Here Gesualdo projects the heartrend-

ing note of the text through the pressure of a downward harmonic spiral, and we sense a composer who, according to Burton, is trying desperately to overcome “a distrust of God’s mercies, thinke they shall goe certainely to Hell, the Divell will have them, and make great lamentation.”® The remainder of the motet, given over to the self-pitying cry “si est dolor,” is marked by a parade of chromatic inflections familiar from the world of the madrigal. Gesualdo’s solution here illustrates that the so-called uncanny progression was not the only potent weapon in his harmonic arsenal. Indeed, it is sparingly, if dramatically, employed in the madrigals, rarely in the motets, and is totally absent in the responsoria. That is to say, in the religious works that announce personal sorrow, Gesualdo withholds the progression, saving its magical force for two appearances (E major—C minor in both instances) in the five-voice motet collection: in “Ave, dulcissima Maria” at the repetition of the text “pro nobis” (“pray to Jesus for us”’),'° and in the motet “Deus refugium” on the word “pietatis” (“hearken to the pious prayers of thy church”), stressing in both instances the miraculous power of prayer. That the two motet collections were both brought to term as

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published sets in 1603 is telling, for it was in this very year that the Prince’s health was in such decline that many feared for his life. It was also the year of the witchcraft trials, a period in which the psychological strain would have been extraordinary. A review of his life could bring little consolation: a first marriage had ended in infidelity and murder; a second marriage had provided only a momentary consolation before deteriorating into an untenable domestic situation; the son from his first marriage was estranged and living elsewhere; and a son born of this second marriage had died in October 1600. The mind and body of the composer had begun to crumble, his impending mortality loomed, and there is an unambiguous sense of stock taking: at least seven texts in the two sets of motets from 1603 speak of the sinner, and twice that number are devoted to sorrow and supplication. Collectively they may be read as prayers of intercession, including a sizable group of nine that are addressed to the Virgin Mary, one to St. Francis, and another to All Saints, a

group that was also explicitly called up in Gesualdo’s last will and testament."

Between the motet collections and the writing of his will, however, many of these figures had also appeared in the large altarpiece that we now know Gesualdo commissioned from the Florentine painter, Giovanni Balducci, for placement in his personal church, Santa Maria delle Grazie’? (see frontispiece). That Gesualdo had built the church and its adjoining Capuchin monastery in 1592 1s attested to by an inscription at the entrance to the cloister of the Capuchins, but the commission for the altarpiece was not completed until 1609." By that time Gesualdo’s two motet collections had been completed, and the Tenebrae Holy Week cycle well under way if not already completed. Indeed, in light of the psychological profile that we have projected and the publication dates, it seems possible that all of Gesualdo’s most important compositions may have been written under the pressure of events: the last books of madrigals by way of a contest with Luzzaschi while resident in Ferrara; the motet books at

the time of the witchcraft trials; and the responsoria at the time the altarpiece was commissioned. In the altarpiece, the Redeemer sits in judgment at the top of a painting that shares elements of both a typical sacra conversazione and

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the Last Judgment. Gesualdo, outfitted in Spanish ruff, appears in the lower left-hand corner in the kneeling posture of a penitent. His uncle, Carlo Borromeo, resplendent in his Cardinal’s robes, protec-

tively places his right arm on his nephew’s shoulder. It is of no little interest that Borromeo would be declared a saint the very next year, in 1610, securing an even more powerful resonance for Gesualdo’s altar commission.’ On the left-hand side of the picture, beginning at the top, are the Blessed Virgin Mary with St. Francis at her side. Just below we see Mary Magdalene with her traditional jar of unguent for the anointing of the dead Christ’s feet; on the right side from the top are the Archangel Michael, St. Dominic, St. Catherine of Siena,

and, at the very bottom, Eleonora d’Este. A visit to the church in 1961 revealed not only that the altarpiece had been transferred to the wall at the left of the main altar but also that it had a prominent tear at the lower left-hand side.'* Over the centuries the picture had suffered both damage and alteration, and following the earthquake in the village of Gesualdo on 23 November 1980, it had even momentarily lain on the floor on its side. Restoration took place in the late 1990s followed by a final rededication

on 6 June 2004 and the return to its original home, the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Gesualdo. Names were clearly printed alongside most of the figures in the picture before the restoration, afterwards not at all, indicating that they were not part of the original. Furthermore, we now discover that not only did the Magdalene originally display a lowered neckline, but that prior to restoration the figure at the lower right-hand side, directly across from the kneeling Prince of Venosa, wore the black habit of a Franciscan nun. Conjecture as to the identification of the latter figure has ranged widely over time.'® Following the restoration it became unmistakably clear that the figure was Eleonora d’Este, now shorn of her nun’s habit and, like her husband,

garbed in a gown replete with Spanish ruff’? The later alteration that placed Eleonora in a nun’s habit clearly reflected the zeal of Counter-Reformation practice that discouraged nonreligious figures in sacred altarpieces.

The restoration also brought a change not only in Eleonora’s clothing but in her gaze, which in the altered version had introduced

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a right turn and upward tip of the head in a look of total adoration of the Savior.'* Restored, we see Eleonora as the sole person in the painting to maintain a blank frontal stare, a completely passive witness to the implorations of forgiveness (see Figures 3.1, 3.2). We see at once how the change of gesture had been fashioned in order to place Eleonora in accord with the other figures in the picture, all of whom fix their eyes on the Redeemer while pointing to the sinner, Gesualdo. The sole exception 1s the Magdalene, who looks at Gesualdo with both arms outstretched toward the person of Our Lord, acting as intercessor 1n the most personalized manner of any of the figures in the picture. Compare, in addition, her graceful hand position (as well as those of Borromeo and other figures in the painting) to the right hand of Carlo and the left hand of Eleonora. Both are outstretched in an ungraceful, stiff gesture signaling a total of ten digits. The Ten Commandments spring to mind. At the center of the picture we see a child understandably identified by many as Alfonsino, who had recently died in 1600, now somewhat unusu-

ally provided with wings and rising from the flames of purgatory.

3.1. Eleonora d’Este in restored, origi-

3.2. Eleonora d’Este in later, altered

nal version of II perdono.

version of Il perdono.

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Remaining in the brilliant fires below are several adult figures whose identity can readily be conjectured. The collection of saints in the altarpiece clearly held a special meaning as all of them, like Gesualdo, had encountered the devil or demons but had nonetheless prevailed.'? St. Francis exorcising the demons from Arezzo became a popular subject for artists, and he was also able to prevail over the devil when he himself had been possessed. St. Catherine had been a strong-willed personality, known to direct her censure at popes, queens, and kings without hesitation. Born in Siena in 1347, she lived through the Black Death and a series

of civil wars. She rebuked the Queen of Naples when the latter supported the antipope; wrote a series of regular letters to both state and secular leaders in defense of Pope Urban’s sole claim to the papal throne, which ultimately insured her immortality; died in 1380 at the age of thirty-three; and was canonized eighty-one years later by Pope Pius II.” Her special significance for Gesualdo is clear: Urban VI (1308-1389) was a Neapolitan, and Pope Pius II (1405-1464) was ultimately succeeded by Pius IV (1499-1565), Gesualdo’s great

uncle. Her canonization can also be read as a prefiguration of Borromeo’s Own ascension to saintly status the very next year, following the completion of Gesualdo’s altarpiece commission. Mary Magdalene? Her name continues to conjure mystery even

to this day." Her most obvious appeal relates to the New Testament verse, Mark

16:9, and the fact that three Gospels agree that

she was the first witness to Christ’s Resurrection: ““Now when Jesus was risen the first day of the week, He appeared first to Mary Madgalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.”*? Here Mary Magdalene dramatically symbolizes the unmistakable charge of the altarpiece as a whole.*? That is to say, Gesualdo would have viewed Mary Magdalene primarily as a sinner who, according to the Gospels, found salvation through the power of exorcism, and it is in this context that she is portrayed in the altarpiece as his most personal intercessor in Gesualdo’s search for eternal pardon. Later legends that Mary Magdalene personally carried the Holy Grail to France would probably have held little meaning for Gesualdo, although there was a later Neapolitan connection even to this account. For, as the Gnostics would have it, when she died, her body was

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carried by angels to Aix and the oratory of St. Maximinus and later transferred to Vezelay. In 1279 her relics were supposedly discovered during the construction of a Dominican convent by Charles II, King of Naples, who erected a convent there in her honor. In 1600, the

relics were placed in a sarcophagus commissioned by Pope Clement VII, the head being placed in a separate reliquary. Spiritual Exercises. In addition to the motet collection for five voices, Gesualdo published another for six and seven voices in the same year. Originally printed in separate partbooks, the Sextus and Tenor are missing. Even from the incompletely preserved collection, however, three compositions stand apart from the rest, the three that were later completed by Igor Stravinsky: “IIlumina nos,” the only work for seven voices that Gesualdo ever composed; and “Assumpta est Maria” and “Da pacem Domine,” the sole examples of strict canon in Gesualdo’s entire oeuvre. The question immediately arises as to why Gesualdo chose to construct these three works in such a distinctive fashion. Although Gesualdo’s motet collections reveal periodic and telling use of chromaticism, they tend to eschew the exaggerated contrasts of the madrigals or responsories. Because of the density of texture in seven voices, however, the role of dissonance can be especially palpable in a work like “I]lumina nos,” whose text reads:*4 Illumina nos, misericors Deus, septiformi Paracliti gratia, ut per eam a delictorum tenebris liberati vitae gloria perfruamur. (Enlighten us, God of mercies, by the sevenfold grace of the Paraclete, so that, through it, liberated from the darkness of sin, we may partake of the glory of life.)

The seven devils of Mary Magdalene? Sevenfold Grace? Seven-voice counterpoint? The translation above was made by Ernst Krenek for a recording, and in a letter of 3June 1957 he wrote Robert Craft as

follows: In the tradition of the Church, the Holy Ghost has always been associated with the figure “seven” (this is, by the way, why in my electronic piece I have based the music of the “Spirit” on a seven-tone

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pattern). The source of it seems to be Isaiah XI, 2, where the “seven

gifts” are attributed to the Spirit of the Lord.”

Similar observations have been made regarding the seven sorrows and joys of the Blessed Virgin as well as the opus ultimum of Orlande de Lassus, a set of spiritual madrigals published under the title Lagrime di San Pietro. A late-style work dating from 1594, the year of the

composer’s death, its penitent spiritualism resonates with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation.” Depicting the stages of grief of St. Peter following his denial of Christ, it is composed for seven voices, and

many of the madrigals are in seven sections. There are twenty-one pieces in the set, which, it has been observed, represents seven times the number of members of the trinity. We shall return to numbers momentarily. Of more immediate concern is the question of the Paraclete. In Christian teaching it is, as Krenek notes, traditionally interpreted as the Holy Ghost in light of Jesus’s remark that he must die so that the Paraclete could arrive to comfort his apostles and continue to show them the way. Some have argued that the Paraclete implied the Holy Spirit, others that it is literally God on earth in the person of an important religious leader. Tellingly, “Illumina nos” explicitly responds to the sevenfold grace of the Paraclete by offering the only seven-voice composition of his entire career. As we shall see, the mystery of the Paraclete was not to remain stilled. Gesualdo composed two other motets in the same collection that require even closer examination: Da pacem, Domine, in diebus nostris: quia non est alius qui pugnet pro nobis, nisi tu Deus noster. (Grant peace, O Lord, in our time: because

there is none who will succor us except thee, our God.)

Assumpta est Maria in caelum: gaudent Angeli, laudantes benedicunt Dominum. (Mary has ascended into heaven: the angels rejoice, they extol the Lord with praise.)

Both are canon motets and are unique on several counts. Almost two

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expressly praised Gesualdo for not having relied upon canonic technique, and indicted lesser composers, such as Francesco Soriano, for

employing it out of a lack of originality. A century and a half after that, however, the English historian Charles Burney charged that Gesualdo was “always struggling at fugue and imitation.”** One can only imagine Burney’s response, or Doni’s for that matter, had they ever encountered the two-voice canon of “Da pacem Domine” or the even more extraordinary example of “Assumpta est Maria,” which carries the designation “ex una voce tres.” The latter work joins three other motets in this collection that recall the altarpiece of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where the Virgin Mary, following her assumption, sits at Jesus’s right hand. There was a backward glance implicit in Gesualdo’s choice of canon for these two works, however. For the great age of canonic virtuosity belonged to the earlier period of the High Renaissance, to composers of the Josquin des Prez—Heinrich Isaac generation (c. 1475-1525). Since then canon had characteristically been invoked as

a demonstration of craft or in a spirit of competition and, G. P. da Palestrina excepted, not as the model for an age. Dissonance control, of course, stands at the very heart of the art of canon: anyone can begin a melody and have another person follow with the same tune. The question is, do they match up vertically, that is to say harmonically, when the two voices begin to sound together? Given the displacement of canon among seconda pratica composers by other more expressive means, what could have been its principal attraction for Gesualdo? Johannes Tinctoris (c. 1436-1511), a Franco-Flemish composer who served the court of King Ferrante I of Naples from c. 1470 to 1490” and who was the most important

theorist of his time, had earlier defined a canon as “a rule showing the purpose of the composer in an obscure way.”*° Given that the guiding rule whereby the solution to a particular canon could be retrieved varied and was sometimes a verbal direction of considerable intricacy and complexity, there was an implicit element of mystery, one might say magic, in the ultimate resolution of the canon and the implied perfection of the final outcome.” That such intricate verbal canons could also entail the mysteries of the Resurrection story had already been demonstrated in a stunning

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example included in Petrucci’s Odhecaton of 1501. The penultimate number in this earliest printed collection of polyphonic music is by the Renaissance master, Josquin des Prez, who takes the two upper voices of Haine von Ghizeghem’s chanson, “De tous biens plaine,”

and adds a single voice below as a Contra, to which the following direction is added: “Petrus e Joannes current in puncto.” Three written voices now invite a supplement, but in what quantity and how are they to be deployed? Should it be assumed that the Contra ought to be sung by two men (Peter and John)? Yes, they are running (“current”), but at what distance (“in puncto”)? Interestingly, it is the only canon in the Odhecaton that is not written out, and in his Dodecachordon of 1542, the theorist Heinrich Glareanus

offered the correct resolution for Josquin’s piece, which otherwise could be determined only by trial and error: “Fuga ad minimam,” he writes. The short distance between the entry of the two canonic voices (a quarter note in a modern edition) is extraordinary, as one

follows the other in hot pursuit.* But to what could Josquin’s original indication “Petrus e Joannes current in puncto” refer? The answer is to be found in the New Testament at John 20:3—4: “Peter therefore

went forth, and that other disciple [John], and came to the sepulchre. So they ran both together; and the other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.” Both the technical solution and its literal meaning were wrapped in an obscure Latin inscription signifying one of the great mysteries of the Christian religion: the discovery of an empty tomb and Christ’s resurrection. Such an example helps us to understand that Gesualdo’s introduction of canon would not have been undertaken casually, in that he dispatches the technique only twice in his entire career. The symbolism seems clear enough: the two-voice canon was joined to “Da pacem Domine,” whose final lines may be viewed as capturing a binary idea without intercessor (“there is none who will succor us except thee, our God”); while the three-voice canon (“Assumpta est Maria”), marked “ex una voce tres,” suggests the ternary notion of the assumption of the Virgin Mary, who thereby rejoins Christ and the Heavenly Father.*3 Although it should be noted that the renowned Palestrina, who died in 1594, had continued a robust display of the art of strict canon,

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its privileged position had already been seriously eroded by the end of the sixteenth century. The important summaries of the art of polyphony in Gesualdo’s time, including those by Artusi (L’arte del contraponto, 1598) and Pietro Cerone (El melopeo y maestro, 1613), all point to a new, strictly didactic approach to the issue of canon and indicate that all of these older forms of polyphony were in the process of “being augmented, if not supplanted, by the more fashionable harmonic approach of the Baroque.” In addition to such special contrapuntal solutions, however, Gesualdo,

the harmonist/contrapuntist,

quietly, almost unobtru-

sively, transferred elements of the expressive vocabulary of the secular madrigal to the realm of the sacred. Chromaticism is deployed not so much with caution as with reserve, and in so doing Gesualdo complements its former expressive role with the magical property of signs. Such a collection of codes is introduced in conjunction with, but arguably independent of, mimesis and paves the way for a more intensive examination of the Passion message. The invocation of other signs and their attendant power in the world of Renaissance publications has been noted. Not only were astrology, demonology, alchemy, necromancy and other forms of magic in combination with Neoplatonic perspectives familiar to court festivals, but it has been noted that they were also enlisted in the task of expressing “the centrality of royal power in the political universe, which corresponded to divine power in the cosmos.” Furthermore, the printer’s trademark emblems redolent of the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt were also considered to hold “secret connections holding the universe together.”** Prohibited by the prevailing custom of the nobility from signaling his name on the title page of his madrigal collections, Gesualdo had signed each and every one of them in a fashion readily understandable to any member of the aristocracy. That is to say, while his name does not appear, the Gesualdo family crest is prominently emblazoned, typically in the company ofa royal crown or crowns. This is true of the printings made in Ferrara (Figure 3.3), the later ones executed in Gesualdo during his lifetime (Figure 3.4), the motet collections, the responses for Holy Week, and the posthumous collection of six-voice madrigals edited by Muzio Effrem and dedicated to

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Chord,” “Farben,” and “Summer Morning by a Lake”). Predictably,

the idea was taken up soon thereafter in Webern’s orchestral pieces, op. 6, as well as in the third of Berg’s Altenberglieder. Webern’s latestyle application to a composition of Bach was the only one ofthese

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that had used received material, but the early Schoenberg and Berg examples provided the harmonic models. Interestingly, Stravinsky had only recently come to know the Berg and Webern pieces, through the recordings of his assistant. Noting that much of this music was registering in the minds of most musicians for the first time during the same decades as the beginning of the Gesualdo revival, Craft observed that many of the smaller Viennese pieces shared a similar dimension with Renaissance forms. “The scope [of a Gesualdo madrigal], by Wagnerian standards,” he observed, “is small, but it is a measure that we today

are able to feel, or at least adjust to, perhaps for the first time since the cinquecento.”® After receiving a copy of the Gesualdo Responsoria shortly after its publication, Stravinsky replied on 15 May 1960 with a gracious note of appreciation. Three days before, Craft had written a long letter of thanks for his copy in an obvious state of excitement: “This is an event—I drink your health across these 3,000 miles,” he wrote, add-

ing that he had played through the whole of the Good Friday music and realized that it should all be performed and recorded. Though there were difficulties for his standing madrigal group with respect to the range, he concluded that I am so overwhelmed by the unity, the continuity, the even quality of the music, however, that I resolve to do the whole book this

winter when my singers are reunited . . .

You say only three more weeks and another school year is over. Why, then, don’t you come out here for the Gesualdo recording June 9 (singers) and June 20 (Monumentum and Canzon for harpsichord) .. . and for the I.S. concert June 7 (Mass and Noces—I do “In Ecclesiis”

by G.G. and Berg Kammerkonzert). | realize a hell of an expense is involved and the suggestion is probably ridiculous, but . . .

Needless to say, I went. I arrived at Stravinsky’s home from the airport just before 7 p.m., perilously close to the their concert that evening at 8 p.m. in Royce Hall on the of UCLA. Stravinsky noticed that I was wearing a suit, but

directly time of campus advised

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that evenings in Los Angeles could be chilly. With a tight schedule looming to get to the auditorium on time, he nonetheless went to his bedroom, fetched a sleeveless navy sweater, which he then gave

to me. “Here,” he said. “Now every time you wear this, you will think of me.” I had just turned thirty-three, and I suddenly felt very special. Following the concert, which included among others Stravinsky’s Les Noces and Gabrieli’s “In eccelesiis,” the two Stravinskys, Craft,

John McClure of Columbia Records, and I joined Franz Waxman as his guests for dinner at Luau’s, a fashionable Polynesian restaurant. Waxman, a legendary Hollywood film composer, had been the sponsor for several years of a series of contemporary concerts in Los Angeles, of which the one that evening had been a part. At the restaurant Madame Stravinsky sat nobly in her rattan peacock chair, and with libations in hand the conversation flowed easily. At one point Stravinsky reminisced about numerous personalities, including the conductor Ernest Ansermet. “He never understood my music,” Stravinsky reflected. “He simply belonged to a different generation.” Startled, recalling that Ansermet had witnessed the premiere of The Rite and conducted the premiere of Histoire du soldat, 1 couldn’t resist: “But I would have thought you and he were very much of the same generation.” Stravinsky smiled broadly as though he had waited for me to fall into the trap: “No, my dear. The difference between the two of us was the fact that I always took the trouble to surround myself with young people.” I couldn’t help but calculate: Craft, McClure, and I were all in our thirties.

Stravinsky, Craft, and McClure—who was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the four of us were to lunch the next day for a planning session of a projected Stravinsky series with Columbia Masterworks—drove me to the Tropicana Motor Hotel on Sunset Boulevard just off Doheny, only a few blocks down from Stravinsky’s house on North Wetherly Drive in the Hollywood Hills.° On our drive there Stravinsky suggested that I should find the accommodation suitable. “Boulez has stayed there,” he assured me.” The next morning I rode with them to the first reading and recording of the Monumentum pro Gesualdo. The world premiere was scheduled for the Venice Benniale later that September.

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Having recently confirmed the contrapuntal-harmonic art of Gesualdo in his reconstruction of three motets, Stravinsky had now attempted to forward a fresh perspective in the Monumentum by means not inherent in the original vocal form but securely rooted in instrumental practices of the late sixteenth century that deserve to be cited. By this I mean to suggest that Stravinsky’s “timbral isolation of the vertical” at the opening did not constitute his entire catalogue of observations on the piece. For following the ravishing chromatic opening section of “Belta poi,” which Stravinsky knowingly recolored with reference to an early twentieth-century Viennese perspective (or, one might argue, medieval color hocketing), Gesualdo initiated his final section with a diatonic, homophonic pronouncement of a frottola rhythm. Here Stravinsky introduced a brass choir and in so doing, dramatically illuminated a surprising link between the world of a Gesualdo madrigal and a Gabrieli instrumental canzona. Then, by way of conclusion, Stravinsky further tested the meaning of the word “instrumental” by invoking perspectives first notated in Giovanni Gabrieli’s historically renowned Sonata pian’ e forte, first published in 1597.

The reference is subtle but unmistakable. Gabrieli’s instrumentation called for a choir of one cornetto and three sackbuts, and

another choir of a viola and three more sackbuts. Dramatically new, however, were Gabrieli’s dynamic markings, inherent in the title

of the composition, that specified dual levels of sound: loud in the tutti passages, and soft as the separate choirs played by themselves. The dynamic markings are remembered today as a historical first. Interestingly, Stravinsky followed this same dynamic plan: first, by employing the equivalent of cornettos, sackbuts (trombones) and strings against which he juxtaposes a quartet of horns and another of oboes and bassoons; and second, by controlling and nuancing the brass dynamics in the concluding section, as did Gabrieli, with nota-

tions offorte, piano, con sordino and (in the case of the horns) bouché— or hand-stopping. Stravinsky also distinguished between the several instrumental components by using no trumpets or trombones in the first piece; no horns or strings in the second; and combining the full ensemble only in the third piece. Gesualdo’s contemporary appeal clearly plagued the respected

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Italian musicologist Lorenzo Bianconi in his article on Gesualdo for The New Grove Dictionary edition of 1980 (still unrevised thirty years later in Grove Music Online), who charged that Stravinsky misleadingly denied the contrapuntal basis of Gesualdo’s art in his Monumentum pro Gesualdo. As a consequence, he argued, this “brought about a mistaken overemphasis on his chromatic style,” and “whether consciously or not, exploited just this misunderstanding when he orchestrated the madrigal Beltd, poi che t’assenti (in Monumentum pro Gesualdo, 1960).” He further charged that “by accentuating the implicitly vertical nature of modern chromaticism, Stravinsky obliterated the contrapuntal relationship which justified those chords in the original madrigal.’’® “Mistaken overemphasis on his chromatic style?” We will return later to the predictable charge that follows immediately in the same article, namely that “the historical influence of Gesualdo’s madrigal style was slight,” a view that Bianconi himself would later revise. The judgment had become so commonplace that it was automatically pronounced by most historians and journalistic reporters of the day—although the leap in judgment that “not until Wagner” had his harmonic discoveries been equaled also continued to appear from time to time. Bianconi’s implied charge that Stravinsky had been unaware of the contrapuntal basis of Gesualdo’s music deserves to be placed in a fuller context, however. For having completed Gesualdo’s two canonic motets, Stravinsky provided the following crucial observation: Gesualdo’s music must be approached through the art of his voice-

leading. His harmonic system was discovered and perfected through the inventions of voice-leading, and his harmony is trained by his voice-leading exactly as a vine is trained by a trellis. I learned this much myself when, a few months before composing the Monumentum, I fabricated the lost parts to the canonic motets Da Pacem Domine and Assumpta est Maria.?

It is hardly surprising that Leibowitz had forwarded this essential double perspective a decade earlier in a study of chromaticism when he noted that “A musician may think in independent voices and pro-

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duce chord-progressions. We shall also see that he can think in terms of harmonic functions and produce independent voices.” Canticum Sacrum had only recently forced Stravinsky to a review of late-Renaissance Venetian musical practice, and, as we have seen,

works by Giovanni Gabrieli and Claudio Monteverdi were included as companions at the premiere of his new work. Now, with the Monumentum pro Gesualdo, which premiered in Venice at La Fenice in September 1960 (yes, Gesualdo finally plays Venice), Stravinsky’s “close reading” provides us with direct evidence of his abiding affection for and recent review of late Italian Renaissance music— instrumental as well as vocal. Once again he reinforces the historic Slavic-Italian connection in a manner quite distinct from, although in combination with, Viennese Klangfarben principles. Here Stravinsky also forwarded a modern model of transferring Gesualdo’s text-generated music to the instrumental realm, an action, as we

have noted, that was familiar in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In this respect Stravinsky’s solution was neither, as Bianconi would have it, “irreverent” nor “arbitrary” but “polyfocal” as well as “historically informed.” This is not to deny that during Stravinsky’s last years, many observers were left to wonder what the composer was really up to. Indeed, without a genuine sense of the Russian’s essential cosmopolitanism tethered to an acute sense of history, it is difficult to imagine that the dodecaphonic organ interludes in Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum could have been composed at the same time as his Bach “Vom Himmel Hoch” Variations; or, in another unlikely pairing, that his ngorously serial Movements for Piano and Orchestra of 1959 was composed during the same months as his two Gesualdo projects. Notice, in particular, the difference in Stravinsky’s language when describing these latter two works. Speaking of Movements, StravinskyCraft openly betray an infatuation with Krenek’s recent discussions of serial rotation which had already interested Stravinsky as early as the Canticum. In a now infamously recondite description, the matter is put this way: Every aspect of the composition was guided by serial forms, the sixes, quadrilaterals, triangles, etc. The fifth movement, for instance, uses a

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construction of twelve verticals . . . Five orders are rotated instead of four, with six alternates for each of the five, while at the same time

the six work in all directions, as though through a crystal.’

Come again? Shades of the numerology and imagery found in the book of Revelations 4:5—6 spring to mind: And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God. And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal.

Yet, for all the serial lingo and fashionable rhetoric, Stravinsky’s Movements (which he called the most “atonal” work he ever wrote) was still capable of incorporating tonal gestures taken directly from his early Russian period. For at the end of the third movement of his new piano concertante piece, Stravinsky cites the gurgling, tonicdominant clarinet tremolo originally heard at the final cadence of the first of his Pribaoutki of 1914 and quickly adopted as a persistent texture throughout the first of his Berceuses du chat of 1915. Interest-

ingly enough, it was a sonority that had only recently been recalled at the final cadence of the last of his Three Shakespeare Songs (1953). Now, in his Movements for Piano and Orchestra, he had once more invoked this early, tonal and coloristic signature as a cadential coda to an otherwise rigorously serial landscape." It is a striking detail that reveals the composer’s lingering interest in his musical roots and its adaptability to a contemporary landscape. Movements for Piano and Orchestra had been written during the same period as his completion of the Gesualdo canonic motets and only a few months prior to the composition of Monumentum pro Gesualdo. But in speaking of the latter Stravinsky no longer indulged in pitch class discussions, remarking rather on matters of instrumental color and his love for his musical ancestor from the Italian Renaissance. “My Monumentum,” he said,

was intended to commemorate the 4ooth anniversary of one of the most personal, and most original musicians ever born to my art (for

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Gesualdo is a natural, an involuntary composer). To effect a greater sense of movement—as well as to show a different analysis of the music—lI divided the orchestra into groups of strings, brasses, woodwinds, and horns, and hocketed the music from group to group; the hocket is a rhythmic device, after all."

On 29 October 1960, a month following the premiere of Monumentum (Venice, 27 September 1960), I received a note from Nadia Boulanger. The Canticum Sacrum, which we had both anticipated in 1956, had received its first performance four years before in the

same city. Now, with the Monumentum premiere just concluded and an edition finally in hand of Gesualdo’s Responsoria (1959), which I

had recently sent her, she expressed her delight. By that time she had also clearly taken possession of Stravinsky’s completions of the two canonic motets, published a only few months before by Boosey & Hawkes. The convergence of Gesualdo events was as striking as it was unexpected. She now responded with a remarkably generous expression of gratitude for the new edition of the Holy Week responses: For the wonderful present I do thank you deeply and am day after day more grateful. And when I see the result you have attained, I am “proud”! to have insisted you to go on. And with what impatience the other works are expected—and the book so needed. I only hope you were busy and did not notice my silence! Excuse it now that I brought you to face it, receive thanks, congratulations, and wishes for such an important contribution to music.

Clearly Boulanger’s reaction reflected her awareness of the growing Gesualdo fever in Stravinsky quarters as well as the recent premiere of his Monumentum at the Venice Biennale. In light of her long-held infatuation with Monteverdi and a small Gesualdo repertoire (Gesualdo and Monteverdi were born within a year of each other), the Holy Week Responsoria had come as a revelation, and Stravinsky’s Monumentum had further fueled her enthusiasm. Boulanger’s claim in her note that she had encouraged me “‘to go

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on” referred to the fact that in 1958 she had accepted an invitation

for a two-week residence at Southern Illinois University, where I had taken my first collegiate post. Seeing my transcriptions of the Gesualdo Holy Week cycle at that time, she was so taken with the collection that she offered to collect private subscriptions to underwrite publication of the project should my university press, which she had personally approached about the matter, fail to do so. She even stated that she felt sure that Poulenc, for whom I had played his organ concerto at her request two years before, would be willing to join in the subscription. As Gesualdo’s Responsoria were published shortly thereafter by Ugrino Verlag in Hamburg, Germany, as part of a complete edition coauthored with Wilhelm Weismann of Leipzig, Boulanger’s intervention became unnecessary. But I have always suspected that Poulenc’s Sept Répons de Tenebrae of 1962, his last completed work, may have been in part prompted by his recent brush with Gesualdo’s set of twenty-seven Tenebrae responses, which Boulanger no doubt brought to his attention. The repertoire and the chronology are, in any event, intriguing, and his return to a group of Tenebrae texts, which had attracted him previously in 1938—39, stands

as an exact mirror of Gesualdo’s choice for an opus ultimum." Memorials at the Close. Old age brings with it the inevitable passing of loved ones, intimate associates, and professional friends. Begin-

ning in the 1950s, Stravinsky was confronted with the death of both public figures and personal friends, and his preoccupation with the issue can be observed in a series of memorial compositions. Earlier he had written tombeaux for Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Natalie Koussevitsky, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and Mikhail Glinka. Now in his last years the list continued. With the death of his librettist for a planned opera, Stravinsky set the poet’s most familiar poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” in his In Memoriam Dylan Thomas of 1954. Composed for a quartet of strings and another of trombones that betrayed his current infatuation with Heinrich Schiitz, it also endorsed for the first time the idea of acompact series, here a fivenote one, that generated the pitch component of an entire piece. Personal sorrow was matched with the investigation of avant-garde compositional techniques.

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Stravinsky’s capacity to match such new techniques to a solemn task was further corroborated in September 1959. He had never met Raoul Dufy, but the memorial piece he wrote for him, which came

at the request for an autograph, is a double canon for flute and clarinet. The various serial and canonic manipulations in this work are elaborate but virtually inaudible to the most attentive listener. Such conjugations are to be found in the great masters, of course, and we take due notice of them. Yet Schoenberg, it will be remembered, was the first to disclaim any special value in writing canons in nontonal music, where dissonance control (always the supreme test of the historic tonal canon) poses no inherent challenge. The warning did not take root in a great deal of music written during the 1950s and ’60s, however.

For the very idea of canon, it seems, carries its

own magic and connotations of craft equaled by few other contrapuntal actions, regardless of its context. Tellingly, it was precisely at the time that Stravinsky was involved in completing the serial Dufy canons that he completed the two canon motets of Gesualdo. The canon and old age: Gesualdo, Bach,

Stravinsky! But Beethoven had also become interested in canons near the end of his life, and even Brahms collected and published a group of thirteen canons, written earlier, shortly before composing his two final opus numbers: the Four Serious Songs and the organ chorale preludes. That Stravinsky’s interest in canon during this period was virtually obsessive was even picked up by Boulez in a note to Lawrence Morton concerning the orchestral Variations dedicated to Aldous Huxley, wherein he noted that “there’s nothing to get very worked up about in these variations: always canons and more canons and still more canons . . . All this between ourselves! But when it comes to canon, I prefer Webern.”"® Huxley had been a social and professional intimate of Stravinsky and, as we have seen, a somewhat fanatical buff of the life and music

of Carlo Gesualdo. He died on the same day that President Kennedy was assassinated, and Stravinsky offered a memorial to him in the guise of a set of brief, inventively serial orchestral variations that even the composer acknowledged may not have pleased Huxley had he heard them. I choose the word “brief” for good reason. At the morning dress rehearsal prior to the premiere of the Variations

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with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in Orchestra Hall, Craft had just finished conducting Schoenberg’s grandly Wagnerian orchestral songs, op. 8, sung by the soprano Irene Jordan, a rehearsal not only for the performance that evening but also for a forthcoming Columbia Records release. John McClure, Claudio Spies, Stravinsky, and I, all seated in the auditorium at a short distance from each other,

prepared for the first reading of Stravinsky’s new variations. We listened without score, of course, and neither Spies nor I had

any inkling in advance of the dimensions of the work. It took only four minutes and forty-five seconds to perform, and at the conclusion I remember Claudio quietly observing, “It’s quite short.” Stravinsky, a half dozen rows in front of us in the otherwise empty auditorium, turned around slightly and announced: “Not short; brief!” As one of his most involved late serial works, he might also have added “but architecturally complex.” In retrospect we now recognize that many of the works from this last phase tended to be condensed, if not aphoristic—a factor that would obtain even for his own Requiem, which he called “a pocket requiem.” As a group, however, Stravinsky seemed to be protesting that they ought best be viewed not as “short” but as distilled. Stravinsky’s rebuttal was no doubt prompted in part by Paul Henry Lang’s summary dismissal of some of his most recent works in the 1960 Carnegie Hall concerts on account of their miniature size. Craft’s observations about the similarity of dimension between the Renaissance madrigal and many prevailing contemporary forms continued to prove accurate. Stravinsky’s Monumentum pro Gesualdo counts as another epitaph to the memory of a composer, yet for all of its dependence upon his music, it was unlike his invocation of Giovanni Pergolesi (and Domenico

Gallo) in Pulcinella.'? For Monumentum did not forecast

an impending stylistic turn but was rather a summary review of both new and old perspectives at the very moment that he was busy completing Movements, one of the most radical works of his late style. Nor is the work a simple “arrangement,” a curiosity that registers as a stylistic link between the “historical” Stravinsky and the serial composer. For Monumentum was essentially an advertisement of the composer’s affection for one of music’s pioneers whose historical position resisted easy classification. )

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Ballet, Ritual, and Review. In Bart6k’s last years, many noted the backward glance, the softening of the vocabulary in his Concerto for Orchestra (1943) and Third Piano Concerto

(1945)—works

that a

few critics, though not the majority, imprudently termed a sellout at the time because of their accessible language. Given the signs of the times, however, it was virtually predictable that shortly after his death, some analysts would begin to look for serial implications, now declared as embryonic but never fully realized, in works like Bartok’s Violin Sonatas of the 1920s and especially the Fourth String Quartet." In certain quarters the need to validate the serial adventure had now become critical. For Stravinsky, the paradox of his own last works was of a different order, because while every premiere in his old age became increasingly an “event” (unlike the appearance of many of Bartok’s last works), few, if any, of the late works were to become

staples of the orchestral or chamber repertoire. The only exceptions (the brief, pungent, but functional Fanfare for a New Theater aside) were the pieces choreographed by Balanchine—and, interestingly, there were several of them. Indeed, though Agon, unlike Stravinsky’s early ballet music, never achieved an enduring place in the programs of the major symphony orchestras, there was widespread consensus that it was one of the composer’s most brilliant ballet scores. The return to classic symmetries and Baroque dances (saraband, gailliard, and bransle, simple and gay) did not disguise the stylistic journey that outlines the ballet’s course. Beginning in openly diatonic terrain, it progresses toward chromaticism and serialism, and ultimately completes its expedition with a return to its diatonic beginnings. Yet Agon is not a fleeting document of taste or the unfortunate reflection of an artist caught in the mire of a stylistic shift, but the statement of an artistic credo, of amodus operandi for a lifetime. Virtually every parameter of the work proclaims the composer’s deliberately self-conscious appraisal of music history as he knew it, placed in tandem with the winning of a fresh perspective.'’? As a ballet, however, it was something more: it was a revelation—with

Balanchine’s choreography virtually charting the entire course of the music with uncanny invention and athletic grace. It proved to be so clarifying that even Stravinsky was moved to remark that

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he heard his own work anew when looking at his colleague’s contribution. Movements for Piano and Orchestra, too, is rarely played on orchestral concerts and has only infrequently been taken up by a major pianist. This is understandable in that the work was not really a concerto but rather an orchestral work with a concertante piano part. There is bravura keyboard work aplenty here, but not in the grand tradition of Liszt and Rachmaninoff, or even Bartok. Nor does it possess the easy rhythmic charm of Stravinsky’s earlier Piano Concerto, even though its engaging rhythmic and coloristic elements would have to be described as two of the central features of the work. Once again, however, Balanchine salvaged Movements by choreographing it as a double bill with Monumentum pro Gesualdo, and both works initially became best known through this collaborative projection. Stravinsky witnessed something of this translation even in his lifetime, and he must have taken satisfaction in his music’s return to a

medium that had launched a career. But gratitude notwithstanding, he was no doubt disappointed and must have hoped that with time and familiarity, acceptance of Agon as a concert piece would come. Unfortunately, the repeated performances in concert form never materialized in the first decades following his death, although many musicians as well as a few amateurs became drawn to Stravinsky’s

late works through recordings and relished the brilliance and ultimately the power of many of these final pieces. At the end of his life, Stravinsky could be assured of the permanent success of the three early ballets, and a healthy number of pieces from the so-called neoclassic period also maintained their place on the rosters of the most important performing organizations (the Piano Concerto, Oedipus Rex, the Symphony of Psalms, the Symphony in Three Movements, The Rake’s Progress). In the final period following The Rake, however, there were no symphonies, concertos, or operas,

but rather a predominance of chamber works and sacred works for larger ensembles. Yet, near the end we also have ballets once more: Agon and The Flood, as well as Balanchine’s adaptations of Movements and Monumentum. Then with A Sermon, a Narrative, and a Prayer and,

finally, the Requiem Canticles serving as an opus ultimum, it became clear that his life circle had come to a close with a return to ballet

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and ritual—the two categories for which Stravinsky had exhibited powerful affinities from the beginning. It is also tempting to attribute the considerable emphasis that Stravinsky placed upon sacred choral works in his last years to his awareness that prior to the nineteenth century the spiritual choral concerto was virtually the only developed musical expression in Russia with a native voice.”° Emphasis upon “the composer*in exile” became a persistent leitmotif of critique in the years following Stravinsky’s death along with the observation that after Movements for Piano and Orchestra (1960), virtually all his works were religious and use serial rotation grids.*" Walsh tellingly notes that the “obvious major exception” was the Monumentum pro Gesualdo. To Walsh’s exception, Stravinsky’s Eight Instrumental Miniatures of 1962 ought to be added, for several reasons. Like the Monumentum, their appearance in the midst of a group of rigorously serial compositions could not have been predicted. Yet here, too, there is a story.

Stravinsky’s antipathy to the organ, an instrument for which he had composed only once in his entire career, has been previously noted. Yet only a few years after employing it in the Canticum Sacrum, Stravinsky granted me permission to make an arrangement for organ of his earlier piano set, Les cing doigts, in a note of 17 January 1961.” On 14 February I responded at length regarding some confusions in his transcription of “Ilumina nos,” to which he had made additions,

and also thanked him for permission to make the organ arrangement. The bulk of my letter, however, was given over to making a case that he should write an original work for the organ, not only recalling that it was Bach’s personal instrument but also bringing to Stravinsky’s attention the voicing and clarity of such new instruments as the recently installed Flentrop organ at the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard. My former teacher and later colleague Marilyn Mason had also independently oftered him a commission around this time, but both of our entreaties were eventually declined. Having sketched out for organ the whole of Stravinsky’s Five Fingers, | found my plans brought short when I learned that, following my original entreaty, Stravinsky had begun to review this very work himself and had undertaken to recompose it in a new version, entitled Eight Instrumental Miniatures. Here, in addition to transpositions

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as well as rhythmic, phraseological, and modulatory adjustments, Stravinsky introduced canonic elaborations. From the time of the “Dirge Canons,” which open and close In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, canon had become one of the important signposts of Stravinsky’s late style with implications far beyond any attraction to serialism.”3 Indeed, the composer’s palpable fixation with the idea of canon, as evidenced in his reworking of Les cinq doigts, dramatically advertised that his engagement with serialism was anything but exclusive. Walsh has even compared the compositional method in this work to Stravinsky’s recent addition to Gesualdo’s canonic motets, an observation that must be reversed, however, as here it is Stravinsky

who adds the canons.” Stravinsky’s earlier attraction to the canonic marvels

of Heinrich

Isaac, J. S. Bach, and more

recently Anton

Webern, had now coalesced in the refurbishing of a quasi-didactic, pandiatonic set from 1921. Backward glances, current reflections. The Last Premiere. Another memorial work for a literary figure was premiered together with the Huxley Variations in Chicago on 17 April 1965. Stravinsky and T. S. Eliot had at one point entertained the idea of doing a theater piece together, but in the end the composer set only his “The Dove Descending” of 1962. Then on 4 January 1965

Eliot died, and six weeks later Stravinsky completed his Introitus T. S. Eliot for an extraordinary ensemble of tenors, basses, harp, piano, two timpani, two tam-tams, solo viola, and double-bass. The vocal writ-

ing is austerely written for alternating one and two parts, occasionally breaking into pitchless declamation marked parlando sotto voce, and the instrumental component complements the sense of ritual. The first reading of the work took place in Los Angeles in a recording session prior to the public premiere in Chicago, and those of us who were present noted its sombre and grave voice. No one at the time could have failed to recognize that the Introit was the opening text of the Requiem Mass. Yet no one could have predicted that it would serve as the composer’s initial probe toward the setting of his own requiem, a work to which it properly belongs. The premiere of Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles took place in McCarter Theatre, Princeton, New Jersey, on Saturday evening, 8 October

1966, at eight-thirty. The program included the following:

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Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920; rev. 1947)

Three Sacred Choruses: “Pater noster” (1926); “Credo” (1932; rev. 1964); “Ave Maria” (1934)

Variations (1936-64): “Aldous Huxley in memoriam”

Requiem Canticles (1965-66) INTERMISSION

Requiem Canticles (repeated)

Mass (1944-1948) All the works were religious except for the Symphonies and the Variations. Yet, as we have reviewed, even these two works were

memorials, for Debussy and Huxley, respectively, thus complementing the tone of the whole. I had received a note from Craft shortly before the premiere in Princeton. Enclosed was a ticket to the performance, an announcement of the time and place of the rehearsals in New York the day before, and the pointed observation that this was destined to be Stravinsky’s last major premiere. What everyone knew was made clearly evident in the performance. Stravinsky opened the concert with his Symphonies of Wind Instruments, originally dedicated to the memory of Claude Debussy. He conducted at a stark, solemn, some might

say glacial pace that ultimately threatened to come to a halt. It was as though the maestro were lost in a highly personal, intensely private communication, recalling the circumstances of its original creation many years before. John McClure of Columbia Records, who was sitting directly behind me, gave me a gentle nudge as if to recall several recording sessions, which I had witnessed, where strategies had to be invoked in order to move the tempo along. As originally planned, it was left to Craft to conduct the Requiem Canticles. But the reason behind the juxtaposition of the Symphonies of Winds on the same program was soon made palpable: in the “Interludium” of his new work, Stravinsky prominently replicated the long-short rhythmic metaphor of his earlier Debussy memorial. Once again, continuities between Stravinsky’s early and late works were made audible and in turn provided the keystone to a career.

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At the dress rehearsal in New York the day before the Princeton premiere of the Requiem Canticles, there was some tidying up to do in the score—including a last minute change to omit a harmonium part and substitute a muted choir of four horns in the “Libera me.”*> Why had Stravinsky chosen the instrument in the first place? Had the harmonium been thought of as a portable equivalent of the churchly organ which he had introduced only once before in the Canticum Sacrum? Whatever the reason, other nods to the past are there, some

clear, others obscure. The Italian connection, for

example, has been pointed out in a shadowy reference to Verdi, who had previously played in the wings of Oedipus Rex and whose own Requiem now served as catalytic force in subtle details.”° Placed in the company of new and highly intricate techniques of serial rotation and verticals, however, the connection would never come to mind

to the casual listener. At the same time members of the audience at the premiere performance who had even a rudimentary knowledge of Stravinsky’s early works could hardly have failed to note other, more obvious connections in the three instrumental movements that shape the whole: the insistent rhythmic repetitions of another rite in the “Preludium”; the long-short motif of his Debussy memorial telegraphed in the “Interludium”; and the chiming coda in the concluding “Postludium,” which automatically recalled the wedding cantata Les Noces, a third ritual written almost fifty years before. The effect at the premiere had seemed palpably, startlingly Russian. At asmall dinner on the Princeton campus immediately following the premiere of the Requiem Canticles, | remarked to Stravinsky on the similarity of the conclusion of these two rituals—of wedding and requiem, respectively. His quiet and politely delivered response signaled that he found my observation unremarkable: “Of course,” he said, “others invariably notice such things. For me it is merely a part of a language that I am used to.” Stravinsky’s rejoinder confirmed that quotation and allusion, either gestural or literal, fell naturally into place either from the stockpile of the composer’s memory or from a deliberate review of his career. That Stravinsky sensed the end was near was reinforced for everyone who gathered at this dinner. Midway through the meal, Princeton University’s President Robert Goheen appeared briefly and

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remained standing near Stravinsky. Having greeted the composer with a few welcoming remarks, he concluded amicably, “You must come back and see us soon.” Stravinsky, with barely a hint of a smile, replied, not ungraciously, “Thank you very much, but that will be impossible. You see, I am already very old.” A sudden frisson went through the room, and the momentary silence that followed seemed like an eternity. Contradicting any thought that Stravinsky’s mind was no longer agile, however, was a brief encounter that occurred only the night before. It took place in Stravinsky’s suite in the Pierre Hotel in New York on the evening of 7 October 1966 following the dress rehearsal that day. A half dozen friends, led by a well known composer or two, were engaged in conversation that fleetingly threw a few lighthearted barbs at John Cage. Stravinsky, standing a short distance away, overheard this seemingly safe conversation and intervened, surprising everyone with an announcement. “I am very sorry to take exception to your remarks,” he interjected with barely controlled irritation. “But, you see, Cage has been very important to me.” The room fell momentarily silent. How could this be so? What was the affinity between Stravinsky and the composer of Music of Changes? One can only guess that such a piece, which was premised upon operations seemingly alien to anything Stravinsky ever penned, nonetheless incorporated aspects of calculation and chance attendant to all games, which the Russian noted and appreciated at some very fundamental level.” There is no need to speculate further, for in one of his conversations with Craft,

Stravinsky had already been quite candid about the matter. Noting Cage’s extraordinary success in Europe, he wondered at the reasons: Is it only that Mr. Cage does things Europeans dare not do and that he does them naturally and innocently, and not as self-conscious stunts? Whatever the answers, no sleight of hand, no trapdoors are ever discovered in his performances; in other words, no “tradition”

at all, and not only no Bach and no Beethoven, but also no Schoenberg and no Webern either. This is impressive, and no wonder the man on your left keeps saying “sehr interessant.”?®

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Such comments resonate as Stravinsky’s authentic voice, and carry the implication that he understood and appreciated that Cage was playing the ultimate game—one that challenged the core issues of nationality and tradition so essential to the resolution of identity for most composers. In light of Stravinsky’s remarks about Cage, it is important to recall that Bach and Beethoven had been essential to Stravinsky’s musical identity from the very beginning of his career and, in different ways, both had haunted him to the end when Webern also made a brief appearance. While in later years Stravinsky conceded that he related to the Germanic “‘mainstream” only from an angle, he also added the now familiar statement, “Sometimes an angle can be an advantage.” Call it a defensive strategy if you like; place it under the rubric of Harold Bloom’s “Anxiety of Influence”; trace it to Russian cosmopolitanism or, not imprudently, to the ancient traditions of imitation and emulation from the time of the Renaissance—tt 1s a creative gambit that has been adopted throughout the history of Western music by virtually all composers. The repeated emphasis given to the idea of an “inferiority complex” with respect to the German tradition, while true at some level of sharing common to all artists, does little justice to the complex of forces at work in Stravinsky’s ongoing review of history.”? Craft sounded a somewhat broader, more inclusive note when he observed that “Stravinsky was a great artist because he knew that depth of allusion can be attained only by using the past, and that creation depends as much on the old as on the new.

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Summing Up. Near the end of his life Stravinsky made a recording of his brief essay, “A propos Le sacre du printemps,” which highlighted the composer’s need to review the one score that was his greatest, irrefutable, public triumph. In so doing, however, he not only made a reasonable proclamation of genius as its guiding force but offered a contradiction to the importance of the grand tradition in certain special cases. Noting the lack of precedent for such a work, he concluded in a remarkably direct voice: “I am the vessel through which Le sacre passed.” The bold claim to uniqueness and the impossibility

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of imitation by others made by the Prince of Venosa in the preface to his last two books of madrigals springs to mind. When Stravinsky recorded that remark, the polychords had all been located and analyzed and the octatonic collections were in the process of being catalogued by the theorists in an attempt to italicize the role of layered pitch and exploding harmony. But when all was said and done, it was the rhythmic structure of The Rite, which Boulez first articulated in depth in 1953 in an article “Stra-

vinsky Remains,”*' that had resounded in the musical world for the remainder of the century. Indeed, the impression was so strong that Stravinsky himself periodically had to employ evasive tactics in order to avoid the stereotypical thumbprint. Years later, reviewing the many styles that followed, he properly conceded that it would have been impossible for him to have gone on recomposing The Rite of Spring for the rest of his life. Nonetheless, it was his “escapes” from it that brought him to face the available options. Ultimately, it became apparent that these two forces were less at odds with each other than the essential and reciprocal propellants of a creative life. Even amongst those artists who leave monumental exit signs near the end, light-hearted works can also find their way. Stravinsky provides a stunning example following the solemnity of the Requiem Canticles in a setting of ““The Owl and the Pussycat.” On the surface a work of whimsy, it was also a valentine to his wife, Vera, and it

was in some ways his final valedictory. That tranquility of expression concealed serial and canonic elements did not prevent Stravinsky from telling Balanchine that the song “should be impersonated: a little hooted, a little meeowed, a little grunted for the pig. 9932

The Late Style. With such a varied panoply of late works, how should we judge the late style of Stravinsky? Recalling AdornoSaid’s review of those qualities exhibited in some of the greatest artists, should we review Stravinsky’s last years as a period that brought reconciliation and a kind of restful summing up, or one that embraced restlessness, experiment, and resistance to summation? Here we can have it both ways, for with Stravinsky the two perspectives are clearly on view. The old and untiringly restless composer continued to recognize the congeniality as well as the necessity of

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review. At the same time he also assumed the role of captain testing new waters right to the end, querulous and resisting any attempt at summing up. Adoption, adaptation, and integration: these were the watchwords

that were alternately, sometimes

discretely, invoked.

The plurality of Stravinsky’s perspectives, it must be added, shared more than a little with Schoenberg’s final decade.:3 Stravinsky was living in America when the great serial wave hit— not only at home but in Europe as well, and he had been forced to a reappraisal. His friendships not only with Craft but with Milton Babbitt, Arthur Berger, Claudio Spies, and Elliot Carter in America

were the counterpart to the attention he paid early on to Boulez and Stockhausen in Europe. Collectively, these signals of awareness gave the impression that he was “keeping up.” His serial inquiry sealed the sense that he was not only au courant but capable of turning a new method to personal account. It has been rightly noted that the decade of the 1950s brought a rapid series of changes in Stravinsky’s compositional style. His introduction to the music of Webern was clearly thanks to Craft, but as his then young assistant remarked at the time, nobody “could lead that horse to water, if it didn’t want to go, let alone make it drink.”*4

Stravinsky investigated and chose to drink. The personalized inventions that followed, culminating in Movements for Piano and Orchestra, seemed increasingly to reflect a nsing infatuation with Webern. If momentarily this seemed to permit a detour around the Schoenberg problem, Craft’s ongoing recording project of the complete Schoenberg for Columbia Records seemed to suggest otherwise, even though Stravinsky remained resistant to total embrace. “We must remember only the perfect works,” Stravinsky said of Schoenberg, mentioning the Five Pieces for Orchestra, Herzgewachse, Pierrot lunaire, the Serenade,

and the Variations for Orchestra—a short list which (the last two works excepted) focuses on the Expressionist, pre-serial works contemporaneous with Stravinsky’s three blockbuster ballets from the period just prior to World War I.*° Stravinsky’s serial music remains an emblem of the composer’s originality and vigor in approaching a foreign model. Yet, in the absence of repeated live performances, it remained improbable that it was a language that would ever be appreciated by the average concert-

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going public. It is crucial to remember that these works were born in a postwar Western world confronted with a dual perspective. For the artistic perspectives of both the Fascists and the Soviets now required a response that placed an emphasis on hard science and political freedom.*° A dramatic manifestation of this new agenda had surfaced in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was formed in Berlin in 1950 as a response to the East-West political divide.

The authors behind its original manifesto, Freedom Takes the Offensive, were Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, and Nicolas Nabokov. Nabokov, a close friend of Stravinsky, was its secretary-general and was in charge of the organization’s activities. Between 1962 festivals took place in Paris, Rome,

1952 and

and Tokyo, with a tour

of concerts. The mechanism behind the organization was powerful and wildly propagandistic, and its presentation of works intended to demonstrate the breadth of artistic freedom in the West made for some strange bedfellows. That is to say, the L’Oeuvre du XXe siécle concerts sponsored by the Congress in May 1952 presented both Structures I of Pierre Boulez and the Symphony in C by Igor Stravinsky, the former described by one critic as “a war machine devised to kill convention,” the latter the very archetype of neoclassic control.37 However, six years later in 1958 Threni, Stravinsky’s first totally dodecaphonic work and surely one of his most formidable scores, was sponsored by this very Congress at the Biennale in Venice. Amazingly, advanced music was now being enjoined as “cultural propaganda for Western liberal ideals,” and both Stravinsky and Nicolas Nabokov had been drafted as central players.’* Nabokoy, critic of Leibowitz as well as confidant of Stravinsky, was not particularly taken with Stravinsky’s dodecaphonic excursions, however. While the conjunction of such severe music from Stravinsky’s late style in the service of international politics was mind-boggling, it is doubtful that the fall of the Berlin Wall, or later the Soviet Union, can be

attributed even in part to Stravinsky’s enlistment in this campaign. We now see Stravinsky’s last serial works as reflective of their time and place, and the dodecaphonic serial fashion as short lived. At the same time it is important to note that Stravinsky’s final compositions were anything but Viennese in sound or design. Further-

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more, for anyone even mildly interested in following the progress of such a seminal mind for the twentieth century, these last works are essential—not so much courageous as probing, confected with science and dash, a sense of history, structure, and sentiment, and,

most important of all, carrying the personal imprint of an abiding imagination and unfailing ear tuned to full review. As we have by now repeatedly observed, the inclination to combine newer serial techniques with historical as well as self references was a proclivity that continued to the end of Stravinsky’s career. At the same time he was aware that his agglutinative approach to composition was a cause for concern in some quarters. Postmodernism as a term or aesthetic cover had yet to surface to any extent prior to his death. Yet Stravinsky’s alertness to the basic issue, which was acute, once more encouraged him to reveal his keen historical sense as well as his abiding multicultural sensitivity by way of defense, and to emphasize the pull of tradition in its many guises. Gesualdo was simply one of the powerful attractions from this inheritance in his late years, but he was not the only one. Without any sense of embarrassment, even Jean Sibelius and Hugo Wolf could appear momentarily in his workshop, however modest the embrace, and

not surprisingly at the very end there was Bach once more. In such returns we see the revolutionary not as one who has become conservative but as a lifelong conservative-revolutionary. It was a perspective that Stravinsky shared with Schoenberg, his lifelong nemesis, though with a different result. Stravinsky noted that composers were guided inevitably by the grand tradition,“by the free adoption of ancestors, and the choosing and pasting together of assorted bits and pieces of the past.” His confirmation of the obvious presence of antecedents was also accompanied by the prescient observation that “connection may be created and discovered only after long periods of time.”*? The art historian George Kubler, whose similar thoughts on the

subject were published in a remarkably influential work only three years later, would have been pleased had he run across these words. For there he noted that virtually all artists and historians share pleasure in “the discovery that an old and interesting work of art is not unique, but that its type exists in a variety of examples spread early

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and late in time.”#° Stravinsky was clearly intent not only on dramatizing the force of history for all composers but also on acknowledging the benefits that could accrue from the invocation of multiple music histories richer than his native Russia could claim. Note particularly the use of the expression “free adoption of ancestors,” that is to say, in borrowing, the artist must not only take note of the grand tradition but also declare an exception.*' It is a tenet that Nadia Boulanger frequently offered to composers in a different but quite extraordinary fashion: “Take the music you know and love best and commit it to memory. Then when you go to compose do not strain to avoid the obvious.’ Lest this be misunderstood, it was not

offered as a formula for mediocre copycats but rather as the only firm starting point for the creative act.

Stravinsky’s “late style”? Breaking new territory or a dead end without issue? Abstract or personal? National, neonational, or cos-

mopolitan? Ritualistic, playful, or historically oriented? All of the above? Among the many elements that constitute the final profile of the composer, perhaps one can do no better than to note Stravinsky’s infatuation with the harmonic element of counterpoint. Recall his comments as early as 1952—Jjust prior to launching his own investigations into both Gesualdo and serialism—to the effect that what he found “wrong with most twelve-tone composers” was that they were “indifferent to the vertical aspect of music.” It should come as no surprise, then, that in his last major work, the Requiem Canticles,

Stravinsky planned his serial rotations to generate vertical harmonies as carefully as linear melodies.** To single out this particular issue as a constant would seem to stand somewhat at odds with his legendary profile as a rhythmicist. The two strands were never immiscible, however, and ultimately proved to be congenial companions—a claim that could also be made for Gesualdo, whose extraordinary harmonic voice was spawned from a contrapuntal web. Following Stravinsky’s death, his body was transported to Venice, a city where the Canticum Sacrum, Monumentum pro Gesualdo, and Threni were premiered and where the Gesualdo canonic motets were composed. Long after the funeral ceremonies on the island of San Michele had concluded, visible evidence of Stravinsky’s acknowledged devotion to Italy and Venice in particular lingered on in the

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numerous oversize notices affixed on walls throughout the city. The City of Venice, the posters declared, took pride in rendering homage to the remains of the great musician Igor Stravinsky, who, as they phrased it, “in a gesture of exquisite friendship desired to be buried in the city which he loved above all others.” Stravinsky’s musical legacy did not find such an immediate resting place, however. Various institutions juggled for the right to house it, and the New York Times of 18 May 1982 announced that the University of Texas had lost out to UCLA in its attempt to secure the archive. Eventually, this report ofa final resolution also proved to be false. In time the archive became part of the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland. Thus Los Angeles’s bid to retain the final artistic legacy of another of the century’s most important composers had failed once more.

Henceforth, scholars interested in the archives

of both Stravinsky and Schoenberg would be obliged to travel not to Los Angeles but to Basel and Vienna, respectively. Intriguingly, Gesualdo scholars would need to go to Basel, too, for some of Stra-

vinsky’s Gesualdo materials went there as well—perhaps the only “old” music in the entire archive.“ The final verdict on such a remarkable and generously long life? Greg Sandow, with at least partial accuracy, has stated the paradox somewhat bluntly regarding the composer’s position at mid-career: “Stravinsky, at the end of World War II the most important mainstream composer of his age, had prestige but no real popularity.” He then concluded, ““That’s what happens when classical music comes to be about the past.”’*’ It is prudent to note, however, that even after the so-called neoclassic venture ended, Stravinsky’s music continued in some considerable measure to “be about the past”—as, indeed,

all sustainable art must. That is to say, like Schoenberg in his last years, Stravinsky continued to surrender to the pull of history, willingly giving in to its seductive power and embracing early masters as partners to his adventures in more contemporary idioms. The point received its ultimate dramatization from Balanchine when he paired Stravinsky’s Movements for Piano and Orchestra with his contemporaneously composed Monumentum pro Gesualdo in a double bill shortly after their non-balletic premieres. The juxtaposition showcased one of the most commanding forces in all late styles: the seemingly inevi-

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table review and reappraisal of some corner of tradition to stand as cohort to the residue of the avant-garde.** The last works of both composers, however, confirmed another,

less surprising affinity. For just as Gesualdo’s Responsoria reflected concerns regarding personal salvation, so Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles, though different in detail, served a similar function as an opus ultimum. Both Gesualdo and Stravinsky rang down the curtain with a sacred work that resonated personally, privately, and at the same time served the potential function of a formally prescribed public ritual. They also remain as the final and deeply inscribed epitaphs for each composer.

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Stoking the Flame Reputation is the strangest thing. An artist is celebrated; he’s on top of the world. He dies, and his work is forgotten, or misremembered,

or misunderstood as fashions change and canons form. Then suddenly he’s back in the spotlight, or what survives of him is, with scholars

scrambling to make up for lost attention and time. —HOLLAND

CorTreErR'

Ir THE FIRST post-World War II decade brought an inquiry into the music of the Second Viennese School that was momentarily epidemic—a state of affairs variously attributed to a postwar call to order and renewed interest in scientism—there were also other forces simultaneously at work. Even as Aaron Copland composed a piano quartet in 1950 that openly took note of the rising fashion of the serialists, patently tonal landscapes were still audible in the vast majority of American scores written about the same time—Roy Harris’s Symphony No. 7, Ned Rorem’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Virgil Thomson’s Five Poems of William Blake, Giancarlo Menottt’s The Consul. In another corner of America, the whole realm of elec-

tronic music was also being ushered in by Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and John Cage. No less startling is that 1950 witnessed the world premiere of Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs as well as the completion of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress a few months later. Multiple eras were overlapping; openings and closings simultaneously grabbed for the headlines.

The Great Revival. During this same postwar era, the early music movement,

too, was just coming

into view

in America,

begin-

ning with such groups as the Deller Consort, formed in 1950, and 2 OFF

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Noah Greenberg’s New York Pro Musica Antiqua, established in 1952. Neoclassicism had found a new nesting ground tethered to the recent discovery of pre-Baroque repertoires. Yet, given the fact that in 1950 not a single ensemble anywhere in the world could yet present the music of Gesualdo or his contemporaries in anything approaching a nuanced level of artistry, the interest among concert organizations more than fifty years later in showcasing music groups devoted to this repertoire is nothing less than remarkable. A review in Time magazine as early as 10 September 1956 of Robert Craft’s Gesualdo recording on the Sunset label, the first LP ever devoted to the composer, heralded its importance as well as its sponsorship. With the headline dubbing Gesualdo “Ahead of His Time,” the article predictably resurrected the opinion that the composer was one whose “daring harmony” made him in the eyes of many “a musical contemporary of Richard Wagner.” It further noted that Aldous Huxley, cast as the presenter of the album, had

long been fascinated not only by the composer’s violent career but by his madrigals which he dubbed “a kind of musical miracle, in which seemingly incompatible elements are reconciled in a higher synthesis.” The match had been struck. The cosponsorship of Stravinsky and Huxley added fuel to the fire. A modern edition was on its way, and the formation of a parade of later performers of Gesualdo’s music— including the Deller Consort, the Consort of Musicke, the Tallis Scholars, the Gesualdo Consort, Les Arts Florissants, the Hilliard

Ensemble, Il Complesso Barocco, La Venexiana, the Kassiopeia Quintet, and the King’s Singers—had been projected if not guaranteed.* Equally remarkable was the developing fascination on the part of composers and an unlikely group of performing musicians, including pianists and conductors. Such a widespread and ongoing engagement with a Renaissance figure—not just his biography but his musical texts and attendant performance issues—was extraordinary. Understandably, testimony to this growing attraction varied in both proportion and kind. At ground zero of this development, Gesualdo’s music received a heady sponsorship from a significant group of contemporary composers from the avant-garde. In a letter of 20 January 1958, for

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example, Ernst Krenek, who had recently contributed some Latin translations for a Gesualdo recording, wrote to Robert Craft: “I shall be happy to get the Gesualdo record. I am playing over the music which you left with me, and it is truly amazing. I’ll have to talk to you about a few details, and I should like to know more about the sources of these transcriptions.”? Sources? Once again an awareness of the general unavailability of the music had been registered. When the recording appeared, Krenek’s endorsement provided a remarkable assessment of the importance of the music: “If Gesualdo had been taken as seriously in his own time as he is now, music history would have taken an entirely different course.” The point is arguable. For as we shall soon see, his music had, indeed, been taken seriously and subjected to critique, though by a limited group of connoisseurs, and despite the limited access to the music, in virtually every generation following his death. This was true even though the madrigal as a form had increasingly fallen out of fashion and court sponsorship for it had gradually disappeared. It is nonetheless important to understand that Krenek’s interest 1n Renaissance music was far from rudimentary and had previously led him to investigate dissonance and contrapuntal theory in the music of Ockeghem

(c. 1410-1497).° In the second volume of Stravin-

sky’s edited correspondence, Craft was perceptively specific when he indicated that “as a theorist of serial techniques and as scholar of Renaissance music . . . [Krenek] exercised an influence on Stravinsky that heretofore has not been acknowleged.’”* It is worth mentioning that Krenek’s interest in Ockeghem coincided with the composition of his own Lamentations ofJeremiah (1941), a work that later resonated with Stravinsky when he approached the composition of Threni in

1957.’ In earlier decades, Nadia Boulanger’s promotion of Gesualdo’s music was confirmed by Virgil Thomson. Speaking of the famous Wednesday “strictly by invitation” afternoon meetings with her students in her Paris apartment, he noted that along with the examination and analysis of some of the most modern scores by Stravinsky, Schénberg, and Mahler at the piano, some of “the rarest madrigals of the Renaissance (by Monteverdi, Luca Marenzio, and Gesualdo di Venosa) were sung in class.”* Here “rare” would have connoted

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not only artistic value but the few specimens of the music available in modern edition. Then in the late 1950s Boulanger updated her enthusiasm by praising Craft’s first Gesualdo recording from Columbia, to which Luigi Dallapiccola also joined in celebration: “Thank you for giving me for the first time the opportunity of hearing the true color of Gesualdo. I congratulate you with all my heart for having realized a task that is always at the limit of the impossible.” These recordings were not Dallapiccola’s first brush with this music either. The impact of Debussy’s music had been so strong on the young composer that he actually stopped composing between 1921 and 1924. Then, in the fashion of the day, his teacher, Antonio

Illersberg, imparted

an enthusiasm for early Italian composers, particularly Monteverdi and Gesualdo, and a performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire in 1924 ignited his interest in the Second Viennese School.’ In the 1920s, Gesualdo and Schoenberg had proven to be complementary but clearly preliminary discoveries, not only for Dallapiccola but for Peter Warlock and others. But it was only in the 1950s that an

increasingly potent and symbiotic relationship began to develop. Given the strides that were made by early music vocal ensembles in the half century following Craft’s recordings, many will judge that the latter have been surpassed and replaced. The judgment is fair insofar as it goes. The complete story, however, would of necessity register that it was these very Gesualdo recordings, much like Craft’s contemporaneous Webern set, that introduced a vital repertoire for the first time in renditions that provided an entirely new perspective. Previously known only from imperfectly tuned and inexpressive performances, from the history books, or imagined at the keyboard, Gesualdo’s madrigals had at last been given a new life with the circulation of these recordings.'° Craft was aided, of course, by a group of extraordinary musicians, including Marilyn Horne and Grace Lynne-Martin—the former soon to move on to an important international career, the latter, along with Marni Nixon, to become cohorts in Craft’s Webern recording project. Marilyn Horne’s participation in these performances was to have interesting consequences, however. Paul Hin-

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demith, who spent the years of World War II in America, had also recorded two Gesualdo madrigals with the Collegium Musicum at Yale during his tenure there in 1954.'' Given the times, there is

no censure intended in noting that both style and technique, not to mention tuning, almost totally eluded Hindemith’s singers.’ Taken with the challenges in preparing and presenting this music and obviously aware of Horne’s participation in Craft’s recordings, Hindemith asked Horne during her first season in Europe to sing some Gesualdo madrigals at the 1957 Vienna Festival. Others in the

group were the celebrated singers Christa Ludwig, Murray Dickie, and Walter Berry. Amused by such a constellation singing this repertoire, Horne, who already had considerable experience with the music, wrote Lawrence Morton, “Can’t you just hear all our vibrati

swinging against each other when we should be singing a heavenly well-tuned Gesualdo chord?” Horne also confronted Hindemith on his choices, charging him with choosing the “pop” Gesualdo madrigals (“Moro lasso” et al.). When the composer expressed surprise at her knowledge of such music, she informed him that she had already recorded sixty or seventy of these madrigals in Los Angeles. She might have added that she had also sung Stravinsky’s completion of Gesualdo’s “Illumina nos” while, as she put it, “the ink was not yet dry.”"? Hindemith then asked her to sing Stravinsky’s Cantata and Monteverdi’s Lagrime d’amante al sepolcro dell’amata, a work that she knew from her student days at the University of Southern California. When Hindemith again expressed astonishment that she knew the Monteverdi as well, she retorted, “Maestro, there’s a lot more in Hollywood than just making films!” Hindemith’s continuing interest in Gesualdo, even after his permanent return to Europe, was dramatized when, as a

professor at the University of Zurich during the winter semester of 1957-58, he offered three seminars: the first on the madrigals of

Gesualdo, the second on the quartets of Schoenberg, and the third on the fundamentals of composition.’ The presentation of Gesualdo in tandem with Schoenberg by one of the principal composers of the age had once again underscored their complementary relevance for the contemporary scene.

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A Gathering of Composers. In the late 1960s, a group of Dutch composers independently heralded their fascination with Gesualdo. One of the first to signal interest was Louis Andriessen, who wrote a lengthy and highly perceptive study of Gesualdo in 1968, a work that took note of the ascendant interest in him and provided a critique that indicated more than a’ passing knowledge of the composer and the cultural milieu in which he had developed.® Then in 1974 Andriessen composed Principe, a work for two choirs: The first, singing mostly in unison, chants extracts from Machiavelli’s The Prince, doubled by an ensemble mostly of winds; a second choir then interrupts the first with extracts from the Prince of Venosa’s Sixth Book of Madrigals. To some the stylistic juxtaposition recalled not only the chanting of Stravinsky’s recent Threni and the source of his even more recent Monumentum but more particularly Andriessen’s well-known admiration for both composers. The attraction to Gesualdo took a completely different turn in the work of another Dutch composer, Ton de Leeuw, who made clear that his Lamento

Pacis of 1969, which included a section in homage to the Prince of Venosa, was anchored in the use of microtonal intervals explicitly intended to correspond to chromaticism as it was explored in the age of Gesualdo. Here the age of Vicentino’s archicembalo is momentarily revived and accorded a new importance alongside embryonic developments in electronic music."7 Rausing Gesualdo fever in the Netherlands was made even more concrete, though paradoxically more obliquely, in Jan van Vlijmen’s violin concerto of 1971 titled Omaggio a Gesualdo.'’ The composer noted that the material for his homage had been borrowed from an ingenious chromatic construction in the madrigal “Belta, poi che t’assenti,” a work that had served as the concluding number of Stravinsky’s Monumentum. He then elaborated that with serial and postserial techniques now behind him, this work took a step toward a sort of “pantonal” music. Though Gesualdo’s music appears only obliquely, barely recognizably, Van Vlijmen insisted that his intention was to bring tonality back to its most primitive form, what he called a “permanent, infinitely continuing, indeed complex tonic.” Once more the view of Gesualdo as one who knocked at the door of

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an extended tonality resonates as the specific link to a contemporary work that, without explanation, would never bring the earlier composer’s name to mind. Yet Van Vlijmen’s tonally free and abstract formations illustrate that the decade of the sixties and early seventies saw numerous composers toying with alternatives to the serial avantgarde. Given Gesualdo’s controversial position in an earlier age of crossover, our Italian prince seemed to beckon, unexpectedly if also repeatedly, as a phantom guide to uncharted lands. There were other composers in Europe besides Hindemith and the Netherlanders whose interest in early music proved crucial to the rediscovery of Gesualdo. Early in his career, Peter Maxwell Davies had been drawn to chant and to early English polyphony, and works reflecting this interest served as preludes to an even grander statement of his attraction to Renaissance themes in the opera Taverner (1962-70). Shortly thereafter, in 1972, Davies composed

Tenebrae

super Gesualdo. Here a Schoenbergian Pierrot ensemble, plus percussion, flashes contemporary commentary against choral performances of Gesualdo’s

Lamentations

text, “O vos omnes.”!?

The

modi-

fied Pierrot ensemble had begun to achieve a certain cachet among numerous composers at the time, but here it serves a specific function as Gesualdo’s music repeatedly gives way to Davies’s reflective instrumental interludes, the pervasive darkness of the original being periodically pierced with glittering shards of light. In turn and somewhat paradoxically, these glistening instrumental meditations 4 la Pierrot virtually force recognition of Gesualdo’s tortured maze as a model of rationality. Then, a decade later, Davies arranged two

Gesualdo motets, “O vos omnes” and “Peccantem me quotidie” for brass quintet (two trumpets, horn, trombone, and tuba), a choice

that seemed to echo Stravinsky’s instrumental take on Gesualdo more than two decades earlier. Elsewhere the spotlight could occasionally be placed on Gesualdo, not through recomposition but through overt programming that seemed to proclaim a specific connection. One ofthe major cultural construction projects of the Francois Mitterrand era with profound implications for French musical education and for the concert-going public was the opening in January 1995 of the Cité de la Musique, home among other things to the new Paris Conservatoire. This led

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to the announcement of a series of programs ranging from Venetian music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to Steve Reich and Louis Andriessen; ritual music that paired a Japanese Gagaku orchestra with Boulez’s Rituel in Memoriam Maderna; and finally, a

set juxtaposing Carlo Gesualdo and Pierre Boulez.” In the latter program Boulez revived his earlier fascination for Gesualdo from the Domaine Musical days by programming all nine of Gesualdo’s Responses for Holy Saturday alongside the most recent version of his own Répons, a work in progress that referred to the alternating responsorial form used in chant as well as in Gesualdo’s cycle. The work left Gesualdo’s world behind, however, in its scor-

ing for an orchestra, a digital processor, six loudspeakers, and six solo instruments: a harp, a glockenspiel, a vibraphone, a cimbalom,

and two pianos. The juxtaposition of the two works with identical titles in tandem was obvious, but an IRCAM

Internet citation, no

longer running and attributed to Boulez, had appeared a few years before that had made an extraordinary claim.*' Furthermore it had reappeared in print in Italian translation in Giovanni Iudica’s wellreceived Gesualdo study of 1997,” which quoted Boulez as saying the following about his own Répons: My basic idea was to generate an entire work by manipulating the spectrum of vocal sounds through the technique of interpolation,

compression and expansion. The primary sound source of my work was extracted from the Tenebrae service of Carlo Gesualdo. The music is of a dark mood which evokes the text and style of Gesualdo’s vocal scenario.”3

While the titles and juxtaposition (Répons and Responsoria) could easily have been interpreted as a confirmation of the Internet citing, even a superficial knowledge of the Gesualdo and Boulez pieces would have triggered doubts. A communication to Boulez of November 2006 sought clarification of the issue. Boulez’s response arrived promptly and with a personal amplification. I was indeed interested in Gesualdo very early on as a friend of mine gave me some scores during the Domaine Musical era. As almost no

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scores or material were available at the time I copied them myself by hand for the musicians. But I never programmed Tenebrae Responses at that time. I programmed it for the first time in relation with my own Répons in the concert you mention at the Cité de la musique in 1995 . .. I have no idea how this quotation from the internet was

attributed to myself.*4

While the specious operating forces behind the genesis of his own work had been denied, Boulez had confirmed not only his interest in Gesualdo some four decades earlier and the unavailability of the music at that time but also his current reclamation of it as a partner in showcasing one of his own most recent compositions. It was a connection,

once made, that continued to resonate in Postmodern

Fables by the renowned French philosopher, literary theorist, and articulator of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard, who, speaking of music as a hymn to glory, an echo, suggests: “You formulate my demand by linking onto that phrase. In music this is called répons, responsaria [sic], response from as far back as Gesualdo up through Boulez. Response is not to answer, but to address and carry forward.” Among other major European composers, few had expressed keener interest in Gesualdo than the Hungarian, Gyorgy Ligeti. Yet, when the announcement of Gyorgy Ligeti’s death came on 12 June 2006, there remained but a slim written record of his interest in our

Italian prince. The fragments nonetheless tell a story. As early as September 1987 Ligeti had announced that his first order of business was to compose a series of madrigals for the King’s Singers, a six-voice British ensemble that has since made a splendid recording of Gesualdo’s Tenebrae music for Maundy Thursday. Ligeti confided that he had in mind the music that he was to write but not the words. “It will not be like Italian madrigals, though the source,

musically, perhaps goes back to Gesualdo. I look for something English. Perhaps rhymes from Lewis Carroll—nonsense rhymes for the text.” Ligeti then spoke of Bartok, his first important and most lasting influence: “He was the greatest Hungarian composer. He was the idol of everyone in Hungary.” There was Stravinsky, too, he added, and more recently Monteverdi,

Gesualdo, and the “old

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Netherlands school.” “It was an influence,” he said, “not a mixing

of styles. Gesualdo was very important to me, I wanted to do something which corresponded to him. But my own language! I don’t use old music.””° Six years later, in March 1993, the New England Conservatory held a festival of Ligeti’s music, and his visit there was reported by Alex Ross in the New York Times. Mr. Ligeti had made it clear, both in seminars and informal discussions, that “his music has always had an ambivalent but intense relation to the past.” Amazingly, he explained that his Atmospheres had been a product not only of electronic experiments but also of an intensive study of the music of Gesualdo and Ockeghem. Finally, he had demonstrated analytically how the free-flowing modulations of Schubert, one of his favorite composers, was reminiscent of those earlier composers. Ross summed up Ligeti’s thesis thus: “The present subverts the past, and Vice versa.7 A week later, speaking to a small group of composers on a Saturday afternoon at the University of Michigan, Ligeti confirmed these same points. Having read the Times account of his Boston visit, I anticipated that he would once again invoke the names of Ockeghem and Gesualdo, attended his presentation, and came prepared with a copy of the Hungarian translation of my first Gesualdo book, of which I coincidentally possessed three virgin copies. Confirming my advance suspicions, not only was Gesualdo discussed during the lecture, but Ligeti also cited at the piano the opening measures of “Belta poi che t’assenti,” the same madrigal that Stravinsky adapted for the final number of his Monumentum. At the end of the lecture,

I quickly penned an inscription and moved forward to present him with the book. We had never met previously. Opening it to the title page he smiled widely, thanked me warmly, and asked, “Can you read this (meaning Hungarian)?” “Of course not,” I answered regretfully. “That’s why I’m giving it to you.” “I apologize,” he continued. “My citation at the piano just now of ‘Belta poi che t’assenti’ was not quite accurate, was it?” “Not quite,” I smiled back,

“but pretty close.” Ligeti’s expressed admiration for Gesualdo continued in a Berlin interview of 2001—a Ligeti year because of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:

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A Space Odyssey, which had used the Kyrie from Ligeti’s Requiem as well as the opening of Atmospheres on its sound track. There his current favorites in several categories were reported as both unexpected and delivered with unflinching conviction: “Conlon Nancarrow is the most original of composers since Stravinsky and Barték; Carlo Gesualdo, a 16th-century Neapolitan count, is one of the greatest composers ever; Reinbert de Leeuw is among the very best of contemporary conductors.”** But the most surprising and certainly the most dramatic connection between the two composers occurred in May 2004 when the Associazione Antidogma Musica, noting that various composers had been attracted to Gesualdo in recent years, held a festival devoted to the music of Gesualdo and Ligeti that protested their specific affinity.” Ligeti, though ill at the time, would probably not have objected.*° In another part of the globe, Brett Dean, Australian composer and former violist in the Berlin Philharmonic, had his initial confrontation

with Gesualdo in a work from 1997 entitled Carlo. The work, based

principally on Gesualdo’s most renowned madrigal, “Moro lasso,” was scored for strings, sampler, and tape.*’ He described the piece as ‘a musical fantasy reflecting what might have gone on in Gesualdo’s mind as he prepared to commit his celebrated crime,” and the work traveled widely. The next year in a ballet, One of a Kind, Brett once again introduced Gesualdo, this time with his sole spiritual madrigal, “Sparge la morte.” Emerging from a clangorous background, the path to Gesualdo’s madrigal is led by ponticello strings and percussion, with a solo cello ultimately replying with its own madrigal that reaches into the highest register of the instrument.*’ In a personal communication of February 2003, Dean mused about Gesualdo: “As you must well know, he creeps inside and grabs your soul and is in no hurry to let go.” It was no surprise, then, when three years later in 2006 Dean revisited familiar ground in a new work, Sparge la morte, scored for solo cello, a vocal consort of five voices, and tape.

Given the dance component of One of a Kind, it might reasonably lay claim as a companion to Balanchine’s choreography of Stravinsky’s Monumentum. But there had already been a balletic entry as early as 1993, when Gordon Pierce Schmidt, artistic director and choreog-

rapher of the Grand Rapids Ballet Company, made his television

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debut as the director/choreographer of his “strictly for television” ballet Gesualdo, created for PBS/WTTW

Chicago, for which he

received a prime time Emmy Award nomination. Yet another medium and approach surfaced in an early work of the rising German composer Matthias Pintscher. His String Quartet No. 4, Ritratto di Gesualdo (1992), is a single-movement work that

the composer asserts was constructed: as a gloss on the “gestures and sighs” of Gesualdo’s madrigal “Sospirava il mio core.” The title and the claim aside, the connection with either the figure or the music of our Neapolitan prince would never come to mind for the casual listener.33 The whole appears as a psychological “portrait,” with references to Gesualdo’s music appearing only briefly about eight minutes into the twenty-four minute piece and again near the end, when a prominent vocalization on a single vowel suddenly intrudes. The advertisement of Gesualdo’s name on so many different fronts and with such vague connections forces a question as to the original motivation. Pintscher’s distant invocation of Gesualdo’s name, frequently used by composers as an announced trigger for the expansion of the tonal realm, seemed to confirm that the Prince of Venosa’s story had achieved recognition sufficient to act as a hook to get listeners to new-music concerts. A quarter of a century earlier, on 20 July 1966, the German-born American composer Lukas Foss had conducted a most unusual concert with the New York Philharmonic:

Gabrieli, Monteverdi, and

Gesualdo’s “Aestimatus sum” appeared together with Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces and Te Deum on the first half, followed by Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, a program redolent of the Canticum Sacrum premiere ten years before. By the 1980s, having moved through a variety of styles as a composer, Foss settled into a broadly eclectic period characterized by a keen sense of past idioms and styles of Western art music and once again joined those who recognized Gesualdo’s rising tide of glamour by incorporating his music alongside that of Monteverdi and Jean-Philippe Rameau in his Renaissance Concerto, for flute and orchestra (1985-86). Ten years later another American, David Gompper, wrote a quartet for piano and strings, Musica Segreta (1996), whose title specifically invokes the courts of Ferrara and Naples. The music makes nods to Boulez, Stravinsky, and Gesualdo,

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and reflects the variable and circuitous associations that can link a composer today to the twilight of the Renaissance. One of the most powerful approaches to Gesualdo’s Tenebrae texts has been introduced by the German ensemble, Singer Pur, in their performances of Holy Week responsoria texts set by Wolfgang Rahm, one of the most prolific and celebrated German composers of his generation.*° His Seven Passion Texts eventually were incorporated into an even larger project called Vigilia, commissioned by several European sources including the Berliner Festspiele, the Festivale d’Automne a Paris, and the Venice Biennale. This latter macrocycle includes not only the seven Tenebrae responses but instrumental interludes to the vocal pieces and a concluding “Miserere.”>” Although in Rihm’s reviews and recordings Gesualdo’s name had typically been mentioned only as a previous composer of Holy Week texts, the announcement of a Gesualdo-Rihm concert by the Eisen Philharmonia on 5 April 2009 invited shifting the association beyond context to connection.

David Chevallier, with an ensemble of five improvisers on saxophones, violin, viola, cello, and guitars and the vocal group A Sei Voci, has pressed the mix in a different direction with his Gesualdo Variations: Les madrigaux imaginaires du prince assassin. Chevallier confided, thus: ““The modernity of Gesualdo’s musical language encouraged me to find connections with my own musical language. I’ve known his madrigals for a long time, and since I have been working for a few years on the relationship and frontier between chamber music and improvised music, Gesualdo naturally came to mind.” The two faces of citation and improvisation, including jazz, blend in a musical drama about a composer and his art, which Chevallier concludes “moves to the limits of tonality” that “can only fascinate a composer oftoday.”3* The Gesualdo Variations were performed for the first time for the Europa Jazz Festival in Le Mans (France) and for the Opéra de Rouen (France) in May 2007, and video as well as audio extracts immediately appeared on his Internet site.*? Among artists of contemporary popular song, Franco Battiato 1s one of the most notable figures in all Italy. His CD, L’ombrello e la macchina da cucire (The umbrella and the sewing machine), surprisingly includes an entire section, following one labeled “Fornicazi-

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one,” entitled “Gesualdo da Venosa.” Our Italian master speaks of himself as a “contemporary at the end of the world,” and after referring to Galuppi’s Concerto No. 4 for Strings and to Charlie Parker's “Ornithology,” Battiato concludes: I madrigali di Gesualdo, principe di Venosa Musicista assassino della sposa— cosa importa?

’

The madrigals of Gesualdo, prince of Venosa Musician assassin of his wife— What does it mean?

Scocca la sua nota,

It strikes its note,

dolce come rosa.

Sweet as a rose.*°

Three Pianists. One of the most unexpected demonstrations of Gesualdo’s appeal to the contemporary musician was introduced by Maurizio Pollini in 1995 in celebration of his twenty-fifth anniversary

at the Salzburg Festival—a presentation he later pursued in a series of concerts from New York to Tokyo. In addition to solo piano performances, Pollini’s first “Progetto” included compositions by Carlo Gesualdo, Luigi Nono, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern,

Salvatore Sciarrino, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, and

Paul Hindemith. The historical perspective was, of course, extraordinary for an internationally renowned concert pianist, but the final impact of these concerts and a summation of Gesualdo’s importance for Pollini came in a series of Carnegie Hall concerts in 2000. Paul Griffiths’ review captured the impact of a program that opened with Schoenberg’s Piano Pieces, opp. 19 and 23, and his Second Quartet. When Monteverdi’s ““Lamento d’Arianna” followed, we are told that it did

so “seamlessly, putting the same kinds of pressures on the language of tonal harmony in the interests of expressing lassitude and dejection.” The reviewer then entered an increasingly familiar historical

perspective: “When five Gesualdo madrigals completed a second half begun by choral songs of Luigi Nono’s, there were echoes across the centuries.’”” Nuria Schoenberg-Nono has confirmed that many years earlier Nono had become infatuated with the music of Gesualdo,

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and that, like Boulez and Craft, had transcribed Gesualdo’s music

together with Bruno Maderna, this time from sources in the Marciana and Friar Church libraries in Venice.*! Griffiths concluded his review by further noting the striking connections between Gesualdo and the twentieth century, stating that at those times when Gesualdo “let his harmony fall through the floor for a moment, he seemed to be glimpsing the possibility of the rarefied, rootless sounds of Nono’s ““Havenido.” He concluded by noting that at certain points the sopranos may have felt uncertain as to whether they were singing the Baroque master’s “Mercé, grido piangendo” or Nono’s “Cori di Didone.” Not only had the uncanniness of “Mercé grido” once again made its bid to replace “Moro lasso” at the epicenter of Venosa’s art, but Gesualdo had now been promoted to the rank of “Baroque master’”—a telling characterization that hardly seemed like a slip of the pen. The Pollini Project continued on 28 October 2002 in Tokyo, where the Arnold Schoenberg Choir once again joined in a concert that included three Nono works in the center of the program, one of which (“Sofferte onde serene” of 1976) was for piano with tape. Reflecting his prior taste for juxtaposing the old with the new, the program opened with selections from Marenzio’s ninth book of madrigals of 1599, his harmonically most adventurous volume, and concluded once more with a group of Gesualdo madrigals. The unusualness of Pollini’s programmatic juxtapositions in this series of concerts gave the impression that they were personal accounts, unlikely to be attempted again by a pianist of international repute. Yet on 12 February 2006, Richard Goode, joined by the Pomerium ensemble and Dawn Upshaw, guided an invitational series, once again in New York’s Carnegie Hall, that would have seemed familiar to those who had attended Pollini’s earlier series. The program, which included only Bach, Gesualdo, Berg,

and Schoenberg, read as follows: Bach, Prelude and Fugue in A Minor from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I; Fugue in F Major from Book I]; Fugue in C-sharp Minor from Book I

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Gesualdo, “In monte Oliveti”; “Ave dulcissima Maria”; “Moro lasso”; “Tenebrae factae sunt”; “Gia piansi nel dolore”; “CO vos omnes”; ““Tristis est anima mea” Berg, Piano Sonata, Op. I

Schoenberg, The Book of theHanging Gardens, Op. 15, Dawn Upshaw

The extraordinary placement of both sacred and secular works by Gesualdo on a program with Bach, Berg, and Schoenberg was provided a rationale by stating that the “program might well bear the title ‘music at the tonal crossroads.’” Bach, of course, had system-

atically traversed the entire chromatic spectrum in his historic set for a well-tempered keyboard, providing a final answer to Vicentino’s archicembalo. The companion works by Berg and Schoenberg showed their composers grappling with a harmonic chromaticism so extreme that it seemed to undermine tonal and expressive norms that had previously seemed destined to endure forever. Goode, who planned the series, gave a clue to his choices with a personal remark: The Gesualdo pieces—madrigals and sacred responses—are pieces that I’ve always loved and don’t often hear. These madrigals represent a kind of chromatic idea with which Gesualdo experimented

and then largely abandoned. I thought that from there it was a natural idea to go to Schoenberg, who turned chromaticism into a totalizing principle of music.

The juxtaposition of Gesualdo and Schoenberg set out by Wellesz in 1916 had received startling confirmation for the second time by an internationally renowned pianist. Goode later confessed that he knew very little Gesualdo but that his “astonishing style (and the legend) made a great impression” on him when he was only twelve. He confirmed that he particularly treasured “O vos omnes” and “Gia piansi nel dolore,” which he had first heard on a Rob-

ert Craft recording and which “seemed to stand out as completely

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achieved compositions—perfect from beginning to end.” Here two points are italicized: that one or two examples are sufficient to set an impression, to carry the DNA forward; and that twentieth-century recordings offered the opportunity for further exposure to vocal performances by trained singers. Jeremy Eichler’s extended review of Goode’s concert appeared in the New York Times two days after the Carnegie concert and noted the usual signposts as well as a retrospective look at Goode’s Perspectives series. He remarked that the radical harmonic language of works like “Moro lasso” and ““O Vos Omnes” can “still catch the ear off guard” before concluding that Schoenberg’s Book of the Hanging Gardens properly served as the final destination point of Goode’s program and, indeed, of the Perspectives series as a whole.*# Once more Gesualdo and Schoenberg had been cast as increasingly familiar partners and through their juxtaposition had dramatized not only the perceived relationship of past repertoires to the present but also the underlying historiographic issues.* However remarkable the spectacle of both Pollini and Goode as Gesualdo enthusiasts, an equally unexpected endorsement by yet a third major pianist of the day appeared in Alfred Brendel’s conversation with Martin Meyer published in 2001. Brendel opened the discussion by observing that for him music typically unfolded in a historical continuum, yet he had recently become aware “of composers like Monteverdi and, above all, Gesualdo. Gesualdo since has become one of my declared favourites, with his inexhaustible and inexplicable chromaticism that for me never loses its appeal.’’*° The twentieth-century’s attraction to the historic role of chromaticism had now begun to conspicuously infiltrate the discussion of some of the most illustrious performing musicians of the day. Early in his career Brendel had endorsed and performed the music of the Second Viennese School, including Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto as well as his solo piano works. Asked about the issue of reaching an audience for challenging repertoires like Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, he not surprisingly spoke to the issue of championing the music responsibly in vital performances. For Brendel the issue of“performance practice” was obviously not a topic relevant only to early music. Then, confronted with the fact that a great deal of

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Schoenberg’s music had still not “reached” audiences “more than seventy, eighty years after it was composed,” Brendel replied with an unexpected parallel: “Gesualdo was not performed for ages!” he countered.” Yet another link had been forwarded between Schoenberg and Gesualdo: the possibility of resurrection. ce

Gesualdo and Opera. The English: infatuation with Gesualdo can be traced, of course, to the time of Burney, John Hawkins,

and John Immyns in the eighteenth century. Less well known, however, is that a good seven years before he began work on his opera Troilus and Cressida (1948-54), William Walton’s first approach to opera had been on the subject of Gesualdo. Cecil Gray, who together with Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) had penned a Gesualdo study in 1926, was the instigator here. The correspondence between Walton and Gray preserved in the Bnitish Library suggests, however, that despite an interest expressed by both parties, the planning developed only to the rudimentary stage of a libretto.’ More than a half century would pass after Walton’s aborted attempt at an opera before a number of other composers would pick up the challenge. As fate would have it, one of the earliest theater pieces was by Prince Francesco D’Avalos, a direct descendant of Gesualdo’s first wife, Maria

D’ Avalos. Hav-

ing lived his entire life in the Neapolitan Renaissance palazzo of the D’Avalos family, Francesco D’ Avalos had also maintained a career as chair of advanced composition at the Conservatory San Pietro a Majella in Naples. In the 1980s he began Maria di Venosa, a dramatic work about the tragic story of his ancestor.*? The score that ultimately emerged introduced a range of materials from early Baroque pieces, including Gesualdo’s instrumental gagliarda, to full-throated orchestral interludes worthy of Berg. Several visits to D’Avalos’s historic palace followed, and on the occasion of a prize awarded the present author by the Fondazione Carlo Gesualdo in August 2005, D’Avalos made the trip from Naples to Gesualdo for the ceremonies there in the church of San Nicolo. Then in his seventies, D’Avalos had never visited Gesualdo before,

though he had spent his entire life in nearby Naples. Following the ceremony the prospect of seeing the renowned altarpiece in Santa

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Maria delle Grazie was offered. He smiled: “Yes, of course. I know

this painting.” The ceremonies had ended late, and a phone call was placed to the friars at the monastery. Lights were turned on, the doors were opened, but on the way one of the tires of D’Avalos’s car was punctured. Delays for repair ultimately ended with our arrival at the church just as the fathers had almost given up. The lights still illuminated the altarpiece, however, and D’ Avalos sat near the front as Michele Zarella, vice president of the Fondazione Carlo Gesualdo,

explained the backgrounds of the painting and the restoration that had recently taken place. The modern-day prince looked on solemnly, fascinated as history replayed itself. Serendipitously, a compact disc of his own Maria di Venosa had just been released. David Diamond

once

told me

that, like Walton,

he too had

toyed with the idea of aGesualdo opera, but, to my knowledge, no one succeeded in completing a staged one until 1995, when Alfred Schnittke’s Gesualdo received its premiere under the baton of Mstislav Rostropovich at the Vienna State Opera. It was the house’s first world premiere since Gottfried von Einem’s Kabale und Liebe in 1976 and its first commission since Krenek’s Karl V in 1934, which

had later been dropped in order to appease the Nazis. Richard Bletschacher, who suggested the idea of the opera to Schnittke and who ultimately was also its librettist, invited me to come to Vienna and speak briefly at a matinee preview performance on the Sunday prior to the premiere.*° In a brief address from the stage of the Vienna State Opera, I recapped the fact that I had first learned of Schnittke’s projected opera on Gesualdo in April 1992 from a review by the American critic,

John Rockwell, reporting on the Amsterdam premiere of Schnittke’s opera Life With An Idiot. As a result I contacted Schnittke through his publisher, Hans Sikorski, in Hamburg. Schnittke answered at once, and like D’Avalos asked my help in securing copies of several volumes of Gesualdo’s madrigals he had been unable to obtain. These I sent to him together with a copy of Gesualdo’s Responses for Holy Week as well as a small volume of instrumental pieces and my monograph on the composer. Ultimately, we exchanged a few letters, and his high regard for Gesualdo’s music as well as his personal modesty was made apparent in a letter of 25 July 1992,

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which read in part: “I want to write an opera on Gesualdo (I have already made a sketch of it)—and it will be premiered (with Maestro Rostropovich) at the Vienna State Opera (in 1995). Unfortunately, I know much too little about this fantastic figure of music history— but I love and revere him profoundly.”* During the week of rehearsals prior to the premiere, which I attended, notice was made of a spareness in the orchestration to such a degree that many felt that it had been left incomplete—although parallels were recognized with the leanness of his Sixth Symphony. A year later Peter Wagner, who had sung the title role in the premiere, wrote me that, indeed, additional orchestral parts had been

located that would be included in the somewhat amplified version to be sung the next year.* Not surprisingly the opera included the legend that Gesualdo killed his own child, whose paternity he suspected, by swinging it to death (a tale, which we have detailed, that belongs to later spe-

cious accounts). Near the end of the opera, Gesualdo, now in a total frenzy, begins to push his child violently in a huge swing suspended from fifteen-foot ropes. Two, three, then half a dozen equally enormous swings with identical oversize dolls in each seat appear one by one and independently accelerate as the music swells to a point of delirium. The child’s cries are conjured up by the eerie sounds of a synthesizer against the incessant drumming of a heartbeat. The epilogue finishes as it began with a cappella singing in Latin as an enormous white cloth covers the steps—and eventually the entire stage—like a giant pall. It is the most dramatic point in the entire opera, although Bletschacher, the librettist, affirmed that the mul-

tiple swings were not part of his original text. While madrigal groups appear sporadically throughout the opera, there is barely a hint of Gesualdo’s mature art—indeed, how could there have been since at

the time of the murder only portions of his first two madrigal books had been composed. The opera was revived in Vienna in 2004-5, this time under an

enriched title, but failed to appear at other major opera houses.*? The conclusion surfaced that the music, despite moments of telling power, reflected the fact that following a third stroke, Schnittke had

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fallen into a coma for more than three months prior to the completion of the opera. The initially published score then became subject to a series of alterations, deletions, and additions with the aid of

Marc-Aurel Flores as well as final corrections and completions by the fatally ill composer himself.* The fate of Berg’s Lulu hovered in the wings. A different approach to the Gesualdo legend unfolded with Luci mie traditrici, an opera in two acts by the Sicilian-born avant-gardist Salvatore Sciarrino to a libretto by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini. One

of the most important Italian authors and librettists of the seventeenth century, Cicognini had based his II tradimento per l’onore of 1664 on the story of Gesualdo’s murder of his wife.’’ Ultimately placed on the Index librorum prohibitorum, it had been rediscovered only in 1911 by Benedetto Croce, the renowned philosopher ofhistory and aesthetics.*° The story unfolds during the course of a single day: in the morning the count and countess express their eternal love; at noon the wife is seized by passion for a guest and submits to him; in the evening the count forgives, the countess returns. That

night, when she pulls back the curtain to her bed with the count at her side, she discovers the body of her dead lover. The count then kills her, and she collapses over her lover’s corpse. When Sciarrino learned that Schnittke was writing an opera on the subject of Gesualdo, his project took a dramatic change: he dropped all references to him, omitted those sections that elaborated on his music, and relocated

the story around the French chanson composer, Claude Le Jeune (1528-1600).°’ The relocation may not have been as strange as it seemed, for in the process the Gesualdo story had been transferred to a world where the traditions of French prosody (musique mesurée a l’antique) were imbued with the doctrines of Ficino’s musical magic. Sciarrino’s seemingly misdirected original effort proved to bear further fruit, however. For his Le voci sottovetro, which followed in

1998, owes its existence to the failure of the original Gesualdo project and “consists of crumbs left over from Luci mie traditrici.” It fabricates instrumental elaborations of four pieces by Gesualdo: “Gagliarda del Principe di Venosa,” “Tu m/uccidi, o crudele,” “Canzon francese

del Principe,” and “Moro lasso.” Each of the pieces is subject to

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instrumental elaboration and contrapuntal revision, related to but quite unlike Stravinsky’s approach in his Monumentum pro Gesualdo. In his personal scrutiny of the music Sciarrino finds new colorations, not just through the use of instruments, but through the capricious switching of parts midphrase to such a degree that even the celebrated opening of “Moro lasso” sounds only distantly familiar.** In between the movements of Le voei sottovetro Sciarrino interpolates letters by Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), who had written over

three dozen poems for Gesualdo’s express use. Letters from the 1580s reflect the deranged mental state of the poet during his confinement in a Ferrarese prison, his melancholia bordering on madness that was not only his lot but also served as partial verification of his genius. “I suffer headaches,” he says, “pain in the entrails, . . . pain, vomiting, blood loss, fever have rendered me weak. And in the midst of such

horrors and pain the image of the glorious Virgin Mary appeared to me in the air with her son in her arms in a half circle of colors and fumes.” The similar psychological portrait we have constructed for Gesualdo stands close by. The degree to which Sciarrino had become involved with the Gesualdo story and his music was to be further clarified in his “terrible and frightening” puppet opera, Terribile e spaventosa storia del Principe di Venosa e della bella Maria of 1999 for female voice, saxo-

phone quartet, and percussion.*? Here the composer begins with yet another setting of “Tu m’uccidi, o crudele,” quite different from his

treatment in Le voci sottovetro. This stems principally from the fact that the elaboration is for voice, percussion, and four saxophones from

which he elicits a catalogue of extraordinary sonorities: tritone trills, slapped keys, and breathy superpianissimos abound creating a ghostly impression. This is especially true in yet another visit to Gesualdo’s gagliarda, here unidentified except for the title “Immagine ossesso” (obsessive image). Scored for four saxophones and percussion in which the saxophones proceed almost exclusively by percussively slapped keys in a wide range of dynamics, the work creates a gathering state of obsessive frenzy. A single soprano appears throughout, first with a “Canzone segreta” and finally with a concluding “Per finire,” written in a decidedly pop mode:

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Gesualdo a Venosa Oggi € stato perdonato non sappiamo s’é all’inferno se la musica bast6 per andare in paradise

Gesualdo da Venosa Today has been pardoned. We know not if he is in hell (or) if the music was sufficient To lead him to paradise.

tisu tisu

Tsktsks

poveri angeli che musica strana!

Poor angels, Such strange music!

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With good reason the Fondazione Carlo Gesualdo awarded Sciarrino the first Premio Internazionale Carlo Gesualdo in 2004.

A review in the Independent for 7 June 2004 noted that the Danish composer Bo Holten had also written an opera on Gesualdo in which the aged composer sings as young boys flog him on stage. “We live in sensational times,” Holten stated. “Classical order isn’t

right for us now. Our art is constantly striving for extremity, and we are moving towards his. He was dismissed as a weirdo in his own times, but now he fits. His languishing, drunken polyphony feels natural to us.”°° There were problems encountered in the mounting of the opera, however, that prevented it from being recorded and almost stopped it from being produced, suggesting that the Gesualdo Hex does not always lead to felicitous ends. The music is written for a Baroque orchestra with a rather large continuo group—organ, harpsichord, theorbo, harp—plus a few woodwinds, two late-Renaissance trombones, Baroque strings, principal singers, and a madrigal group. The first act, as the composer described it, is set in the time up to the famous murder, while the

second act takes place in Gesualdo’s later years. In the first act the elderly Gesualdo watches his young self silently and more or less without movement from a chair at the side of the stage, reliving the whole thing. In the second act he gets up and is his older self. Six months after the premiere of Schnittke’s Gesualdo, a series of favorable reviews appeared, in German newspapers, of the premiere on 14 January 1996 of another Gesualdo opera, by Franz Hummel. Commissioned by the city of Kaiserslautern, it was, unlike Schnittke’s opera, soon recorded, though unfortunately issued without

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accompanying libretto. The work seemed to prefigure the composer’s subsequent interest in stage works about musical personalities, such as the musical Ludwig II: Sehnsucht nach dem Paradies (Ludwig II: longing for paradise) and further projections of “musicals” for Anton Bruckner and Richard Wagner. The lure of the Gesualdo story as the basis of a stage piece was only beginning, however. Calling his new stage work Gesualdo Considered as Murderer, an “opera for the concert hall,” the Italian com-

poser Luca Francesconi (b. 1956) offered a work that premiered in Amsterdam in 2005 involving video projections, electronics, three solo singers, an all-male quartet (the Hilliard Ensemble), and the Netherlands Wind Ensemble. In 1997 Francesconi had earlier writ-

ten a piece entitled Respondit due madrigali di Carlo Gesualdo after “Moro lasso al mio duolo” and “Ecco morird dunque / Ahi, gia mi discoloro.” Now he took to the theater with a portrayal of Gesualdo as one whose music pushed beyond the expressive boundaries typical of the madrigal and virtually demanded the invention of opera. Brett Dean has stated his belief that Gesualdo embodies “a kind of music where there’s no distinction between him as a composer and him as a person. His story is inexorably tied into his music.” Francesconi, however, took the story a bit further in searching out

similarities between polyphonic tradition are today,” incapable Monteverdi's. In an

Gesualdo as the last representative of the great of the Renaissance, hopelessly “trapped as we of making the leap into Baroque sensibilities like interview he elaborated more fully: “Working

on the opera, I found I didn’t like Gesualdo as a person, because he was too close to me, too close to the situation of modern man now,

which is a huge metaphor of impotence. We have enormous power, but we don’t know how to use it.” “Are we by any chance talking about Iraq?” asked the interviewer. “Of course we are! Gesualdo was probably the richest man in Italy, and so was a perfect symbol of this impotence. He was hiding in his spiritual world, and social pressures forced him to act. He was forced to commit that murder.’ Francesconi’s interest in the subject, he noted in a correspondence that followed, began when he was fourteen, as a student at

the Milano Conservatory. Later, during study with Luciano Berio, Gesualdo gradually became a metaphor for him on many important

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issues. By way of response, I reported that interesting new biographical discoveries had been made concerning Gesualdo’s involvement with witchcraft, magic, and special potions “that make Brangaene’s draught for Tristan and Isolde seem like lemonade.” Perhaps this material could serve as the point of departure for a sequel, I suggested. “Why not?” he responded. The answer disguised the more important, underlying fact that he held Gesualdo as a symbol of modern madness coupled to an astonishing genius for discovery. Other figures had preceded Francesconi in the world of theater, and others would follow, including Ian Rankin’s fifteen-minute opera,

Gesualdo, from 2008.

If Walton

was the first to consider

Gesualdo as a topic for an opera, and Schnittke continued by picking up on some of the early sensational elements of Gesualdo’s personal story, Salvatore Sciarrino alternately put the legend at a distance through puppet theater and transcription. Francesconi, Holten, Swiss composer Klaus Huber, and Dean employed further distancing techniques including electronic manipulation—all in the service of allegory, while Blaise Ferrandino and Steven Breese may have found the definitive separation for the legend in their projection of a Broadway musical, Gesualdo, Prince of Pain. Sensing an opportunity to lure audiences, perhaps, the Vienna State Opera adopted the identical distended title for Schnittke’s opera when it returned for its second season. Beyond the attendant sensationalism, the showcasing of Gesualdo in various guises had now joined a larger movement of variegated contrasts in concert programming that provided larger opportunities for exposure. The appearance of Gesualdo and his contemporaries a half century earlier at the Evenings on the Roof concerts (later the Monday Evening Concerts) in Los Angeles as well as in Boulez’s Domaine Musical concerts in Paris had clearly served as models for the exploration of new repertoires in new places with new companions. But it was already becoming apparent that this broad interest in the music as well as the story of Gesualdo was not only to persist but was soon to escalate to nonmusical quarters. What it all meant seemed momentarily beside the point.

Gesualdo Fever

Cultural change and geographical dispersal do not necessarily mean a loss of identity or authenticity, but rather a rearticulation in a different context. The most tenacious aspects of culture are often those that can incorporate change. —NILOUFER

ICHAPORIA

KING’

GESUALDO FEVER, as it turned out, was not to be limited to com-

posers, pianists, and singers. Remarkably, beginning in the late 1960s the modern myth spread beyond the musical fraternity to virtually every corner of the creative arts. The reasons behind the attraction were varied. The endorsement of high-profile figures encouraged novices to take a close look, of course, and the discovery of an artist’s

life story whose details rival those of the tabloids provided another stimulus. Yet even largely chance encounters among nonmusicians typically took on a more urgent tone than such a summary might suggest and included a surprising list of luminaries. Gesualdo Goes to the Movies. Werner Herzog, visionary new-wave director of film and part-time opera director, has recorded that he first came to music without guidance and stumbled initially onto the music of Heinrich Schiitz. Wagner and more contemporary composers came later. When he finally encountered Gesualdo’s sixth book of madrigals, however, the music took on a completely new

dimension for him, and he has recorded his reactions vividly: That was

a moment of complete enlightenment for me. I was so

excited I called up Florian Fricke at three in the morning and did 242

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not stop raving about it. Finally, after half an hour, he said, “Werner, everyone who is into music knows about Gesualdo and the Sixth Book. You sound as if you have discovered a new planet.” But for me it was as if I had discovered something tremendous within our solar system, and out of that sprang a film about Gesualdo which I carried

within me for many years.”

Predictably, Herzog’s film Death for Five Voices, which won the Italia Prize in 1996, takes liberties.? Calling his film a “documentary” in

quotes, its creator-director rejected the idea that it was “subtly stylized” and instead dubbed it a “complete fabrication.” Acknowledging that the film “really runs amok,” he also claimed that the film was the closest to his heart of all his movies. While the stories were completely invented, they forwarded what he called “the most profound possible truths about Gesualdo.” Confessing that Gesualdo kept stunning him more than any other composer, he spoke of the power of the composer’s last madrigal collection before revealing the basic perspective behind his film: the belief that in his last years “Gesualdo was basically mad; he really did lose his mind.” He then repeated the legend that the composer chopped down the entire forest around his castle and hired young men to flog him daily. Once again old fictions had been reiterated and new fictions added. Herzog even introduced a chorus to accompany the myth of Gesualdo’s swinging his infant child to death. Gesualdo had been returned to the role of the legendary mad prince and all attempts to place his physical and mental health in the context of his time and place had been abandoned. The story is the thing. One of Herzog’s maddest and most dramatic touches involved the inclusion of a woman

in a black dress with red hair, who claims to be the

spirit of Gesualdo’s dead wife. She roams the corridors of Gesualdo’s castle with a boombox, singing his music, including “Belta, poi che t’assenti,”’ and informs us that she lives in a box at La Scala and can be

reached by helicopter. Herzog said he had employed her to emphasize the profound effect Gesualdo’s music has had on people over the centuries, and to play the part he hired Milva, an exceptionally popular Italian actress and singer, for whom Gino Negri had already written a Gesualdo piece in 1975 entitled Il diario dell’assassinata,

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which premiered at the Piccola Scala in Milan.‘ The remainder of Herzog’s movie is best seen rather than described. Though the musical interludes where Alan Curtis’s Il Complesso Barocco and Gerald Place’s Gesualdo Consort perform Gesualdo’s music uninterrupted return us to the composer’s art, the film is essentially a mind-spinning fantasy that points to the drawing power of our Renaissance prince’s story even for nonmusicians today. The movie, for all its oddities, quickly became a kind of cult film

readily available on DVD. The popular movie critic Roger Ebert has spoken of Herzog as one who “embodied a vision of the cinema that challenges moviegoers to ask themselves questions not only about films but about lives.”’ Somewhere in Herzog’s Gesualdo film, the lives, the madness, the creativity, and the compassion of two artists intertwine.

Herzog was not alone among cinematographers, however. On 2 February 2004 La Repubblica announced that Bernardo Bertolucci’s movie on the Prince of Venosa, to be called Inferno e Paradiso, or Heaven and Hell, was moving ahead. It had been in the planning stages since 1997, but the next year Bertolucci had turned to the story of an eccentric English musician in Besieged. The Gesualdo story was different, and the renowned cinematographer was candid about his initial reaction. “Gesualdo, with his prophetic fury, confused me from the first time I heard him. I experienced a carrier of emotions that was almost expressionist.’”® Bertolucci, respected as one of the most brilliant filmmakers of his age, is no stranger to sordid topics. Mother-incest played center stage in his infamous film La Luna; more recently, The Dreamers stole the headlines with its story of an incestuous relationship between a boy and his virgin twin sister; and earlier, Last Tango in Paris had alternately titillated and shocked audiences with its story of meetings for anonymous sex in a Paris apartment. Now Bertolucci, noting that Gesualdo composed his richest and most anguished music only following the tragedy of his first marriage, observed that this music was virtually “fertilized in the blood of his wife.” In his mind the whole situation revolved around the fact that Gesualdo was too much in love with music, while Maria was too much in love with love. “I

am convinced that Gesualdo killed his wife because she stopped him

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from being creative, deep down, and that he found the pretext of adultery to free himself.” The timeline is accurate; the rationale, dubious; the premise for a

movie, rich. Yet while a screenplay by Mark Peploe had long been announced,

other difficulties remained.

First of all Bertolucci had

declared that the film would be extravagantly expensive, for which reason he felt obliged to shoot it in English in order to find the largest possible audience. In addition, however, ill health contin-

ued to plague the venture. Well over a decade since its inception, the Gesualdo Hex at least momentarily seemed to have ground the project to a halt. In an interview of February 2008, however, Bertolucci was queried as to why he had not made a movie since The Dreamers five years earlier, in that he was still only sixty-six years of age. He responded that a back operation three years previously had gone poorly, and that for three years pain had prevented him from walking well. Noting that he had had to set aside plans for his long-cherished film on Gesualdo, he concluded:

“I have to find a

solution for my back. And then I will direct again.”’ The delay may be fortunate in light of the substantial additions to Gesualdo’s biography since Bertolucci’s initially announced plans and the role they might play in a more understanding, however shocking, portrait of the artist and his time. Gesualdo: Literature and the Other Arts. As with the developing mythology of the Corona Manuscript in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so the Gesualdo legend had begun to gain momentum totally independent of the preserved facts of the case. The myths, which began to accrue around Gesualdo immediately following his death, had now been amplified and perpetuated not only by contemporary musicologists, performers, and composers but also by writers of varying backgrounds. Although both Herzog and Bertolucci protested that their initial attraction to the figure of Gesualdo was through his music, there can be little argument that the biographical element increasingly brought additional attention to it. The composer may not have disappeared, but his noble station and the grizzly aspects of a life had moved center stage. Yet it is worth recalling that the attraction to

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embellishment begun in the seventeenth century had still been active in 1875, when Anatole France evoked the murder of Gesualdo’s first

wife in a novella, The Well of Saint Clare, a story that concluded with a familiar confection: The poor bodies were left shamefully exposed as before. Toward the latter end of the night, the curious having ceased to come any more, the guards were withdrawn. Then a Dominican monk, which had all the day lurked about the great doors, did slip within the vestibule by the smoky light of the dying torches, crept to the steps where Dona Maria lay, and threw himself on her corpse.*

The Gesualdo legend among writers was destined to have a series of updated responses in amazingly different contexts, however. Almost a century later, in 1965, the German author Wolfgang Hildesheimer invoked the figure of Gesualdo in his novel Tynset, a commemoration of the Holocaust drama by a Jew who returned to Germany from Palestine at the conclusion of World War II and whose knowledge of the atrocities flowed from his role as translator at the Nuremberg trials. At one point he makes a phantasmagoric visit to Gesualdo’s deathbed that plays with the issue of temporality. Here visions of Gesualdo’s wives and loves, halberds, the Gest Nuovo,

and the composer’s El Greco eyes blend with strains of “crux benedicta,” “inter mortuos liber,” and what he calls the forbidden pro-

gression, A-flat minor to C major (elsewhere dubbed “uncanny’”’). For all the visionary quality of the writing, Hildesheimer’s familiarity not only with the Gesualdo story but with the technical aspects of the music was astonishing. In the years following, a series of bravura writings about Gesualdo were also published, with titles like Alberto Consiglio’s Gesualdo,

ovvero, assassinio a cinque voci (“Murder in Five Voices”) of 1967.2 One of the most creative juxtapositions was fashioned by the acclaimed British author David Pownall. In his Music to Murder By of 1976, a

play wherein a Californian woman musicologist conjures up two ghosts to demonstrate creativity and violence, he finally introduces Philip Heseltine to summon Gesualdo in order “to persuade a critic that all must be sacrificed to music.”'° Then in 1983 the Argentinean

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writer, Julio Cortazar, wrote a short story, entitled “Clone,” about

a group of madrigal singers who perform Gesualdo’s music, then begin to experience feelings of discord obscurely connected with the composer's tragic life, and who are finally rescued by changing their repertory from Gesualdo to Bach’s Musical Offering.'' Five years later William B. Ober, a pathologist known for his analysis of the afflictions of literary figures and author of Boswell’s Clap as well as Did Socrates Die of Hemlock Poisoning? wrote a purportedly scientific study that confronted issues of flagellation and sadomasochistic influences in the madrigals of Gesualdo in a book called Bottoms Up!” In 2003 Gustav Herling’s The Noonday Cemetery and Other Stories received an English translation by Bill Johnston. Herling, acknowledged as Poland’s greatest contemporary writer, spent two years in a Soviet labor camp following capture by the Russians. Later, in his final collection of short stories, he autobiographically advanced a series of perspectives of a Polish writer living in Naples after World War II. The Neapolitan scene offered an obvious historical and musical connection, and in “A Madrigal of Mourning,” Herling once more invoked a musicologist, this time a Russian, who becomes so captivated with the music and biography of Gesualdo that she falls in love with the legend of this disquieted genius." Of a different order with respect to both range, size, and inten-

tion was a critically acclaimed novel by Helmut Krausser. Frequently compared to Umberto Eco, Krausser found his literary breakthrough in the successful Melodien of 1993."* It is a work that explores the

power of music as myth, beginning with the Orpheus legend and its reception history, continuing with a large section recounting the Gesualdo murder story, and bringing the story to a contemporary conclusion with a young photographer. The whole is purportedly viewable as an intellectual collage of aesthetic, ethical, and philo-

sophical questions encompassing politics, religion, love, sexuality, and death—a big assignment!" That this did not signal the end of the line for the novel with a Gesualdo component, however, came with a private communica-

tion from Wesley Stace (aka John Wesley Harding, the folk singer) who, beginning his research for a new novel, sought out the original Italian text of the court proceedings of the viceroy following the

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murder of Gesualdo’s wife. Author of two well-received novels,

Misfortune and by George [sic], he announced plans for a third, Charles Jessold Considered as a Murderer, that would revolve mysteriously around our princely figure and a contemporary protagonist whose name visibly echoed that of Carlo Gesualdo. Early on, Stace offered the following enticing preview of his new book, the research for which began in 2007 with personal journeys to the village of Gesualdo, its castle, and environs:

It’s about an early twentieth-century composer,

during the so-

called English Musical Renaissance, who murders his wife and her

lover (in a way that will seem familiar) then takes his own life before

the opening night of his first opera. The story is told by his friend and biographer (a Gesualdo scholar, who introduced the composer to the music of Gesualdo) trying to put the story right—and doing quite a lot more—years after the events.

The finished manuscript confirmed the view that any given story may be told in a number of different ways, that uncanny parallels between fact and fiction can momentarily deceive, and that omitted portions may be revealed at a later date and change the perspective— much like our present narrative! In another corner Gesualdo became a reality for Kathy Thoma, an active Parisian artist, when

in 1975

she heard a concert

of

Gesualdo’s music in Saint-Germain des Prés, a dramatic rappresentazione of Gesualdo’s Holy Week responses.'® Her serious commitment to a series of Gesualdo works began in 1987 and included

thirteen large paintings, a video, and photographic works. A trip to Gesualdo in 2002 brought her to the church of the Santissima Addolorata, where she painted and installed an elaborate and vividly colorful set of scenes and figures in six sections for the semidome of the church’s apse. One section portrays “Gesualdo Rising,” where the body/corpse, made of fire and ice (red and blue drippings), is dying and at the same time coming out of the magma that runs out of the volcanic area behind the Gesualdo family coat of arms. His arms are outstretched in a gesture of prayer which leads upward to the sounds of “O vos omnes” and “Ave dulcissma Maria” and to

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two white horses, recalling the death of Gesualdo’s son.” (see Figure

11.1, lower right). Among American painters, Joe Coleman (b. 1955) has introduced Gesualdo into his gallery of other pop icons, many with a psychopathic, even criminal bent, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Edward Teller, Harry Houdini, Charles Manson, and Timothy McVeigh." As the legend grows, Herzog’s scenario begins to seem tame by comparison. On a less sensational note but equally arrowed to Gesualdo’s dark side, Till Ansgar Baumhauer (b. 1972), a Dresden artist, also became deeply involved with the Gesualdo saga beginning in 1996. His fascination with the subject resulted in a group of instal-

11.1. Kathy Thoma, Gesualdo Rising (2002), Chiesa della Santissima Addolorata, Gesualdo. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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lations, one of which involved a sequence of large and imposing caskets symbolizing the death of Maria D’Avalos. Meticulously crafted in various colors, they are powerful in their sheer physical repetitiveness (see Figure 11.2). Another striking work of Baumhauer was entitled “Klostraphobikon,” a tall, elaborate chamber in scored black tile, lined in white silk with a hand-embroidered text in gold thread that reads “‘si est dolor similis” (if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow), a citation from the Lamentations text “O vos omnes,” which had twice been set by Gesualdo."”” Large, yet alarmingly claustrophobic, indeed suffocating, the chamber was intended as a mirror of Gesualdo’s personal isolation from society. Nothing, however, is likely ever to surpass in size the imposing structure realized by the important English sculptor Michael Sandle (b. 1936), renowned for his critical works relating to war.”° Dating from 1966-69, his Monumentum pro Gesualdo of fiberglass,

resin, and bronze stands 12 feet high by 22 feet long and takes as its symbols an oversize version of the inkstands and quills found in years past in British banking establishments, here placed under an

11.2. Till Ansgar Baumhauer, Installation Et In Campania Ego (Le arche di Donna Maria |The caskets of Donna Maria], 2000/2001), Gross-Gerau and Dresden.

Photo courtesy of the artist.

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enormous canopy on an elevated throne suggesting the royal lineage of the composer. The artist has emphasized that the “personage” representing Gesualdo has a smaller but exact replica of itself (supported by an extending mechanism) that alludes to Gesualdo’s self-absorption.” At the opposite end is a huge trumpetlike shape (actually a metaphor for the cochlea part of the human ear) that brings to mind the phonograph logo for His Majesty’s Voice recordings. Gesualdo, alternately implied as a “crouching coolie in a sunhat,” listens to the magic of his music through the anachronistic means of mechanical reproduction. Here the enormity of the composer’s creative act is writ large? (Figure 11.3). Sandle recalls that he had actually sent Stravinsky a sketch of his Monumentum in the spring of 1970. I hope he received it before he died, because I know he passed away soon after I’d sent it. What is a bit spooky is that I explained to him in an accompanying letter that I had felt that my sculpture had associations with Venice and it was in a way a funeral barge. Not long

11.3. Michael Sandle, Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1966-69).

Photo courtesy of the artist.

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afterwards his body was indeed transported on a funeral barge, and he was buried in the Venetian cemetery on the island of San Michele: I have never taken drugs—unless you count alcohol and the odd joint—but hearing Gesualdo for the first time seemed to be like taking music intravenously, and it seemed to stop or slow down time— quite remarkable. The fact that I suffer from melancholia from time to time might also have something to do with the way the music affected me.”

Gesualdo, The Wine Merchant. Are we really discovering Gesualdo today, or is he just appearing in such a variety of contexts that the name becomes increasingly impossible to ignore? Whatever the verdict, the spell, with the Hex frequently lurking around the corner,

continues to work its magic in the most unexpected places. A lengthy article in the New York Times in January 2005 brought the surprise notice that in a tiny village in the Irpinian region of Campania stands a $25 million winery of sleek glass, brushed steel, and concrete that is home to Feudi di San Gregorio (Figure 11.4). There buses from Naples and the Amalfi coast arrive bringing tourists, who descend into the white earthquake-resistant cellar where endless barrels of wine are “soothed around the clock” by the music of Gesualdo.™ No accident, a San Gregorio spokesperson protested: “We believe the music really helps age the wine.””S Only one other winery, La Cantina di Venosa, went the remaining distance by naming its prized aglianico “I] Madrigale di Gesualdo” and describing it thus: “Characteristics: purplish-red in color, deep and opaque. A vinous and intoxicating nose with clear notes of black, mature fruit and spices. Dry, full, with a sense of

its volcanic nature, full of dense tannins, and velvety.” The proprietor concludes with the inevitable judgment: “Musica per le papille!”—music for the taste buds. It was a description that could just as easily have served for the music of our prince. His music held one incontrovertible edge, however: it had been cellared much, much longer.”?

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A Twenty-First-Century Gesualdo Reliquary. Programming encounters with Gesualdo and some predictable companions has continued into the twenty-first century, a sample of which will suggest the range. On 30 October 2001, for example, the Hyperion Ensemble offered a by-now familiar juxtaposition in a performance at the Arnold Schonberg Center in Vienna: a Gesualdo responsoria, Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht, and Brahms’s String Sextet, op. 36. Similar perspectives were also visible in a Friends of Music concert at Princeton given by the Brentano String Quartet on 23 March 2005, which advertised music by Gesualdo, Schoenberg, and Beethoven.

Gesualdo on a string quartet program? The entry in the latter instance came via a new work by Bruce Adolphe that the Brentano Quartet played widely on tour during that season. Several decades earlier, in 1984, Adolphe had had a brush with Gesualdo in a set of

piano variations on “Moro lasso.” Now, twenty written a piece for a quartet, whose leader, Mark introduced to Gesualdo when he was a student work, titled “Oh Gesualdo, Divine Tormentor!”

years later, he had Steinberg, he had at Yale. The new is in several parts:

11.4. Caves of Feudi di San Gregorio, Irpinia, Italy. Photo by Luca Vignelli.

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five madrigals from Book VI arranged for string quartet; a Gesualdoinspired piece, “More or Less” (a take on “Moro lasso”); and the concluding “Momenti” (great moments from madrigals by Gesualdo linked in a single movement). Adolphe offered a rare observation, as correct as it was to the point, in noting that Gesualdo’s “texts become redundant quickly, but the music remains fresh, immediate and surprising.” We are obliged to appreciate as well the historical basis of Adolphe’s choice of a string quartet in light of the affective performance of Gesualdo’s music by viols, senza parole, in the early seventeenth century. This litany of perspectives can close with no better example of Gesualdo’s capacity for contemporary social conscription than with a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah intended for the Catholic liturgy of Holy Week, written between

1992 and 1997 by the

Swiss composer Klaus Huber. The composer acknowledged that his intention was to complete the responsories of Gesualdo by adding the Lamentations that preceded each of the responses that were to be “sung in the Gregorian manner of the Catholic Easter week liturgy.”?” Huber’s Webernesque lamentations contrast sharply not only with Gesualdo’s responsoria but with additional inserted contemporary texts that mourn the modern devastations of the Holocaust and AIDS. Scoring his work for the same six voices of Gesualdo’s responses, Huber enriched the Gesualdo connection through a study of Vicentino’s archicembalo and the enharmonic spirals, motifs, and

intervals of Gesualdo’s responsoria. Noting the persistence of the idea that the stile cromatico came to an abrupt end with Gesualdo’s late music, he argued that his approach to Gesualdo was an attempt to free his own music “from the ascendancy of panchromaticism, which became totalitarian in this [the twentieth] century.”** The appeal of Gesualdo’s music for modern times had seldom been more clearly spelled out. Indeed, the idea of the “unpaid debt to the past,” as he put it, as a liberating key to the present seemed to sum up the multiple journeys of many of the composers, writers, and artists who had adopted Gesualdo in search of a contemporary identity. Such an ongoing series of confrontations with the man and his music illuminate a remarkable historical parallel. In late-Renaissance Ferrara, musicians had turned to the Greeks as a vivifying source.

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Now, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a con-

tinuing line of performers, composers, artists, and writers repeatedly turned to the late Renaissance in search of a rejuvenating companion. All of this came at a time when arguments were being generated that art had forsaken all notions of incremental stylistic development, that the notion of continuity had been forced into the straightjacket of a historical narrative, and that the concept of a linear direction of progress had apparently collapsed.” For some, the grand tradition of an unfolding historical narrative had become merely a “ruin to pick through.”*° The argument, which embraces questions posed by the present account both chronologically and philosophically, had now taken hold and demanded debate under the contentious label postmodernism. The label ultimately proved to be less powerful than the initial debate suggested, however. Music of the present has always been built—in measures large and small, now overtly, now clandestinely—on the music of the past. At the same time it was also evident that the ongoing rush of tradition had always been subject to periodic jolts that seemed to decry the notion of an orderly transition. In any event, it was clear that whatever perspective one might choose in viewing such compulsive reuses of music of the past, the figure of Gesualdo had now become an increasingly attractive signal of unexpected power in unexpected places.

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Retrospectives:

Closure or Continuity? Not biography nor the idea of style nor again the analysis of meaning confronts the whole issue now raised by the historical study of things ... In place of the idea of style, which embraces too many associa-

tions, [I forward] the idea of a linked succession of prime works with replications, all being distributed in time as recognizably early and late

versions of the same kind of action. —GEORGE

KUBLER’

The past does not influence me. I influence it. —WILLEM

DEKOONING?

In Licut oF such a rich parade of responses to our legendary prince, how do we best locate him? The question is no sooner asked than the thorny questions of influence, anachronism, and continu-

ity arise together with an accompanying set of warnings resistant to each category.’ We might profitably turn the typical premise of continuities, therefore, in a slightly different direction. Rather than searching out the familiarly proposed, suspiciously regarded connection between Gesualdo and Wagner, for example, we might ask whether Wagner’s Tristan, typically regarded as the locus classicus of nineteenth-century expressive chromaticism, announced the death of the Romantic era or also (not instead) projected possibilities that were to be taken up in different ways by succeeding generations? The question posed in this way suggests its own answer, of course, and not one simply fashioned as a series of evolutionary “begets,”

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nor one that runs contrary to those who think in terms of options rather than progressive evolution.‘ The observation is an interesting one in that some of our most prominent musicians have addressed the issue in quite individual ways. Claudio Abbado is a conspicuous example of a master musician who has recently “outed” himself as a full-fledged admirer of Gesualdo and inquisitor of his legacy. This is more than a little surprising in light of the fact that Abaddo’s career as a renowned conductor of the symphonic and operatic repertoires would seem to guarantee that, like Pollini, Goode, and Brendel, his public work

would have taken him nowhere near the madrigals or sacred music of the Prince of Venosa. Yet, comments made by Abbado at Ferrara in 2003, immediately preceding a visit to Potenza to receive a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Basilicata as well as to help inaugurate a new institute for Gesualdo studies there, were projected with surprising assurance, some might say historical abandon, regarding the diversa eredita of Gesualdo’s art.’ The extensiveness of his observations can only be labeled as both unexpected and powerfully delivered. Abbado began by charging a moral obligation to provide a more informed and comprehensive appreciation of Gesualdo’s works and to turn aside from judgments that labeled him “an unacceptable and somewhat psychopathic personality, an inordinate genius, and thus not to be taken completely seriously.”° Abbado continued by reviewing the accelerating attention given to Gesualdo by composers and cinematographers in recent years and concluded that it was not all that little, but that it was not enough. Listening and intensive study, he proposed, were essential in order to counter those who view his art as “extravagant, exaggeratedly varied fragments of an anthology of effects.” Greater familiarity, he claimed, revealed a vast architecture of highly structured tonal schemes that placed Gesualdo at “an open aesthetic frontier that unites the Renaissance and the Baroque. Thus Gesualdo is a musician at the summit of his time, and a bridge toward our own.” Abbado continued with descriptions that were both lucid and specific, articulated from an intimate knowledge of the score. Delivered with an unambiguous emphasis upon the harmonic element in

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the service of affect in Gesualdo’s music, he sought out an eradication of the boundaries of influence in later centuries, taking notice of a grand legacy stretching from Gesualdo to Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, and Berg.’ However improbable Gesualdo’s link to such a German line of succession may appear on first reading and however wary one may be of progresssive views of evolution in the arts, we ought not be surprised to find that even McClary’s strictly modally anchored inquiry could not forego a similar comparison. Linking a particularly striking harmonic progression in “Da le belle contrade d’oriente,” one of the most adventure-

some madrigals of Cipriano de Rore to a familiar thumbprint of the Romantics, she concluded: “Cipriano has taken us into modality’s dark continent, the same VIb that becomes the standard Never-

Never land of Schubert and Mahler.’”? The Romantic Reception. Notice of such connections are the joy and the incubus of music historians, of course. It would be interest-

ing to know if Wagner, let alone Schubert or Mahler, ever saw the score of a Rore or a Gesualdo madrigal, let alone heard one performed adequately.’? One of his German contemporaries, Carl von Winterfeld

(1784-1852), certainly did, and Wagner, who owned

a large personal library, may well have known Winterfeld’s study, Johannes Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter (Gabrieli and his age) of 1834. This seems especially likely given its principal focus on the Venetian school of Giovanni Gabrieli and Wagner’s known interest in Venetian cori spezzati techniques. We know, too, that Wagner’s library in Dresden contained a wide range of both ancient and modern literature, and in his article “Uber deutsches Musikwesen” (On the nature of German music) of 1840, Wagner conceded that the world

of vocal music belonged to the Italians." Whatever the Wagner connection may or may not be, Winterfeld had journeyed to Italy in 1812, during which time he transcribed numerous compositions from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.’* Furthermore, in his classic study of 1834, he

verified at some length that in addition to Gabrieli and the Venetian School he had also undertaken a study of Gabrieli’s Neapolitan contemporary, Carlo Gesualdo. Speaking of Gesualdo’s dissonances and

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strange harmonic juxtapositions, which defied connection to typical practices of the period, he noted the abundant use of chromatic notes that were to be found later in a different context. His perspective on continuities is extraordinary for the time, yet his conclusion reveals a mixture of confusion and admiration: While we wish still at the present time, more than 200 years after the cesssation of his creative activity, to praise him as exemplary in his characteristic tendency, we are unable to justify it. But the first

disclosure of every new life has a somewhat mysterious attraction, whose force, if we view Venosa’s creations with unclouded eyes, will not be denied to us."3

Shortly after Winterfeld published his study, Raphael Kiesewetter (1773-1850), who in the main shared Winterfeld’s perspectives

on early music, took exception to some of his views. From 1816 on he, too, had presented concerts devoted to vocal music from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in his home and was as conversant as Winterfeld with a sizable corpus of early music. Later, Kiesewetter addressed the central issue by advancing the radical argument for the time that “the Italian madrigal was superior to Renaissance liturgical genres with respect to expression and harmonic practice.”'*The whole corpus of Renaissance sacred music, and what theretofore had been known principally as the Age of Palestrina, had come under intense review. Continuing forces of the Age of Enlightenment had now reclaimed the origins of the seconda pratica in a secular expression and in so doing had rephrased one of the terms ofits own progressive optimism.

At exactly the same time, Francois-Joseph Fétis (1784-1871), a Frenchman who had studied with a disciple of Rameau and had undertaken a detailed study of competing harmonic theories, published an influential treatise in 1844. Encouraged by Luigi Cherubini, he also began to study the writings of Giosefto Zarlino (1517-1590) and Padre Giovanni Battista Martini (1706-1784) as well as the music of Palestrina. His historical sense, and with it an interest in

early music, was acute, and he left behind five volumes of a projected eight-volume history of music at a time when the subject was

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not even a part of the curriculum at the Paris Conservatoire. Most important of all, however, Fétis endorsed a final competing philosophy that claimed that “art does not progress, it merely changes” largely under the guidance and discoveries of geniuses. It has been judged that it was this very perspective that provided the foundation for early music’s revival in France and Belgium during the nineteenth century because it permitted early music to be judged by standards other than those currently in vogue.'’ The distinction is crucial to an understanding of the difference between a prevailing tonal theory and a contemporary capacity to embrace pretonal repertoires on their own terms. Predictably, then, Fétis weighed in on the figure of Gesualdo, recalling Burney’s negative—and what he deemed unjust—assessment. Noting that the madrigals had as their principal task the expression of the poetic meaning of the words, he concluded that “the system of tonal succession employed by Gesualdo is not true modulation, because the harmonic element of

tonal progression did not yet exist when he was writing; but these same successions are a part of his thought, and Burney was wrong to judge them by the ordinary rules.””° The composite of these estimations by Winterfeld, Kiesewetter,

and Fétis provides a clear reflection of the intensifying interest in music of the Renaissance in both Germany and France during the nineteenth century.'? Even more, it clarifies that notice ofa transitional post-neomodal, pretonal order in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did not prohibit recognition of its impact on the future course of music, even though a theoretical justification may have remained out of reach. Connections, that is to say, can be intuitive and practical as opposed to theoretically anchored.

A Text for the Present. It is, nonetheless, impossible to attribute an extensive knowledge of pre-Baroque musical repertoires to musicians of the nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth century in light of a factor that is virtually nonexistent in most of the other arts. In architecture, for example, there is a continuous,

visible record available to all succeeding generations: San Marco, Notre Dame de Paris, Les Invalides, the Palazzo Vecchio, Chartres, Westminster Abbey, the Taj Mahal, Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram

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Building, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Buildings that span a millennium of activity are today instantly retrievable from memory or readily available photographs, not to mention that all of them are visited or passed by on the daily rounds of thousands of people. A similar familiarity may be claimed for painting, not only through the museum but also photographic reproduction. Picasso, for example, knew not only Tintoretto and El Greco but virtually the entire collection of the Prado by heart as a young artist, and only a short time later the Parisian museums as well—from the Louvre to the Trocadero. When in 1957 he appropriated Las Meninas of Velasquez (1599-1660) as the basis for a painting, there was no need to ask how he could have known of it, nor whether viewers would recognize the model. With the written word, too, our libraries bring

together the literary accomplishments of the centuries: the legacy of Gesualdo’s contemporaries, such as Battista Guarini, Tasso, Marino,

Cervantes, and Shakespeare, has rarely been out of reach of their fellow citizens from the time of their creation. A comparable sense of a continuing legacy cannot be claimed for the world of music, however. While the nineteenth century was the first to undertake seriously the preparation of editions of early music, composers from the Middle Ages through the middle of the seventeenth century were virtually ignored. Projected complete editions of Bach and Handel were launched in 1851 and 1858, respectively. Then, beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century, the musical Renaissance received a new burst of attention with the generous editions of English Tudor church musicians, such as William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, as well as continental composers like Jean de Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht, and Josquin des Prez.'® Given the tardy appearance of a large corpus of Renaissance editions, the occasionally inflated reputation or, more often, outright neglect of major composers earlier than 1620 was predictable. Palestrina’s works, for example, were edited in thirty-three volumes between 1862 and 1894, a rarity for the time.'® This reflected the fact that the sixteenth century in particular was so overpoweringly summarized by later periods as residing in the art of Palestrina that such a giant of the High Renaissance as Josquin des Prez

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virtually disappeared from view for the next four hundred years. The veneration accorded Palestrina, whose coffin in St. Peter’s was

conspicuously inscribed “prince of music” (“Joannes Petraloysius Praenestinus musicae princeps”’), stemmed principally from his supposed role during the Counter-Reformation as the “savior of church music” in the act of composing the Missa Papae Marcelli. It was an idea introduced as early as 1607 by Agostino Agazzari and by Pietro Cerone in his El melopeo y maestro of 1613, and endlessly repeated through the Classic and Romantic periods. He was virtually canonized by Fux in his Gradus ad Parnassum of 1725, after which his music served more or less uninterruptedly as the pedagogical model for the study of Renaissance counterpoint, albeit of a strict, diatonic style. The exaggerated musical importance attributed to a work such as Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli crumbles, of course, once its pur-

ported sociopolitical role is removed. Yet the fiction, once it had taken root, served the work and the composer well, much as the

immediately ensuing examples of early Florentine opera, which purportedly signaled the birth of the genre, claimed an elevated status because of what Adorno has called the “‘first-tume-ever”’ factor.”° Failing a similarly powerful as well as sustaining corporate endorsement, there was little to guarantee the survival of the music of Gesualdo or Marenzio, Rore or Wert. The music of Gesualdo and his contemporaries remained, true to its origins, a genuine musica reservata.”'

Prior to the introduction of the LP format in 1948, Gesualdo’s

music, or that miniscule portion of it that was available in modern edition at the time, was virtually unrecorded and little circulated—a claim that can be made for most medieval and Renaissance composers. But even with the appearance of the first complete Gesualdo edition (1957-62), things improved slowly. Eight Gesualdo madrigals selected for a practical performing edition by Wilhelm Weismann in 1931 served as the source for two of the earliest LP recordings:

Rudolf Lamy’s Singgemeinschaft recording on Archiv Production (1954-55)

and Robert

Craft’s Sunset recording of 1955—Weis-

mann’s edition being clearly identifiable in the latter from a photograph printed on the jacket (see Figure 8.1). Indeed, this was one of the few practical sources of Gesualdo’s music available in print to most musicians prior to 1957.” As we have seen, this limitation

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was a factor that Boulez had also been obliged to confront in 1954

when he presented his Domaine Musical concerts. Bit by bit over the following five decades, however, the entire corpus, including the sacred music, was ultimately recorded variously by the Deller Consort, the Gesualdo Consort (London), the Quintetto vocale italiano, the Consort of Musicke, Les Arts Florissants, the Tallis Scholars, the Hilliard Ensemble, La Venexiana, Il Complesso Barocco, the Kas-

siopeia Quintet, the King’s Singers, and others. To sum up: continuing awareness of the music of Gesualdo and his contemporaries was dependent upon a consortium of factors, all of which had to be organized before transmittal could take place. Yet, despite the impediments to transmission, we have evidence that small, private groups did perform samples of this repertoire in each and every century following Gesualdo’s death. We have noted that even Burney, whose brutal diatribe launched the Gesualdo controversy in the eighteenth century, personally transcribed a number of his madrigals on his way to an assessment. Further scorings by the likes of Winterfeld, Kiesewetter, and Fétis confirm the probability that samples of Gesualdo’s music would have been known to the curious composer over the centuries. Even if the choice were limited to a single madrigal like “Moro lasso,” the perennial favorite, its striking qualities would have been sufficient to guarantee a chain of memory. Whether acknowledged or unconsciously encountered, it is in the very nature of art that such small specimens can prove sufficient for transmittal of the essential DNA. Chromaticism, Pathos, and the Search for Tonality. The path across such important stylistic shifts are obviously anything but straightforward. The transference of signs and techniques may be reasonably established, but their meaning may be another matter. While traceable to the ancients, the identification of pathos with chromaticism,

for example, is a perspective that has predictably been deflected as well as endorsed. While we have the positive perorations of Abbado regarding the inherently expressive connotations of chromaticism, the question is specifically posed and parried in one of the StravinskyCraft conversation books. The question is asked: “You often associate ‘pathos’ with chromaticism. Do you really believe in an innate

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connection?” Stravinsky’s answer is equivocal, regardless of the opening three words: Of course not; the association is entirely due to conventions . artists believe not in innate qualities but in art. Nevertheless, ‘chromaticism’ and ‘pathos’ are connected . . . I prefer to use chromatic in a limited sense, and in relation to diatonic.”3

The response continues with the hypothesis that the sureness of harmonic

movement

in works of Rore, Macque,

Luzzaschi, and

Gesualdo exceeds that of the operatic composers of the seventeenth century (Henry Purcell excepted), and that not until Bach do we find music as advanced in this sense. The symbolic contrast inherent in the juxtaposition of chromatic and diatonic to which Stravinsky refers had, of course, been discussed by the Greeks long before it

served as the basis of Gesualdo’s language and technique. The convention, that is to say, had been understood as well as applied not only by the late Renaissance madrigalists and early Baroque monodists but by Wagner and most of his successors, including Rimsky-Korsakov and his young pupil, Stravinsky, beginning with the Firebird. Extreme chromaticism, it has been plausibly argued, was resisted in the late sixteenth century not so much because of conservative taste in matters of expression but because it implied the irrational intervals of equal temperament. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a new age intent upon discovering the miraculous power of ancient music turned to chromaticism and monody, yet they rarely operate in tandem in a work like Monteverdi’s L’ Orfeo, where monody remains for the most part firmly diatonic. When at strategic moments the music does occasionally become chromatic, we recognize that the experience of the madrigalist has been brought into play.*> Yet if Monteverdi’s L’ Orfeo played an important role in overcoming an inherent crisis and provided the important agency for transfer,” a single figure seldom accomplishes such a momentous transition alone. Today we are aware of the degree to which early monodists like Sigismondo D’India (1582-1629) and Claudio Saracini (1586-1630), among others, also contributed to the foundation of anew expression. And Domenico Mazzocchi (1592-1665)

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continued to compose polyphonic madrigals, in addition to writing operas, in the academies of Cardinal Francesco Barberini, where the

art of Gesualdo continued to be cultivated. Whatever course the future would take, certain musical construc-

tions had been excavated that would inevitably leave their mark on the future. While there has been a tendency to emphasize the contrapuntal (horizontal) to the exclusion of the harmonic (vertical) aspect of late Renaissance music, it is important to recall that even Joachim Burmeister, whose theoretical treatises appeared in the decade

1599-1609,

reflected a merger of modal theory with

triadic theory and an emergent emphasis of the period on the vertical, harmonic aspect of music traceable to the teachings of Gioseffo Zarlino.”” Not only had the late fifteenth-century frottola offered a practical demonstration a good century before Gesualdo of what today we would call diatonic functional harmony, but a theory of inversions and equal temperament were not discovered by Rameau and Bach but had been discussed in print in Gesualdo’s lifetime.*® Consideration of the relation between late Renaissance chromaticism to later tonal developments has, however, repeatedly signaled alarm. Carl Dahlhaus, one of the leading European scholars on the topic, argued that by 1600, chromaticism had reached a point of excess, and concluded accordingly that during the 17th century [chromaticism] became both simplified and tonally integrated, the simplification being a necessary part of the integration. Gesualdo’s technique, which in historical terms repre-

sents an end and not a beginning, was virtually without consequence for the development of tonal harmony.’?

Once again the now familiar edict is repeated even as the argument is counterintuitive, for the second of these two sentences, which

claims separatism, virtually ignores and runs counter to the first, which implicates simplification and integration. Any analytical model, once chosen, can enlighten as well as obscure—a factor that even Leibowitz recognized in his search for an analogy between the Renaissance-turn-Baroque and Schoenberg’s journey from tonal to nontonal worlds. He noted that

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many musicians of the beginning of the 17th century were convinced that they were still composing in the modal technique, but their works are already unconsciously tonal, at least the tonal system is more adequate than the modal system to explain most of their melodic and harmonic figures.*°

Perhaps it was inevitable that Leibowitz would fail to heed the implications of his own decree. For, as we have seen, his understanding

of the difficulty in formulating a theoretical system to “explain” the music of Gesualdo and his contemporaries did not prevent him from demanding an “explanation” of specific details in Schoenberg’s late serial works that seemed to lie outside a perceived set of developing boundaries.

Transference and Boundaries. Ultimately we are obliged to acknowledge that musical details can and do transfer without notice of theoretical arguments. Although we cannot hear Gesualdo’s music with his contemporaries’ ears, we only have to contrast the lexicon of Gesualdo’s chromatic maneuvers with his own normative diatonic counterpoint in order to understand the force behind them for Gesualdo’s generation and immediate successors. The previously cited “uncanny” progression (e.g., C# major—A minor; or E major— C minor), for example, would have been of particular interest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in that it constitutes an important step in the saturation of the total chromatic: the two triads contain six different pitches; repeat the progression, transposed up or down a major second or at the tritone, and you have the complete twelvetone complex without pitch repetition.® It is difficult to imagine that Schoenberg never confronted the progression when he was writing his Structural Functions of Harmony. Even Puccini had invoked this very progression at the most dramatic moment of his opera Tosca, where following the stabbing of Scarpia, the heroine repeatedly declaimes, “Muori, muori” (Die, die). Schoenberg would surely have known it from various instances in Wagner,”

and, as has been pointed out, he must have at the

very least stumbled upon it in the “near-death” experience of his String Trio, op. 45.33 The larger connection could well have been

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anchored in an awareness of mid-nineteenth-century theorists, who subscribed to the belief that “most chromatic harmony can be read as diatonic harmony with chromatic inflection’”’4—an idea already summed up by Max Reger’s maxim that “any chord can follow another chord.” As we have previously observed, in 1948 near the

end of his life Schoenberg could be heard forwarding a similar principle of monotonality, according to which “every digression from the tonic is considered to be still within the tonality whether directly or indirectly, closely or remotely related.” Gesualdo’s typical drive to a tonal cadence following excursions in the harmonic labyrinth endorse this sentiment exactly and suggest the fundamental basis of his appeal in the twentieth century. The crucial question thus revolves once more around the function and force of historical-stylistic boundaries and the role of revolutionaries—especially those who seemingly close out an old order, yet whose force strongly suggests relevance for the unfolding of a new age. It has been argued, for example, that the expressive, affective text setting of Rore, Marenzio, and Gesualdo was transferred

not only to England but to secular monody and the birth of opera in Italy at the turn of the seventeenth century; and that chromaticism quickly became linked not only to the Doctrine of Affections but also to abstract compositions, especially for keyboard and ultimately for the whole range of Baroque instrumental music.3° Thus transferred, it also forecast the eventual necessity of adopting equal temperament for keyboard instruments—a prospect that Artusi had already discussed as early as 1603.3” In a word, the split keys of Vicentino’s hyperchromatic archicembalo had advertised a problem, but they had not solved it. Two operas composed at either end of the twentieth century help us to locate the crisis and their quite different confrontations with the last decades of the Renaissance. Hanz Pfitzner’s opera Palestrina (1909-15) has been judged a symptom of the power that its subject still held for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Regressive modernism and modernist conservatism have been advanced as terms in play as Pfitzner announced the crisis of modernity itself at the very time that some of the most epoch-making scores of the twentieth century were being composed.** Palestrina, who witnessed

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but resisted the birth of the seconda pratica, is adopted here as the conservative symbol at the moment of crisis. At the other end of the twentieth century stands a remarkable counterpart: eighty years after Pfitzner’s opera, Gesualdo was repeatedly embraced as the subject for a series of operas beginning with Schnittke’s offering in 1995, not only for the obvious biographical element but precisely because he represented an ambiguously progressive perspective for the practitioners of an unfolding postmodern age. The appeal centered on the fact that Gesualdo’s revolutionary embrace of the seconda pratica had resisted any thought of formalistic escape into the world of monody and opera and placed the focus directly on the expressive role of harmony and tonality. Schoenberg’s

atonal venture

around

1909 had brought a sea

change, but with the formulation of a twelve-tone method little more than a decade later, something even more dramatic happened: once all the notes of the chromatic octave had been defined as equal in weight, the contrast between diatonic and chromatic largely disappeared, and the idea that the latter was an extension of the former evaporated.*? This deletion, perhaps above all other issues, proved to be the most critical consequence of dodecaphonic serialism and spelled the inextricable crisis of twelve-note serial music: for the first time since the Greeks it became difficult, more frequently than not impossible, to speak of chromaticism as opposed to diatonicism—a distinction that Stravinsky made clear was essential for his understanding of the term. Even Berg told Schoenberg that one of his principal reasons for introducing tonal effects in his serial works was that he found it untenable to give up altogether a factor he deemed analogous to the former contrast of major with minor.‘ It seems probable that a recognition of this very historical crisis played a significant role in Schoenberg’s need for the reclamation of quasi-tonal perspectives near the end of his life. How instructive that a figure who had initially helped signal the collapse of the historic tonal structure felt compelled to review and reconsider that same time-honored system at the very moment that he composed his first atonal scores and again in his last years—“‘to fill out the gap,” as he put it, between his chamber symphonies and the “dissonant” music. In this we note how chronologies are often confusing and riddled

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with events that are out of sequence with respect to eventual theoretical consolidation or practical usage. Indeed, it was this very issue that troubled Leibowitz in his letters to Schoenberg when he spoke, somewhat reluctantly, of the seeming inevitability of antiquarian carryovers in the search for a “purer” serial perspective. Little could Leibowitz have imagined at the outset that his envisioned “purer” brand of serialism did not signal the way ahead but was destined to be relegated to a footnote. Schoenberg’s retrospective view, which offered serialism as an option, not a mandate, was stunning, for it

offered a counterargument from the very inventor of the idea of a dodecaphonic series; arguments regarding the inevitable supremacy of the idea had in effect been overturned by its creator. Continuities? Why was it that the music of Gesualdo suddenly rose from the ashes in the period immediately following Schoenberg’s death, the very decade in which dodecaphonic serialism also enjoyed its first and last triumph in America? Was it that Gesualdo was viewed less as a specific paradigm than as a historical conundrum whose ambiguities shared similarities with the present? Any attempt at clarifying the forces behind the appropriation of Gesualdo’s music by the roster of today’s artists, or at confecting a history devoted to reporting the same, is obliged to confront a variable list of motives and chance encounters.

It is the composers,

however,

who

best

know that they are not the theorists of their trade or philosophers of their art. They tinker, rather, with the secret art of the alchemist.

Reinventing History [There is a] reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most

manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are more invented

than found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences. —HayYDEN

WHITE’

i had detention after school today. it was hawt. i got to do my gesualdo essay. it took me longer then detention. so i stayed in the room a little

longer to finish. —HIGH

SCHOOL

SENIOR

BLOG,

29 March

20067

History as INVENTION? Can a teenage blogger reflect societal forces at work more complex and elusive than the historian can possibly take into account? With ever expanding global perspectives and communication pathways the study of historiography, the study of how history is written—its methods and intentions, has become one of the most variously discussed issues of the past fifty years. It is of no small interest to observe that in recent years musicology (formerly considered as history, analysis, and archival research) and ethnomusicology (formerly proudly defined as nonhistorical, cultural anthropology, and field work) have now exchanged vows. At the same time, review of earlier standards and current methodologies in both disciplines persists in holding to the position that the conscientious practitioner must still deal with the ascertainable facts and the sources; they cannot be made up.* Yet no account can tell it all, and discrimination with respect to what is to be included or omitted inevitably becomes a part of the historian’s task. It is an old story. And pace Hayden White, even 2 63

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Francesco Patrizi, the court philosopher for Alfonso II at Ferrara until 1592, had four hundred years earlier registered his belief that

history had its origin in the fable (favola).t That is not to say that it lacks truth, that it is a fiction invented to deceive, but rather

that it partakes of fable in the sense of a story typically devised to convey some useful lesson—or for the historian, one might argue, to lay out a particular perspective. It is just that any argument in history or science, however enfolded, ultimately requires the embrace of a paradigm that frames the parameters of inquiry and in large measure determines the outcome. Hayden White has further argued that it is wrong for historians to limit their perspectives to those of the past, to attempt to get inside the minds of our ancestors; that historical narratives merely configure the plots inherent in historical actions themselves, and that “human actions

have consequences that extend beyond the purview of those who perform them.”® The relation between past and present has been put somewhat differently by the American historian Gordon Wood. Dissecting the elements of the historiographic debate, he has offered clear, frequently cautionary reflections on the issues of influence and narrativity. Allowing that most new historical inquiries begin with an attempt to understand the historical conditions that lie behind a current problem, he has noted, by way of example, how some of the

best work on the historic question of slavery in the United States coincided with the civil rights movement of the 1960s.° That having been said, he warns that our view of the past ought not be directly formed by current issues and problems, and that the attempt to relate the past “without anachronistic distortion to our present is what is meant by having a historical sense.” Here we have a conundrum. For while we might agree that the past ought not be totally shaped by current perspectives, we cannot escape the fact that the past is dramatically connected to the current view we hold of ourselves and inevitably provokes a dialogue—a view with which Wood would agree. It is also clear that the historic Gesualdo had to be clarified before the revival in the twentieth century could take place. The music was caught in the crossfire, and the ongoing series of responses triggered by its restoration inevitably

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did not take place, as we have witnessed, without some degree of “anachronistic distortion.” In the process a fundamental shift in our view of the past inevitably took place. The same may be said of the late Renaissance’s earlier take on Greek theory.* The aggregate of such relationships, it is possible to defend, constitutes a history of the subject.’ That is why it is justifiably argued that any book—every book—belongs to its time and cannot be offered as a definitive statement on the subject. As one prominent Renaissance historian has put it, our image of that era has changed fundamentally in recent decades from the idea of an event, to that of the first modern era, and currently to a period of social and intellectual tensions and contradictions.'® Our attempt to judge the force and position of so enigmatic a figure as Gesualdo has only reinforced this final perspective. A similar judgment may be made of the Schoenberg and Stravinsky sagas, although the full impact of their stories has only just begun to unfold. Periodically and retrospectively we are obliged to take note of the shifting force of language and rhetoric on all of our subjects and to recognize that reigning agendas, however fleeting, drive the rhetoric. Conversely, we may argue that though the rhetoric may change, the object stays the same. Or does it? All changes in perspective unavoidably reflect the biases of a given culture at a given time. Consequently our view of a piece of music is forever in the process of metamorphosis, and we realize that the ideal of grasping its initial meaning is impossible. In 1959 Robert

Craft offered the opinion in the Encyclopedie

Fasquelle de la musique that “Gesualdo is an end, his music dies with him.’’! Little could he have imagined the door to the future that he and Stravinsky had opened in that very year, for at the time, Craft’s opinion rang almost literally true. Indeed, until then the measure of the importance of Gesualdo’s music had been kept alive largely in the encyclopedias and surveys as a kind of historical fiction—an extreme example of its type and time, a last gasp before the Renaissance gave way to the Baroque. As late as 1950 the noted musicologist Leo Schrade was still advertising the essence of this perspective in the title of his book, Monteverdi: Creator ofModern Music. It made for a neatly packaged story.

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The Fitful Flame. Gesualdo had written no operas, no solo songs, no concertato music (i.e., with instruments) and consequently performed the function of a perfect symbol for the close of an era, after which inevitably ensued the dawn of a new age. Yet given the lack of ready access to the music of Gesualdo and his contemporaries prior to the 1950s, what significance could opinions based upon such a small sample possibly have? The issue of accessibility stems, of course, from the restrictions placed on the music from its very inception. That is to say, the Renaissance madrigal had never been designated for the large concert hall or addressed to a wide public. Yet, had the music been readily available, there is no reason why the nineteenth-century salon should not have been able to accommodate it, not to mention Anton Webern’s Viennese choruses (given his antiquarian interests) or Nadia Boulanger’s private ensembles (which occasionally did). While the unaccompanied madrigal as a genre was essentially finished as a compositional form shortly after the turn of the seventeenth century, its demise in later periods was hastened by the limited print runs, partbook formats, and, to a lesser extent, the

mildly archaic notation of the originals. The establishment of a modern text, therefore, ultimately became a necessity for any thought of context or continuity. Contrary to some recent musicological judg-

ments that place a priority on “criticism” and reduce the preparation of editions to a less exalted status, the art historian George Kubler has offered an important corrective when he argues that “the editors who perform it deserve more reward than they get. Without it we should have no sequence in time, no measure

of the distances

between versions, and no conception whatever of the authority and the power of the lost originals.” Tellingly, the few samples of Gesualdo’s music that did circulate continued to occupy a special place and to transcend the disappearance of the form. Furthermore, it did so in ways that the music

of Rore,

Wert,

Marenzio,

and Luzzaschi

did not.

This

can partially be accounted for by Simone Molinaro’s score edition of Gesualdo’s complete five-voice madrigals of 1613. It could even be argued that among Gesualdo’s Italian contempo-

REINVENTING

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2iGuT

raries, only Palestrina and Monteverdi ultimately eclipsed the vividness of his profile (not to be confused with musical value): the former because of historic associations with the church and an accompanying mythology; the latter not only because of his magical contribution to the madrigal over the next quarter century following Gesualdo’s death—the brilliant coda to the form—but also, and primarily, because of his contribution to other forms like the Vespers of 1610 and especially the early history of opera. Yet a modern edition even for Monteverdi, however inadequate, would not be inau-

gurated by Malipiero until 1926 and not completed until 1942. His performance revival was initiated by D’Indy in the first decade of the twentieth century, propelled by Boulanger’s recording of the thirties, and fully achieved under the nurturing force of the early music movement and the invention of the LP and CD recording formats. Gesualdo’s final resurrection, although involving a considerably smaller corpus, was somewhat slower in coming. Paradoxically, a complete modern edition of the central repertoire (the six books of madrigals, the Holy Week Responsoria, and the five-voice motets) appeared for the first time between 1957 and 1962 at almost exactly the same time, 1957-60, that Stravinsky’s several Gesualdo composi-

tions served to further propel this music into its current trajectory. Then with the introduction and proliferation of first-rate early music vocal ensembles that gradually conquered the performance problems of tuning, ensemble, and diction; the invention of economical and

dramatically improved recording techniques; and the fascination of a roster of curious contemporary composers following Stravinsky’s example, Gesualdo’s name burst onto the horizon, and attention to

his music began to escalate. In addition to this range of sponsorships, there were further surprises even in the halls of academe. One morning in 2003, for example, a phone call from a young Harvard student requesting an interview announced that during the coming week the university radio station was to broadcast what was to be called a “Gesualdo Orgy”—an uninterrupted ten-hour broadcast of Gesualdo’s music. Forget Mostly Mozart. Move over Morton Feldman. Then, only a few months later, during a lecture and discussion on Gesualdo for an undergraduate seminar on the Italian madrigal at the same university, I found

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eighteen eager students sitting around the table. Was it possible that, despite its Eurocentric pedigree and historical distance, this music had found a place in the new line-up of global, ethnic, and popular musics seemingly demanded by the younger generation?” I have set up the question with a purpose, of course, and that is to inquire into the factors surrounding the reception of a work of art. Kubler suggests that not only does an artist’s lifework belong to a series that extends chronologically both before and after, but that in addition to an individual’s temperament and training “there is also the moment of his entrance, this being the moment in the tradition—early, middle, or late—with which his biological opportunity coincides.”"* It has also been argued that “the moment of a work of art is not necessarily the moment of taste.’’’ To these perspectives it seems equally plausible to add that a good entrance might well be broadened to include the power coincidental to the good reentrance or revival of a composer who, however momentarily, may have faded from view (think of the revivals not only of Gesualdo but Monteverdi, Bach, Mahler, and even Webern

in this regard). We further note that Gesualdo came on the scene very late in two momentous sequences—in the long arch of the Renaissance and in the briefer history of the madrigal. But what of exit points? Various critics, noting the escalating fascination with Stravinsky’s life and works in the years since his passing, have noted a simultaneous reduction of performances of his work primarily to the three early ballets; and in 1988 one of the most astute of the critics prophesied that, like most composers of the past, it will “take yet another ritual ‘rediscovery’ in the twenty-first century for Stravinsky’s full oeuvre to be heard again in the concert halls of the world.”"° The pattern is not an unfamiliar one. That is to say, late works are frequently, though not inevitably, enigmatic, and the more readily embraceable of them are often puzzling because they seem to contradict the more complex ones with which they share chronological company. Schoenberg, too, early on formed the Society for the Performance of New Music, addressed strictly to the Vienna cognoscenti, while paradoxically the last decade of his life saw him intermittently writing serial and tonally directed music that could appeal to a

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larger public. Gesualdo’s most advanced art, as the composer himself strongly protested in the prefaces to his last two madrigal collections, had from its inception also been intended as a music reserved for a small, privileged audience. Yet his final years, which saw the composition and signed publication of his sacred works, witnessed his retaining the essence of his daring harmonic-contrapuntal craft while softening its most extreme edges and potentially broadening his audience among the faithful. Contrarily, while Stravinsky never protested a musica reservata for himself, his take on dodecaphonic serialism late in life was typically viewed as tantamount to such an announcement. In retrospect, however, it appears less as a capitulation than as a virtuoso demonstration of how to turn a loosely described serial method to personal account. His opus ultimum, the Requiem Canticles, for example, served less to demonstrate his control of advanced technical matters than to articulate how they could be absorbed into a language clearly relatable to his earlier Russian works. That is to say, for all of their intricate taxonomies, these late works were personally clarifying, as he laced them with familiar perspectives that reviewed not only the early history of his own art but his earlier devotion both to ritual and to an expanded sense of key without losing its center.’ Gesualdo, like Schoenberg and Stravinsky, launched his career with classically proportioned specimens (the first three madrigal books) only to quickly signal that the old modal order was irrevocably under attack and that his discoveries pointed to expressive solutions well beyond the domain of the madrigal.'* Serendipitously, the topic of chromaticism had surfaced with a vengeance by the 1550s and was being avidly studied and debated in Ferrara at the time of Gesualdo’s arrival there on the occasion of his second marriage in 1593. While there was no guarantee that Gesualdo’s art

would develop in the way that it did from the relatively conservative beginnings of his first three madrigal books nor assurance that a prophetic new vision would ensue, the conditions of time and place were right for such a thing to happen. Gesualdo was obviously dependent upon the Renaissance tradition of the madrigal, but he was also technically indebted to the humanist’s revival of amuch older theoretical concept, the chromatic and enharmonic genera of

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the Greeks. Unlike Vicentino, Rore, Luzzaschi, or Lassus, however,

Gesualdo did not apply his take on chromaticism didactically or locally in a few demonstration pieces but pursued its expressive domain broadly.” To this argument must be added a corollary, namely that the delay between discovery and application is typical in all fields. Kubler has made the correct but uncommonly forwarded observation that “if a style is interrupted early for any reason, its unused resources become available for adaptation by participants in other styles.”*? The tantalizing arguments made by several eminent performing musicians of recent years, that the vivid opening up of the total chromatic space by Gesualdo and his contemporaries held consequences for a vast literature that followed, were seemingly lost on most mid-twentiethcentury scholarly evaluations. Yet even if one chooses to tell the story this way, it is implicit that the trajectory is not an unimpeded one: interruption and modification typically ensue along the way. It is important to note, however, that even though Schoenberg’s earlier, highly chromatic, atonal discoveries around 1909 eventually led him to the serial organiza-

tion of the total chromatic around 1920, the latter was opened to widespread consideration and emulation only following his death in 1951. The serial movement, endorsed with gusto in its second reincarnation, was then just as abruptly abandoned as a rigorous principle by the 1960s, though predictably not without consequence. For Schoenberg’s breakthrough into the world of atonality around 1909 was ultimately destined to be reviewed and savored not only

by Schoenberg himself but by virtually all composers to the present day, the mature dodecaphonic serial venture much less so. Delay, revival, neglect, absorption. The observation is offered simply to note yet again the characteristic absence of an unbroken progression even among key figures. It is especially curious, however, that the dead-end label for Gesualdo was endorsed more repeatedly in the twentieth century than in the seventeenth.*' A unified perspective for a given time is virtually impossible to outline, of course, particularly one that attempts to spell the relationship between the neomodal Renaissance madrigal and an impending tonality in the seventeenth century.

REINVENTING

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For the latter period alternately continued to flirt with its modal inheritance even as it sought to clarify the forces of tonal harmonic movement that would finally lead to a firmer theoretical as well as practical consolidation in the eighteenth century.” Most important of all, we now understand that this development was not inevitable, even though the Enlightenment took considerable pains to expunge the memory of the alternatives along the way.” Contemporary theory, however, neither validates a given composer’s task nor guarantees the future direction to which it may point. That is to say, there is a difference between theory and practice, and composers have always been free to conjure up expressive details regardless of their apparent concord or discord with current systems that eventually find their way into print. Indeed, theoretical systems in music develop in bits and pieces, are frequently, even typically, formulated ex post facto, and are inevitably noninclusive. Schoenberg offers a good example of how a composer may frequently struggle to explain the complexity of the music that attracts him. For as Egon Wellesz has recalled for us, Schoenberg,

at a time when he had

already composed Verklarte Nacht and Pelleas und Melisande, expressed his amazement at the score of Strauss’s Salome shortly after its premiere in 1905. “Perhaps in twenty years someone will be able to explain these harmonic progressions theoretically,” he said.** What a startling admission given that his own Erwartung would be written only a few years later, in 1909. Similarly in the early tonal period, that is to say prior to attempts at a theoretical codification of tonal functional harmony, wonder and admiration often prevailed alongside a disregard for what later periods would define as strong lines of demarcation. Pietro della Valle

(1586-1652),

for example,

one

of the most

traveled

chroniclers of his time, overtly linked Gesualdo with the advent of the Baroque and two of its acknowledged masters. In a treatise published in 1640, he noted the prior revival of interest in things Greek among musicians and concluded with a judgment that should give us pause regarding Gesualdo’s role in the development of affective song. Noting the newly expressive qualities observable at the birth of opera in Florence and Mantua, he then offered the amazing judgment that “The first who praiseworthily

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followed this path in Italy . . . was the Prince of Venosa who perhaps showed the light to all others in affective song (cantare affettuoso) and Claudio Monteverdi and Jacopo Peri in the works named above [Daphne, Euridice, and Arianna].” It was a perspective that would be repeatedly forwarded through the middle of the seventeenth century.”

Thus, for Gesualdo’s contemporaries and immediate successors, the new affective style was repeatedly discerned in the Prince of Venosa’s polyphonic madrigals, a factor that suggests that instrumentally accompanied solo song was not held to be the sine qua non for its demonstration. At the same time we are obliged to remember that Gesualdo was a virtuoso lutenist, that he was well practiced in the art of intabulating polyphonic madrigals on his lute, and that, having a demonstrably acceptable tenor voice (according to Fontanelli, who heard him sing), he no doubt understood and practiced the classic Renaissance art of solo song to a lute accompaniment.*° This was not a Baroque invention. As a composer, however, he opted for the unaccompanied polyphonic vocal ensemble, no doubt in part out of concern for two central issues: first, his contemporary, Ercole Bottrigani, Ferrarese court observer, had already warned against the subtle problems of tuning in instrumental performance, a subject that Artusi had further pursued; and, secondly, the art of polyphony, as opposed to solo song, had long been held to be the true test of the composer.” Fontanelli, composer, Este courtier, and companion to

Gesualdo on his second wedding voyage, had addressed the latter point explicitly by stating that, when asked to compose solo song, he did so only reluctantly.

Unsuspected Endorsements. Yet while the madrigal as a form favored by composers gradually faded through the first decades of the seventeenth century, Gesualdo continued to garner admirers such as Schiitz, Frescobaldi, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Francesco Geminiani.

All of them spoke of their respect and wonder both from the standpoint of a practical art and as one for study, the last of them, Geminiani, stating that he “laid the foundation of his studies in the works of the Prince of Venosa.”** We also learn in a letter of 1632 that

Schiitz requested copies of Gesualdo’s madrigals and his Neapolitan

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followers, and that in 1706 Scarlatti, who composed but never published his own madrigals, noted the pleasure he found in studying and singing the madrigals of Gesualdo. Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687), Dutch poet, diplomat, friend of kings and players, amateur musician, and composer, registered the degree to which emulation of Gesualdo’s discoveries was still in vogue toward the middle of the seventeenth century in northern Europe. Spending most of his life in the service of the House of Orange, Huygens acted as secretary to Prince Frederick Hendrick. He advised the prince on numerous artistic matters and soon became one of the most important figures in the history of art and architecture in the northern Netherlands. He was one of the earliest to spot the talent of the young Rembrandt, for example, and was responsible for the artist’s most important early commission, a series devoted to the Passion of Christ for the Prince’s palace in The Hague. A portrait of Huygens by Thomas de Keyser (c. 1596-1667) shows him seated in his home at a table on which rests a long-necked lute, or chitarrone, that testifies to his consuming interest in music; plans apparently involving architectural projects; and a pair of terrestrial and celestial globes (Figure 13.1). Forwarding examples of his own composition for correction as well as potential compliments from his tutor Henry Du Mont, Huygens cautions in his letter that his model was the Prince of Venosa. Noting Gesualdo’s extraordinary voice, he then begs his recipient not to judge his music by the ordinary rules. The letter of October 1658 reads in part as follows: I’m sending back to you my small papers with yours, where I’ve marked what I consider worthy of correction or not. You have correctly characterized the Prince of Venosa, who has brought to light such a large quantity of books of Italian madrigals. There are some that are excellent and that show his great skill; others, and for the most part, that are bizarre and outside all rules and customs. Do what you must, then, to explain such a man [Huygens himself] whose mood is a little like that of this prince; and bear my extravagances but perhaps not my faults. If perchance you find some sequence of fifths, fourths, or octaves that might have escaped me in my haste

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13.1. Thomas de Keyser, Constantijn Huygens, National Gallery, London.

while thinking of something else (as this trade is extremely far from my vocation and condition), you will oblige me to pick up the quill and correct them without hesitation . . . But I am a little jealous

of the sequence of my modulations and | truly desire that they be maintained as much as possible. The rules are not unknown

to me;

but I find there so little constancy, and so many contradictions on behalf of the Authors (which I think all have in French, Italian and

other languages), that here and there I stick with those who are of my opinion.

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The communication is priceless in its fixing of Gesualdo’s appeal to aristocratic practitioners of music in mid-seventeenth-century northern Europe. Du Mont, his teacher, responded in part that he would allow his pupil a great deal of license regarding things played on instruments and, in addition, held in esteem attempts at mak-

ing beautiful chords and dissonances. At the same time he admitted that he wished they were more for the contentment of the ear. He noted, too, that there were any number of musical models to select

from and examine, “among others those of the Prince of Venosa, of which I’ve seen some work in score offour [sic] parts and where I’ve found few nice things to my sentiment, while in some others many beautiful things, as in some madrigals by Monteverdi and in several airs of different authors.” Such gentle repartee aside, the central Gesualdo controversy was not truly launched for another century, when Charles Burney entered his notorious and lengthy diatribe in A General History of Music of 1789.*° Rameau

had died in 1764, and his two important

theoretical treatises from the 1720s that attempted to codify the scientific basis of music through a study of harmony had already been widely circulated. Burney, noting that figures in both literature and music “speak of him [Gesualdo] as the greatest composer of modern times,” sought to examine the music and undertook the laborious act of scoring a substantial number of madrigals himself." In an extraordinarily extended critique he noted that he found Gesualdo’s “modulations”

to be “forced, affected, and disgusting,” and those

in “Moro lasso” to be “harsh, crude, and licentious.” That this was

not a universal English view even at the time, however, is apparent from Sir John Hawkins’s proclamation of 1776, which acclaimed Gesualdo’s music for its “fine contrivance, original harmony, and the sweetest modulation conceivable.” Similar affirmations appeared during the same century in France and Italy, where two of the foremost critics, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Padre Martini, continued to praise him. The latter

even spoke of the force of his “modulations” as having surpassed both Marenzio and Monteverdi in this matter.’* Here Martini’s use of the term “modulation” clearly reflects the fact that the term had only recently and for the first time been applied to changes of key.

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However anachronistic we may judge the application of the term to Gesualdo’s music today, we note once again not only the steadily increasing emphasis placed upon the harmonic aspect of his contrapuntal art but its genetic tracks for later periods.

Paradigm Shifts and Gestalt Switches. Bianconi has warned that “Burney measured [Gesualdo’s] harmonic audacity with reference to tonal harmony, without keeping in mind that [it] result[s] from the extension rather than the negation of modality.”3} The charge was a familiar one.** It should be clear by this point in our argument, however, that most progressive works of art are inevitably both extensions and negations of prior models. McClary’s study of modality in the Renaissance madrigal has secured at least this much for Gesualdo. The old question surfaces once more: How ought one consider any music written prior to Rameau’s codification of the tonal harmonic system in the eighteenth century, the very period during which figures such as Padre Martini, Hawkins, Rousseau,

and Geminiani were content to proclaim Gesualdo’s relevance well after a so-called tonal view of music had been secured. It is telling that the issue had already been confronted head on by Vincenzo Galilei as early as the 1580s. Distancing himself from the conservative Zarlino, he announced in his Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna*’ that he favored “the new major and minor keys over the church modes, which he deplored as a false system.’’3° Galilei’s recognition that equal temperament was the only solution for instrumental tuning may appear to concern us less because Gesualdo was almost exclusively a composer of vocal music. At the same time an awareness of equal temperament surely helped Gesualdo to dispense with Vicentino’s tortuous microtones.37

In 1613 another different but equally compelling piece of evidence appeared with the score edition by Simone Molinaro of all six books of Gesualdo’s madrigals—a totally extraordinary publication format for polyphonic music at the time** (Figure 13.2). But already on Gesualdo’s first trip to Ferrara in 1594, Fontanelli reported that in addition to the partbook format, Gesualdo carried score editions of his madrigals “in order to induce [others] to marvel at his art.” Although the Molinaro edition was potentially viewable as an

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It is possible to make the argument that artists in many fields sought to reinvent modern art in partby a return to its roots, wherever they might be found, and both Medieval and Renaissance sources were scoured in the interest of finding a touchstone. In addition to modern editions of the musical text, fresh translations of

Renaissance theoretical treatises provided further grist for the mill, offering less a solution to a set of prevailing questions than a clarification of details for use in a continuing hermeneutic dialogue. As Stravinsky’s momentary but passionate embrace of the High Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac around 1950 advertised, it was within

this broad search for a revivifying base accompanied by a sense that modernism was in precipitous freefall that the expressive urgency of Gesualdo’s chromaticism was rediscovered. Then a bit later, modernism did not just give way to postmodernism. Rather, there was a somewhat self-conscious return to the

crisis generated by the preserial modernists followed by an attempt to consolidate its gains. In the process, musicians began to assess, among various other parameters, the untested possibilities of the complete chromatic complex that had recently threatened to become a system, even as it pondered the possibility of integrating ingredients from a catalogue of world and popular musics that was just then coming into view. An orderly review of the modal-tonal perspectives of a late-Renaissance composer like Gesualdo proved to be both timely and complementary to the issues at hand. A daring voyager into only loosely charted terrain, he had proclaimed no system, yet in his exploration of the harmonic labyrinth he virtually never floundered in steering his music to a logical exit and the security of a tonally grounded cadence. Equally interesting is that recent attempts to provide Gesualdo with a historical grounding in the modes have proven to be elusive. Leibowitz’s frustration and ultimate failure to clarify a serial foundation for some of Schoenberg’s late works, such as the Piano Concerto and the String Trio, provide a striking parallel. From a somewhat different angle, the reappraisal of the tonal issue at the end of the twentieth century, although different in kind, scope, and intention, was not totally dissimilar to Schoenberg’s review near the end of his career. Both recognized not so much a sense of impasse as the desire to examine terrain previously outlined yet not

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fully explored. For once the serial fad began to fade in the 1960s and early 1970s, numerous

composers shifted their focus and, like

Schoenberg himself in his last years, betrayed a fascination with the expressionist palette from around 1909-15, frequently centering on the variegated instrumental ensembles derivative of Pierrot lunaire. In addition, beginning in the 1980s, review of the Romantic world of chromatic harmony and color, which interestingly enough had continued to persist to the period around 1950, was undertaken under the mantle of a so-called new Romanticism. Hardly new, rarely out of sight, the term implied the perpetual force of review. Even Stravinsky at the close took the time to connect once more with the canonic art of Bach, though differently from the way he had in the 1920s, and also, for the first time, to connect with

Gesualdo’s harmonic world at the very moment he was engaged with the composition of his most radical serial works. Even in the latter case, though, it is now apparent that Stravinsky’s seemingly desperate attempt to remain au courant at the end of his life was but a brilliant personal take on a movement in its twilight. Rather than validating a method per se, it succeeded primarily in underscoring his lifelong adaptability to variable perspectives without compromising an essential signature. It also reflected a strong sense of historical precedent for virtually every action, though without thought of chronological order. Here a recent art historical argument might be applied and the judgment forwarded that the complex of Stravinsky’s engagement “manifests an awareness of a history . . . but no longer carries it forward.””° Viewed in this way, however, the problem would appear not to be Stravinsky’s but rather that of historians who now find their craft inadequate. Suddenly our struggle to restrict the “true” meaning of Gesualdo’s music to a single perspective dissolves, and the search for the origin of things—the ultimate question—is now brought to face a further imponderable: “How far back can one go?” Having talked about the larger issue in an early book called Beginnings, Edward Said posed the dilemma best in his final book, On Late Style: “To locate a beginning in retrospective time is to ground a project in that moment, which is always subject to revision.””” So, was Gesualdo an end, a beginning, or a bridge? Schoenberg and Stravinsky? The question

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is one that frequently surfaces when an artist is born at the point of a dramatic stylistic changeover. How interesting that it typically remains difficult to fix such individuals even as we find it impossible to leave them alone. They intrigue. And the historians have a way of perpetuating the dilemma. For the inquisitor today there are other fascinating as well as unsettling questions that confront our assessment, questions that center on political, social, and cultural backgrounds. Stravinsky, for example,

was an Orthodox Russian; Schoenberg a Viennese Jew; Gesualdo a Roman Catholic of noble ancestry but also, and most importantly, a Southern Italian. Interestingly, these last two words forward one of the most crucial components to an assessment of our composer. Even Said has developed the issue of the Southern Question at length, and has clarified what is known to all who are familiar with contemporary Italian culture: following the nineteenth-century Rusorgimento, the so-called unification of Italy, there was actually no social integration of the Italian peninsula at all but rather the formation of an increasingly extensive ruling class principally in the north. Isolation and exploitation of the south by the north only intensified the former’s perennial poverty and economic underdevelopment. Despite the historic riches of Naples and Palermo in the world of the arts, in 1926 Antonio Gramsci could speak openly of this dilemma in La questione meridionale (The Southern Question), an issue taken up in 1958 with lapidary incisiveness at a somewhat different angle by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in The Leopard.** As a titled Sicilian, this Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa was in an ideal position to observe the changes in the social and political landscape following Sicily’s appropriation by Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1860 to the period around 1910. Perhaps the most famous line of the novel reads prophetically: “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Our Prince of Venosa might have said something similar regarding his attempts to intensify the affective qualities of the polyphonic madrigal yet resist the emerging formalisms of the Baroque. But there was a further problem: though our prince may have been well received in the north by Ferrara at the twilight of the Renais-

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sance, in the minds of many today his music remains an art from the South, salvaged only by its historic association with the Este court. There has been a mystery about this strangely distant land, calculated and not completely accurate, that Carlo Levi summarized in Christ Stopped at Eboli of 1945. There he referred to the mezzogiorno, or southern Italy, and the Basilicata region specifically, as a “closed world shrouded in black veils, bloody and earthy—that other world where the peasants live and which no one can enter without a magic key.” Would that he were able to revisit that “other world” today, where people of cultivation, charm, and keen intelligence are to be met everywhere (see map, Figure 14.1). Providentially, the rediscovery of our disquieted southern genius has come as a revelation to many Italian musicians today, most of whom have never traveled to the village of Gesualdo in the province of Avellino or the town of Venosa, the birthplace of both Horace and Gesualdo in nearby Basilicata.*? Consequently and understandably, when an artist of the stature of Claudio Abbado, a native Mila-

nese, made his first trip to these lands in 2003 and praised the genius of the Prince of Venosa, southern cultural and economic hopes escalated at the prospect of future inquiry into a land with such a rich present and even richer past. In a word, it was clear that well beyond issues of musical performance there were deep and lingering social questions involved in the rediscovery of Gesualdo. A local reporter who followed Abbado’s visit wrote that “the exceptionality of two extraordinary days [in Basilicata] is remarkable also for the rarity of concerts by Abbado in Southern Italy. In fact, other than concerts held in theaters of Naples and Palermo, the great Milanese conductor in his forty-year career as an orchestra conductor had until now never conducted a concert either in Puglia, in Calabria, or in Molise.”” When queried, the maestro responded: “During the years when I would have been able to come readily, | was never invited.”*° The issue was further clarified when on 13 October 2003 I delivered an address in Italian in the Castello del Balzo in Venosa,

Gesualdo’s probable birthplace, on the occasion of the inauguration of a new Gesualdo research institute there. At the conclusion two questions followed: one from Abbado, who sat in the front row and

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inquired about performance options in Gesualdo’s music; a second from Edgardo Pesiri, the president of the Fondazione Carlo Gesualdo, who pointedly as well as hopefully queried in the presence of a large audience whether Gesualdo’s soaring reputation might not impact

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upon the social, intellectual, and economic life of Campania and Basilicata today. It was an issue that Abbado had articulated in a somewhat broader context and at some length in a published interview the previous day. The various issues that converge on Gesualdo are simultaneously enticing and disturbing in a variety of ways and not given to easy resolution. The simplest path might be to let the painters, sculptors, cinematographers, composers, and performers each have their individual ways with him—leaving it to the historians, even the sociologists, to ponder the patterns and pose the questions. Whoever leads the way, we need expect no final report. We note that all three of our principal composers were legends in their time, although in considerably different ways. Only one of them never had to struggle over money or professional status in order to pay the bills (Gesualdo); only one of them created a philosophical empire that perpetually threatened to crumble for lack ofa sizable repertoire of music with sufficient public appeal to verify its importance (Schoenberg); and only one of them received international celebrity early in his career and maintained it to the end, even though he continued to be remembered by the general public primarily for the three early works that had been composed by the time he was thirty (Stravinsky). Gesualdo would have us believe that his initial fuoco della mente also occurred by the same age, with only the religious works engaging his last years—a claim that he also shares in part with both Stravinsky and Schoenberg. All three experienced exile, both physical and psychological: Stravinsky from his native Russia; Schoenberg from his native Vienna; Gesualdo to the

isolation of his castle in rural Campania. Tellingly, the difficult serial works from Stravinsky’s final maturity were warmly applauded only by a small group of specialists, even as the most demonstrative outward acclaim came from audiences who went primarily to see the composer conduct rather than to hear his most recent works. It would be difficult to suggest that this last reaction can be explained by the idea that the last works of most composers are typically less arrowed to a large public, are more developed, and are in some ways more obscure. For somewhat at odds with current critical modalities regarding the notion

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of late styles, it is possible to propose examples composed near the end by all three of our composers that could, and sometimes do, fare well in today’s concert programming: any of Gesualdo’s late sacred motets such as “Ave Dulcisssimia Maria” or responses such as “Tristis est anima mea”; Schoenberg’s Variations, op. 40 and 43,

A Survivor from Warsaw, or the Piano Concerto; Stravinsky’s Agon, Monumentum pro Gesualdo, or the Requiem Canticles. Perhaps more telling is that beyond the question of style, in the very last works of each of these composers there is a sense that the end is near—not just in the setting of spiritual texts but in the reflectiveness and review of their language. Review implies reappraisal, the two being familiar constants of old age.*” The music critic Bernard Holland has offered a synoptic view of the history of Western music by tracing its beginnings from twelfthcentury polyphony through “a slow, gradual assault on Pythagorean symmetries, the end result being the nervous breakdown called atonality, a condition from which we are recovering.” In such a reductive analysis, the continuing emphasis upon the issue of “tonality” is striking. Yet it also italicizes the degree to which it is commonly understood that the musical language of the present day has somehow been enriched as well as challenged by the so-called atonal revolution, or, to put it another way, by the current drive to “fill in the space,” as Schoenberg put it, between tonal and serial perspectives.*+ Interestingly enough, all three of our figures confronted the lure of chromatic extensions head-on. Yet in each instance the overriding goal was in some measure defined not only by the need to expand the boundaries of tonality but also—and this is crucial— by the recognition that it was impossible to abandon it altogether. In each instance, extensions and rescues operated continually, often successfully, and in the end left behind the mark on a group of intrepid explorers forever alert to the potentially vanishing riches of a former time.*® The story ofrevivals is always intriguing, resurrections even more so, and Holland has further sketched an intriguing set of options as to why some music survives its own time and other music virtually disappears. Offering as one variable the idea of a genetic make up

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that seems to appeal now much as it did before, he also flatly states that there is such a thing as “luck, good and bad. Another idea is the tidal thesis: that public recognition comes and goes according to the phases of some musical moon.’’?¢ Gesualdo and his age might have settled for the implied astrology of the final option. What, for example, of the stars that predetermined his brother’s death; that then propelled him to a princely title and a quick marriage; that ultimately thrust him into the role of a murderer; and that finally took him to a second marriage, which

provided the crucial exposure to Ferrara? And do you recall Aurelia? Her witch’s brews, her curses, her ministrations begun as early as 1588 and pursued at least through 1598; her trial and torture in 1603;

her imprisonment in his castle until 1607? Do we appreciate that this chronology places Gesualdo under her spell during the central part of his composing years? There can be no exaggeration in the claim that the sum of these various forces clearly placed a hex, not only on the composer’s psyche while he was alive but on his aristocratic name for centuries to come. Biography now became an essential part of the trappings, his legendary eccentricity invariably impacting and frequently dominating the perception of his music. Even as late as 1968, Stravinsky caught both composer profile and performance consequence by correctly suggesting that Gesualdo was “still the crank of chromaticism, still rarely sung.’’3” The precise calculus that ultimately drove Gesualdo’s reclamation remains as elusive for us today as previously, an apparent result of an intricate yet intriguing mixture of literary infatuation, archeological excavation, and fortuitous encounter.

For following his death,

the gradually diminishing availability of the musical text seemed to guarantee that his art, like that of most of his contemporaries, was

destined to be consigned to the dustbin of history. Yet, whatever the composite of forces, genetic traces had entered the mainstream, and a lingering concern for this heritage ultimately became a preoccupation of the period 1950-2000 and beyond. That is to say, confronted with Gesualdo’s music, the twentieth-century musician began to query both its structural underpinnings and its expressive connection to the present.

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Inevitably, readers of this account will argue the question more one way than another. Accordingly, while we may regard the Gesualdo revival as something more than the reclamation of a musical text, now restored to its former luster in the performance arena,

we still struggle to square it with the historical dilemma it poses. When asked about her role in the Monteverdi revival with the first recordings she made of his music in the 1930s, Nadia Boulanger

noted the preparatory work of Vincent d’Indy, Charles Bordes, and Gian Francesco Malipiero, and concluded “It was the result of a happy chance . . . Did I have the idea of making a record of Monteverdi? Or was it Princess Edmond, who was looking out for new things? You are asking more than I can now remember. It was in the air at the time. Monteverdi awaited his day, and his day came.”* Serendipity? Louis Pasteur once said that “In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.” Yet, ultimately, we ponder not so much the element of chance in such events as the fickleness of memory and how it rearranges the evidence daily, leaving us to wonder “why the past looks the way it does, and why it once looked some other way.”? Tradition offers an invaluable link to the past, but it can also calcify; history at its best is a living organism. In the final analysis our continuing preoccupation with the changing nature of recorded history has forced us, as Muschamp has put it, not only to gauge our ongoing shifts in perception but to analyze our motives in selecting our ancestors. To come to terms with such perennial swings is essential not only to the practice of writing history but to an understanding of who we think we are and to the realization that, when it comes to creativity, there is a vast difference

between opportunity and inevitability.

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A Gesualdo Breviary

Adolphe, Bruce. “Oh Gesualdo, Divine Tormentor!” (2004). A multi-part work including five madrigals from Book VI by Don Carlo Gesualdo, arranged for string quartet; a Gesualdo-inspired piece; and a collaboration with Gesualdo.

. “Variations on a Madrigal by Gesualdo, ‘Moro lasso,” piano solo, 1984. Albright, William. “Dance Variations on ‘Moro lasso’ and ‘Vissi d’arte,”” piano solo for the lef: hand, 1996. Dedicated to Glenn Watkins on the occasion of his retirement.

Alexander, Haim. Metamorfozot (Metamorphosis) based on Gesualdo’s “Moro lasso,” for violin, 1978. Amis, Kenneth. Madrigals (Moro lasso, Belta poi che t’assenti, Resta di darmi noia, and

Mille volte il di moro) arranged for string quintet, 1993 and 1997. Armstrong, Craig, with Ian Rankin.

Gesualdo a fifteen-minute opera, 2008. See

the New York Times, 12 February 2008. Avshalomoy, Jacob. Raptures on Madrigals of Gesualdo, for voices and orchestra,

1975. Asriel, Andre. Drei Kommentare zu “Moro lasso,” for chamber choir and six instru-

ments. Balestracci, Guido. Gagliarda del Principe di Venosa, arranged for consort of viols, 1998.

Bartolozzi, Bruno. Madrigale di Gesualdo, for accordion, 1976.

Bastable, Graham.

Three madrigals, arranged for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and

bassoon, 1999. Battiato, Franco. L’ombrello e la macchina da cucire: ““Gesualdo,” 1995.

395

306

A GESUALDO

BREVIARY

Baur, Jiirg. Sinfonische Metamorphosen tiber Gesualdo, 1995. Beamish, Sally. Madrigali (C. Gesualdo), for tenor, flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet/ bass clarinet, French horn, harp, and double bass, 1994.

Becheri, Roberto. Florilegio de Madrigali on “Gia piansi nel dolor,

22

66

Belta poi ché

t’assenti,” “Quando ridente e bella,” “Moro lasso,” “Ardita zanzaretta,” for flute, oboe, bassoon, clarinet, horn, harp, and strings, 2008.

Bertolucci, Bernardo. Gesualdo: Heaven and Hell (1992- ). Proposed film. Bondt, Cornelis de. Respondit due madrigali di Carlo Gesualdo, 1997. After “Moro

lasso al mio duolo” and “Ecco moriré dunque/Ahi, gia mi discoloro.” Bonighton, Ian. Madrigali (after C. Gesualdo), for brass quintet, 2 organs, 1973. Brindle, Reginald Smith. The Prince of Venosa: Variazioni su un frammento di Gesualdo di Venosa, 1994. Cesa, Mario. “ .. . da Igor a Gesualdo con pietre dei ‘Sassi,’” for clarinet, bassoon,

French horn, trombone, violin, double bass, and stones, 1996.

Crespo, Enrique. Suite from the Sixth Book of Madrigals (1611) of Carlo Gesualdo, arranged for brass symphony. Dalbavie, Marc-André. Palimpseste (on music of Gesualdo), for violin, viola, cello,

flute, clarinet, and piano, 2002. Invokes E. T. A. Hoffmann’s unfinished novel of Johannes Kreisler, and in accordance with the title of the work, superim-

poses a madrigal of Gesualdo, “Belta, poi che t’assenti.” Davies, Peter Maxwell. Tenebrae sopra Gesualdo for mezzo-soprano, alto flute, bass clarinet, harpsichord (celesta, chamber organ, or harmonium),

marimba

(glockenspiel), guitar, violin (or viola), and violoncello, 1972. . Two motets by Gesualdo, “O vos omnes” and “Peccantem me quotidie,” arranged for brass quintet, 1982. Dean, Brett. Carlo, for strings, sampler, and tape, 1997. . Sparge la morte, for solo cello, vocal consort, and tape, 2006. Delas, José Luis de. Concetti, musica para Gesualdo di Venosa, for woodwind orches-

tra of 21 musicians, 1974. Domeniconi, Carlo. Gesualdo: fiir Gitarre, for guitar, 1991.

Eotvos, Peter. Insetti galanti, for a cappella chorus, 1970/89. Comedy madrigal with text by Gesualdo. Evald, Viktor Vladimirovich. Suite from the Sixth Book of Madrigals (1611), for brass quintet. Foss, Lukas. Renaissance Concerto, for flute and orchestra, 1976. Commentary on the music

of Monteverdi, Rameau, and Gesualdo.

Francesconi, Luca. Respondit due madrigali di Carlo Gesualdo, after “Moro lasso al mio duolo” and “Ecco moriré dunque / Hai, gid mi discoloro,” 1997. . Gesualdo Considered as Murderer, 2005. Opera.

Freedman, Harry. Four Madrigals by Gesualdo, arranged for brass quintet, 1964. Gelt, Andrew L., Hommage to Gesualdo, for eight-part chorus, wordless text, 1977.

A GESUALDO

BREVIARY

B1OY7,

Gompper, David. Musica Segreta, quartet for piano and strings with coda based on Gesualdo’s “Belta, poi che t’assenti,” 1996.

Haas, Georg Friedrich. String Quartet No. 3, “In iij. Noct,” 2001. Performed in complete darkness, improvised around specific elements, and concluding with a response for Holy Week by Gesualdo. Hammond,

Hartwell,

Victoria. The Devil and Maria d’ Avalos, 2007. Historical fiction. Hugh. Resta di darmi noia, for soprano, flute and piano, 1978. A

commentary on a madrigal of the same title by Carlo Gesualdo. Harvey, Richard.

“Cor mio, deh, non piangete,” for various combinations

of

brass instruments. Herzog, Werner. Gesualdo, Death for Five Voices, 1996. Film. Holten, Bo. Gesualdo, 2004. Opera.

Huber, Klaus. Lamentationes sacrae et profanae ad responsoria Iesualdi, for six voices, theorbo, guitar, basset horn, and bass clarinet, 1992-97.

Based on texts by

Ernest Cardenal, Mahmud Doulatabadi, Klaus Huber, and Jeremiah. Hummel,

Franz. Gesualdo, 1996. Opera.

Kramer, A. Walter. “Two

Old Italian Pieces,” for strings, 1924. Based on “Tu

muccidi, o-crudele.”

Kohlman, Peter. Omaggio a Gesualdo, electroacoustic music, 1970. Liebermann, Lowell. Sonata for Viola and Piano, 1984. Based on “Moro lasso.”

Ligeti, Gyorgy. Considered Gesualdo one of the greatest composers. Mnemonists. Triptych, sound recording, 1984. Adapted from Gesualdo. Phillips, Peter. Madrigali di Gesualdo a cinque voci, Book 6, transcribed for band. 1971. Pintscher, Matthias. String Quartet No. 4: Ritratto di Gesualdo, 1992.

Rearick, Martha. Two madrigals (“In vain, o cruel one”; “Fly away o my sighs,” Gesualdo, Book 4), arranged for flute choir, 1983. Rihm, Wolfgang. Sieben Passions-Texte, 2001-6: “Tristis est anima mea,” “Ecce vidimus eum,” “Velum templi sicssum est,” “Tenebrae factae sunt,” “Caligaverunt oculi mei,”

99

66

“Recessit pastor noster,” “Aestimatus sum.”

Robbins, Pete. “Gesualdo Adaptations.” Reworking of Gesualdo’s music for an ensemble of two saxophonists, two guitarists, an electric keyboard, bass, and

drums.

Schifrin, Lalo. Variants on a Madrigal (“Io pur respiro”) of Gesualdo for large chamber ensemble, 1969. Schnittke, Alfred. Gesualdo, 1995. Opera. Schuller, Gunther. Numerous

Ellington, Monteverdi,

editions and transcriptions of Bach, Eubie Blake,

and Ockeghem,

and including at least 40 Gesualdo

madrigals. Schleiermacher, Steffen. Konzert “Altes im Neuen”: Concert “Old in the New”

(May 5, 2005, Gewandhaus,

Leipzig): Steffen Schleiermacher:

“Una cava di

308

A GESUALDO

BREVIARY

nostalgia” (A mine of nostalgia); Gesualdo di Venosa: “Moro lasso”: “Merce grido piangendo,” arr. for small ensemble. Schlemowitz, Joel. Gesualdo—A Magic Lantern (video), 1998.

Sciarrino, Salvatore. Le voci sottovetro, Elaborazioni da Carlo Gesualdo, for voice and instruments, 1998.

. Luci mie traditrici, 1998.Opera.

. Terribile e spaventosa storia del Principe di Venosa e della bella Maria: musica per l’opera dei pupi, for female voice, saxophone quartet, and percussion, 1999. Serly, Tibor, “Dulcissima mia vita,” madrigal by Gesualdo, transcribed for string orchestra, 1939. Smith Brindle, Reginald.

The Prince of Venosa, for guitar, 1994. Variations on a

theme by Gesualdo of Venosa. Stabler, Gerhard. Guard of Honor: Musical Reflections on the Fantasias by John Bull and Don Carlo Gesualdo, for brass quintet, 1993.

Stace, Wesley. Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, 2010. Novel. Stravinsky, Igor. Tres Sacrae Cantiones, completed by Stravinsky. “Da pacem 99 66 ? Domine,” “Assumpta est Maria,” “Illumina nos,” 1957-59. . Monumentum pro Gesualdo ad CD anuum, 1960. Thomas, Eugen. Madrigal (“Moro, lasso mi al mio duolo” = “Weh’ mir Armen, ich sterbe”), arranged for five-voice choir. Trojahn Manfred. “Madrigal ftir achtstimmigen Chor,” 1975. Based on “Ecco,

moriro dunque.” Truelove, Stephen. “Quasi-fuga in memory of Gesualdo,” for piano, 1964. Vlijmen, Jan van. Omaggio a Gesualdo, for violin and six groups of instruments, 1971. West, Philip. “Io pur respiro,” arranged for woodwind quintet, 1987. Zappa, Frank. Influential composers for him included Gesualdo, Stravinsky, and Conlon Nancarrow. Zurzolo, Marco. “Madrigali in Jazz,” musiche di Gesualdo da Venosa, Collegiata di Santa Sofia Giugliano, 10 December 2005.

AR

POE NeD PX

2 —

A Gesualdo Portrait Gallery

Ir we TAKE the altarpiece in Santa Maria delle Grazie at face value, then a portrait of Gesualdo from 1875 currently housed in the Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella in Naples has tinkered with Gesualdo’s physical profile. Portrayed in his own day as a sallowcheeked El Greco-like figure, Gesualdo had now been turned into a bloated, obese figure with Daliesque moustache and billy-goatee. A similar profile had appeared in an eighteenth-century allegorical picture of three composers, including Guido d’Arezzo and Carlo Gesualdo (Figure App. 1). Did both reflect a view of the composer’s wayward seconda pratica perspectives when compared to the prima pratica sobrieties of his illustrious contemporary Palestrina? Today, more than a century later, the profile has been both clarified and obscured. In the 1990s, the only officially verifiable portrait of our composer in “Il perdono” was restored and returned to its original place in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In the same decade, a previously unknown, privately owned portrait of uncertain date and provenance surfaced that endorsed Gesualdo’s appearance in the altarpiece (Figure App. 2). Displaying the name of the Prince of Venosa in bold letters in the upper right hand corner, it has been widely published, though not publicly shown, and stands without any certification that it is not a modern painting. 3 OW)

310

A GESUALDO

PORTRAIT

GALLERY RE

WN

App. 1. Gesualdo, Guido d’ Arezzo, and Gio. Miers Fiammingo, allegorical print (eighteenth century).

App. 2. Anonymous artist, Gesualdo

(date uncertain).

A GESUALDO

PorRTRAIT

GALLERY

‘SESS

ye

7 ~

Lis

App. 3. Madonna of the Snows, Chiesa di San Nicola, Gesualdo (early seventeenth century). Photo courtesy of Kathy Thoma.

AUD

A GESUALDO

PORTRAIT

GALLERY

Gian Ludovico Mazza of Rome, a descendent of the Pisapia family, one of whose members was Gesualdo’s administrator, also owns

a portrait purportedly of Gesualdo. Said to have been part of a larger canvas, it unflatteringly reinforces the corpulent nature of the San Pietro a Majella portrait. Fontanelli wrote the Duke of Ferrara that Gesualdo typically wore a long cloak that hid his general physique, and we are obliged to recall that the'Gesualdo altarpiece provides a similar corporal disguise along with a lean face. Finally, however, we are confronted with the armor, received as a wedding gift. It is the smallest of several contemporary suits in the collection of the Konopisté museum and clearly suggests that it was not intended for an oversize gentleman (see Figure1.2). Another painting of dubious date and authorship is the “Madonna of the Snows” visible to this day in the Chiesa di San Nicola in Gesualdo (Figure App. 3). The painting has been variously described and disputed, attributed to a commission by Gesualdo himself, and said to depict a procession led by Papa Liberio and a group of bishops, followed by Carlo Gesualdo, his second wife Eleonora d’Este,

with the Madonna and child hovering above the group. The theme is thus forwarded of Gesualdo presenting his penitent wife to the public in the company of the hierarchy of the church (pope, cardinals, and bishops), thus confirming his political role of principe cattolicissimo. More recently, the painting has been judged to have come from the first half of the seventeenth century, following Gesualdo’s death, and the likely possibility forwarded that Nicolé Ludovisi, husband to Gesualdo’s granddaughter, Isabella, is both the commissioner and the princely figure in the painting. In sum, we are forced to the conclusion that the Santa Maria delle Grazie altarpiece offers us the only authenticated portrait of our composer. Interestingly, the dilemma in fleshing out the physical persona matches a similar lack of clarity and consensus in the musical portrait as set down in the most recent music histories. So many questions, so many facades; so few certainties, it would seem, beyond the mystical and palpable pull of the music.

Notes

GMO

ABBREVIATIONS Grove Music Online

JAMS

Journal of the American Musicological Society

Watkins

Glenn Watkins, Gesualdo: The Man and His Music, 2nd ed. (Oxford,

1991) EPIGRAPH

1. Quoted by Matthias Kassel in From Point A to Point B (Basel, 2004), 6.

PRELUDE TO A Vicenda 1. Adam Goodheart, “There’s Life after Lady Chablis,” review of The City of Falling Angels, by John Berendt, New York Times, 25 September 2005, Book Review section. 2. Watkins, v. 3. See Susan McClary, Modal Subjectivities (Berkeley, 2004), and Richard Cohn,

“Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age,” JAMS 57 (2004): 285-323.

4. See David Ledbetter, “Circles and Labyrinths,” Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (New Haven, 2002), 106-11. 5. Regarding the larger questions of reception history see Leon Botstein, “Music in History: The Perils of Method in Reception History,” Musical Quarterly 89 (2006): I-16. 6. Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography (London, 1999), 142.

SpN3

ull Zt

INOTES)

LO)

beNGEST7— lO

. George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven, 1962), 130. . See especially Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (New York, 2008). . Ibid., roo—ro1r. CHAPTER

15 DHESH EXO

IS@ Asa

. The magnitude of the earthquake at its epicenter was 6.2 on the Richter scale, and the strongest shock lasted for ninety seconds. In addition to the dead another 9,000 were injured and 300,000 people were left homeless in Campania, Basilicata, Puglia, and Molise.

. Roger I was the first Duke of Puglia and Calabria, cited by Dante in his Paradiso (canto xviii, verse 48), and also the son of Tancredi d’Altavilla, legendary hero of the First Crusade (1096-99), immortalized both by Torquato Tasso

in his Gerusalemme liberata and by Monteverdi in his dramatic scena Tancredi e Clorinda of 1624. Monteverdi’s Book VIII of madrigals includes the dramatic scene Tancredi e Clorinda, which is remembered especially because of its first use of the stile concitato, or agitated, warlike style. For a detailed genealogy, see

Michele Zarrella, II principe madrigalista, Carlo Gesualdo, l’albero genealogico e la sua citta (Avellino, Italy, 1996), 12.

. See Annibale Cogliano, Carlo Gesualdo, omicida fra storia e mito (Naples, 2006), 1406.

. Philip II was the first official King of Spain from 1556 to 1598, King of Naples

and Sicily from 1554 until 1598, and, as husband of Mary I, king consort of England from 1554 to 1558. He was the only legitimate son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. . For years Carlo Gesualdo’s birthdate was vaguely projected as having occurred sometime between 1560 and 1562. While the correct date, 30 March 1566, was

first reported verbally by Karl Fischer to Keith Larson in 1985 and in turn by the present author in the second edition of Gesualdo (1991), the date c. 1561 remained in GMO

as late as 2009. As we shall see, the corrected date sheds

new light on various issues.

. See Chapter 11 regarding aglianico wines and their connection with Gesualdo today. . For details see Cogliano, Omicida, 118, 135. . The Duke Alfonso II, fifth duke of Ferrara (b. 1533), married Lucrezia de’ Medici, age fourteen, in 1558. The bride died in 1561, some have said by

poison, and Alfonso then married the daughter of Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emporer. 9. Originally published in Bells and Pomegranates 3: Dramatic Lyrics (London, 1842).

- Informatione presa dalla Gran Corte della Vicaria. Die 27 octobris, 1590, in quo habi-

Nores

TO

PaGeEs

18-24

Bales

tat don Carolus Gesualdus. See Watkins, 15-22, for an English translation and Cogliano, Omicida, 171-82, for the original Italian. ET 12.

. For a fuller report see Watkins, 22. See Watkins, 26-30, 58-59.

ae See Watkins, 7-13, and especially Cogliano, Omicida, 117-42. The copy in the Biblioteca Comunale di Napoli suggests the various titles that were applied to the accruing document: Delle Corna di Napoli 0 Successi tragici et Amorosi. Parte prima e seconda delli dottori Silvio et Ascanio Corona trascritta nel 1730, copiati

da Cuomo. G. Parenti, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Enciclopedia Trecani, corroborates the evolving nature of the Corona MS as one “in progress” and written by numerous anonymous hands. 14. This lurid detail was being repeated as late as 1895, in Anatole France’s “History of Donna Maria D’ Avalos and Don Fabricio, Duke D’Andia” in The Well of St. Claire (translation of Le puits de Ste Claire). Se See Cogliano, Omicida, for a fundamental dissection of the myths that have surrounded the Gesualdo story. 16. See Cogliano,

Omicida, 26.

ita. See Watkins, 84. wt Anthony Newcomb,

“Alfonso Fontanelli,” GMO.

19. Susan Parisi, “Rasi,” GMO,

adds that in early 1610 Rasi “was sentenced to be

hanged, drawn, and quartered for the murder of his stepmother’s servant and the near murder of his stepmother.” Escaping to Tuscany under the protection of the Gonzagas, he fled to Turin, and the sentence was eventually annulled. 20.

21.

See William Prizer, “Tromboncino,”

GMO.

The daughter of Giovanni Bat-

tista Guarini, author of II Pastor fido, was also “murdered by her husband and her brother on a pretext of adultery.” Apparently Gesualdo was not the only one to use accomplices, a factor that had evoked societal disdain for Gesualdo. There have been numerous recent attempts to restore the notorious Lucrezia Borgia to the role of a politically shrewd and clever survivor. See Sarah Bradford, Lucrezia Borgia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (New York, 2004).

ee Watkins, 38-72. ZBA Duke Alfonso II’s first marriage was to Lucrezia, daughter of Grand Duke Cosimo I of Tuscany; he then wedded Barbara, sister of the emperor Maximilian II; and finally Margherita Gonzaga, daughter of the Duke of Mantua. 24. See Zarrella, Il principe, 33-35, for lineage chart, and Antonio Vaccaro, Gesualdo, Principe di Venosa (Venosa, 1998), passim.

2S: See Watkins, 48-53, for further details. 26. See Tim Carter, ““Giacomo

a7 Susan Parisi, “Rasi”

GMO.

Caccini,” GMO.

one

NOTES

TO

PAGES

24-30

Alessandro Piccinini states in his Intavolatura di liuto, Libro primo (Bologna, 1623) that in 1594 he presented two of his archlutes to Gesualdo. 20. Annibale Cogliano, Carlo Gesualdo, Il Principe, l’amante, la strega (Naples, 2004), 29. 30. Luigi Amabile, Il santo officio della Inquisizione in Napoli, narrazione con molti 28.

documenti inediti, vol. 1 (Citta di Castello, Italy, 1892), 10-11. Sie “Affari diversi dell’abolito Collaterale Consiglio,” fasc. 1°. The testimony of

Dott. Staibano is dated 18 August 1603. Bae Amabile’s erroneous report is uncritically reported in Keith Larson’s Ph.D. dissertation, “The Unaccompanied Madrigal in Naples from 1536 to 1654” (Harvard University, 1985). The initial clarification of Amabile’s confusion

was made known to me by Prof. Dr. John Crayton, who in August 2001 retrieved a copy of the trial transcript from the Neapolitan archives. By October Crayton, together with Daniela Pastina, had made a translation of the text, and the version he shared with me shortly thereafter is given here. Later, Annibale Cogliano published a detailed study in Italian of the implications of the trial in a meticulously researched monograph, and in the process clarified numerous issues surrounding the event and its aftermath in Cogliano, Il Principe.

33. Cogliano, II Principe, 18-19. 34. “Relazione informativa al Viceré da parte del governatore baronale di casa Gesualdo, Cesare Staibano, sui malefici e factuchiarie, e sullo stato del processo

contro Aurelia d’Errico e Polisandra Pezzella.” Archivio di Stato di Napoli,

Collaterale, Diversi II serie, Segreteria, inc. 1. The English translation is by John Crayton and Daniela Pastina with clarification of afew words in Neapolitan dialect by Annibale Cogliano. The original Italian text is reproduced in Cogliano II Principe, 207-9. 3 WN. For a similar scenario see the case of Gabrina da Reggio in Katharine Park, “Medicine and Magic: The Healing Arts” in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London, 1998), 141.

. Annibale Cogliano clarified that in Neapolitan dialect the word “masco” means “lock.” 37- The original Italian word is “attone,” and Cogliano confirms that it is a variant

of Neapolitan dialect for the word “brass,” not to be confused with the musical ee instrument: “ ‘attone’ ¢ la variante dialettale napoletana per ottone (brass), lega di rame e di zingo. Da non confondere con lo strumento musicale, che prende il nome dall’antica lega di rame e di zingo.” . The word here is “pisava,” which remains in use in Neapolitan dialect today, and which means “to reduce something to a liquid pulp” (“significa ridurre qualcosa in polpa liquida”). As 39. bizarre as many of the details of this report appear, Carlo Levi reported, in a

NOTES

TO

PAGES

30-34

BG

memoir of his experience in Campania as a prisoner of the Fascist regime during World War I, that many peasant women commonly introduced philters, or love potions, into both food and drink. The warning was sounded that such

ingredients were both dangerous and disgusting to the taste and made of catamenial, i.e., menstural, blood. See Christ Stopped at Eboli (New York, 1963),

14. When the present author gave a lecture in Gesualdo’s castle in Venosa in 2003 and referred to such practices by the witch Aurelia as “the exchange of bodily fluids,” a local reporter understood the reference at once and privately confirmed that such customs were still spoken of by women in the region. AO. Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Harlow, Essex, UK, 1995), 188-89.

.It has been observed that “adherents to the dominant faith in a religiously divided area generally did not use witchcraft prosecutions to dispose of their religious antagonists.”” See Levack, 116-17. . Wevack, 22'5=27.

. See Margaret Harvey, “Papal Witchcraft: The Charges against Benedict XIII,” Sanctity and Society, the Church and the World, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford, 1973), 109-10.

44.

45.

Regarding the persecution of the benandanti in the Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi The work was published thirteen times between the

north of Italy see Carlo Cults in the Sixteenth and (London, 1983). years 1487 and 1520 and

sixteen times between the years 1574 and 1669. 46. Levack,

Witch-Hunt, 137.

47. See Levack, 188-89.

48. Giovanni Romeo, Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe nell’ Italia della Controriforma (Flor-

ence, 1990), 47.

49. See Cogliano, II Principe, for a discussion of these matters. 50. See Cogliano, 28-30, for the complete Italian text. Bale See Levack, Witch-Hunt, 138-41. 52 See Cogliano, II Principe, 47, fn. 40. Much of this information was supplied

earlier to me by Dr. John Crayton. 210-11 53. See Watkins, 78-80, and Cogliano, Il Principe,

for a letter, dated 11

August 1604, written to her brother in which she describes herself as near details see Capitolo VII, “La malattia di Leonora: il corpo abitato dal diavolo e la svolta del Santo Officio,” Cogliano, 170ff. death. For more

54.

For citations of the correspondence of Michele Neri to the Este court see

Cogliano, II Principe, 21 and 170ff. and Cogliano, Il Principe, 185. SS. See Park, “Medicine and Magic,” 142-49; 56.

LitLawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study ofMelancholia in English erature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing, MI, 1952), I.

318

NOTES

TO

PAGES

34-41

S57. See Watkins, 80-81, Cronaca, Archivio del Collegio di S. Carlo in Modena, 7 November 1609: “The Princess of Venosa has undertaken a divorce with

her husband with the consent of Pope Paul V on the grounds of excesses and prodigalities,” and “languishing because of the extravagances of her husband, she finally arrived at such a state that she determined upon a divorce, and the pope conceded it.” See Vencesclao Santi, “La storia della Secchia rapita” in Memorie della Regia Accademia di Scienze, Ser. 3, vol. 9: “Memorie della Sezione di Lettere,” 325, fn. 1. 58. See Zarrella, Il principe, 45-49. The

OED defines “halberd” as: “A military

weapon, especially in use during the 15th and 16th centuries; a kind of combination spear and battle-axe, consisting of a sharp-edged blade ending in a point, and a spear-head, mounted on a handle five to seven feet long.” It is used to this day by the Papal Swiss guards. 59. See Zarrella, 45. 60. See Vaccaro, Gesualdo, 174, fn. 1, and Zarrella, 37.

. See Watkins, 84-87, for details of Gesualdo’s will. CHAPTER

2. THE

LAST

MADRIGALS

.Susan McClary, Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley, CA), 157. © 2004 Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press. Quoted by permission. . See Watkins, 165-66, for the complete Italian text and English translation. . Ibid. . The Gagliano madrigals in question were “Chi sete voi che saettate” and “Ohime tu piangi o Filli’”; the purported Gesualdo sources were ‘“‘Felicissimo sonno” and “Tu piangi, o Filli mia” respectively. See Edmund Strainchamps, “Theory as Polemic: Mutio Effrem’s Censure . . . sopra il sesto libro de madrigali di Marco da Gagliano” in Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, ed. Christopher Hatch and David W. Bernstein (Chicago, 1993), 208—9. Comparison by the present author of the two settings confirmed once more that there are virtually no similarities of consequence. Effrem might better have made the charge by comparing Gagliano’s “A dolorosa vita” with Gesualdo’s “Ahi disperata vita.” See David S. Butchart in his study, I Madrigali di Marco da Gagliano (Florence, 1982), 31-32 and 67. . See Watkins, 213-24, 329-33.

. Watkins, 45-46, and Newcomb,

“Fontanelli.”

. See Watkins, 333, for a list ofall the concordant settings. Gesualdo also set two

other texts from Luzzaschi’s Book VI, but they were composed for six voices. They were therefore relegated to his incompletely preserved book of six-voice madrigals published posthumously by his wife Leonora in 1626. . Elio Durante and Anna Martellotti have argued the question, and while allow-

NOTES

TO

PAGES

41-44

21 @

ing the possibility that Book V was composed in 1596, principally because of the large number of concordant texts of that volume, they have left open to question the matter of Gesualdo’s Book VI, “Ancide sol la morte” being the only text in Gesualdo’s Book VI set by both composers. . Edited respectively by Einstein in The Golden Age of the Madrigal (New York, 1942), $3, and The Italian Madrigal, vol. 3 (Princeton, NJ, 1949), 262. See

Edmond Strainchamps, “Luzzasco Luzzaschi,” in GMO. Although Book VI, the crucial publication for comparison with Gesualdo, nately preserved in only a single Quinto partbook, the publication Scelte Napoletane di Luzzasco Luzzaschi in 1611 and 1613 provides

Luzzaschi’s is unfortuof the Due us with the

complete musical text for “Itene, mie querele” as well as for “Gioite voi col

canto” (Luzzaschi, Book VII, 1604). 10.

See Watkins, 335-45, for a detailed comparison of these two works. See also Elio Durante

and Anna Martellotti, Le Due

“Scelte” Napoletane di Luzzasco

Luzzaschi (Florence, 1998), 1: 108-9. Gesualdo’s book ofsix-voice madrigals,

which was collected and published by his wife Leonora in 1626, also includes the following texts set by Luzzaschi: “Ah come tosto passa” (VI), “Tu che con vari accenti,” “Cor mio benché lontana” (all from Luzzaschi’s Book VI), and “Dei bei colori” (from Book VII). See Durante and Martellotti, 73-75.

Unfortunately only the Canto part survives from Gesualdo’s six-voice madrigal collection. Jeibe

For an extended critique see Watkins, 333—50. See also Durante and Martellotti,

I10—11I.

The original analysis of the sources behind the discussion that follows stems from continuing discussions with Dr. John Crayton and ultimately his published overview, “Un ritratto psicologico: Echi di una personalita inquieta,” in Il Madrigale 3 (2006): v. The original, unpublished version is in English. 1638 See Anthony Newcomb, “Carlo Gesualdo and a Musical Correspondence of 1594,” Musical Quarterly 54 (1968): 411, fn. 3. IPAS

14. Newcomb,

413.

ise See Watkins, 63. 16. See Watkins, 45-46.

17.J.Peter Burkholder, “Borrowing,” GMO, notes that, like most composers of his age, Monteverdi “could claim that he was the first to use the stile concitato and claim it as his own invention” but did not claim “ownership of musical material when it was reworked by others.” On the other hand Monteverdi was not above retrodating this particular discovery by fifteen years—a common number, as we have seen, that had previously been used by both Luzzaschi

and Gesualdo. 18. See Watkins,

84.

19. Michael Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture in Renaissance Italy,” in Gender

BETO

Notes

TO

PAGES

45-47

and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Bown and Robert C. Davis (New York, 1998), 166. 20.

Crayton, “Un ritratto,” v.

21.

Rocke, “Gender and Sexual Culture,” 166.

22.

See Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime, and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York, 1985), 144. The records reveal that it was a practice involving not only the working class but the nobility and the clergy as well. See also Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1996), 87-132, and Ruggiero, 109-45.

28) Babb, Elizabethan Malady, 76. Zera S. Fink has even claimed that the English traveler of the time learned his melancholy manners from his visits to Italy

and brought it home with him. See “Jaques and the Malcontent Traveler,” Philological Quarterly 14 (1935): 237-52, and Babb, 74. 24. Crayton has suggested that a diagnosis of Gesualdo today might read as a Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), a condition characterized by a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), the need for excessive admiration from people of high station, a lack of empathy, and an envy of others together with the belief that others are envious of him or her. Personal communication with Dr. John Crayton, 7 June 2007. aig. See William Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550-1640 (New Haven, CT, 2000), 120. Emblematic of the currency as well as the appeal of the condition was the systematic classification of its various types in the Italian study of 1589, Hospital ofIncurable Lunatics. See Tomaso Garzoni, The Hospital of Incurable Madness, trans. by Daniela Pastina and John Crayton, introd. by Monica Calabritto, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies (Tempe, AZ,

2007). 20. See Nino Pirrotta, “Carlo Gesualdo, principe e musicista,” in his Poesia e musica

e altri saggi (Florence, 1994), 169-70; Antonio De Lisa, “Osservazioni sul Sesto

Libro dei madrigali di Carlo Gesualdo,” De musica 6 (2002); and Giuseppe Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 2009). Dap See Pirrotta, “Carlo Gesualdo,” and De Lisa, “Osservazioni,” 169-70. Author’s translation. See also Nino Pirrotta, ‘““Gesualdo, Ferrara e Venezia,” in Studi sul teatro veneto fra Rinascimento ed eta barocca, ed. Maria Teresa Muraro

(Florence,

1971), 305-19, 321-43. 28.

See Paolo Cecchi, “Le scelte poetiche di Carlo Gesualdo: fonti letterarie e musicali,” in La musica a Napoli durante il Seicento, atti del Convegno internazionale

di studi, Napoli 1985, ed. Domencio D’ Alessandro and Agostino Ziino (Rome, 1987), 63.

29. Translations of this and the following madrigals from Book VI are those pro-

vided with the recording of this collection by I Febi Armonici, directed by Alan Curtis (Symphonia SV 94133).

Notes

TO

PAGES

47-52

ee

nO; Such as “Tu piangi, o Filli mia” and “Candido e verde fiore.” am Bouwsma, Waning of the Renaissance, 170. pee Richard Cohn, “Uncanny Resemblances,” 285-323. See also John SchusterCraig, “An Eighth Mode of Limited Transposition,” Music Review 50 (1990), 296-306; and Richard Cohn, “Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems,

and the Analysis of Late Nineteenth-Century Triadic Progressions,” Music Analysis 15 (1996): 9-40. 33. Cohn, “Uncanny Resemblances,” 293, n. 24, confirms that both of the pas-

sages from “Moro lasso” which he cites were excerpted and discussed in Carl von Winterfeld’s Johannes

Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter (Berlin, 1834), vol. 2,

94-96. The opening of “Moro lasso” has been analyzed from every conceivable angle. McClary, Modal Subjectivities, 163-69, emphasizes the tenor’s role in pointing to the cadential tonic, A. The present author noted in Watkins, 204-5, similarities with a sequence of Phrygian cadences that conclude with an authentic cadence. Alan Curtis, in the program notes to his recording of Gesualdo’s Book VI (Symphonia 94133), forwarded a perspective based on a series of secondary dominants. Whatever the analytical perspective, no piece to my knowledge in the history of music to that time had begun with an opening C# major triad with an E# in the soprano, which, moreover, as a leading tone fails to rise to FA.

34.

Gesualdo’s “Languisce al fin” also dispatches the “uncanny” progression, repeated, though less dramatically separated by rests than “Mercé grido.” 35. Examples of “Mercé grido” and “Moro lasso” may be heard at wwnorton .com/books/the-gesualdo-hex. Performances courtesy of the Kassiopeia Quintet, Amsterdam, Tido Visser, director, and Glossa Records. 26.

For a different perspective see McClary, Modal Subjectivities,

157-63. The music

of the complete madrigal is reprinted on 341-43. 37- See Craig Wright,

The Maze and the Warrior (Cambridge, MA,

2001), 75.

Gregory of Nyssa (c. 331-c. 396) noted that “those who wander, caught in the labyrinth, do not know how to find the way out; but if they meet someone who knows this maze well, they undertake to follow him to the end, through the complicated and misleading turns of the edifice.” The metaphor is introduced that Christ entered the maze of life, “achieved victory, and escaped from this prison of death.” On a more technical note, McClary, “Modal Sub-

jectivitie,” 148, 165, 169, calls attention to an important factor little noted

before regarding the modal orientation of the tenor in the opening of “Moro lasso.” She then unexpectedly concedes that Gesualdo held onto the core idea of neo-modality “with only the most tenuous and ambivalent of threads,” despite the fact that he clearly gives some thought to organizing his collections as a whole according to modal patterns. 38. McClary,

148.

ADB

NoTES

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PAGES

52-55

39. McClary, 148. 40. Rather than investigating whether “melancholy inspires song or music induces sadness,” Wendy Heller has argued in an unpublished paper (“J pianti d’Apollo:

Desire, Melancholy, and the Power of Song,” at a conference, Music and Mel-

ancholy, 1400-1800, Princeton University, 26-27 October 2002) that “under the influence of Marinist esthetics, the debate presupposed that both sorrow and song have the power to arouse sexual desire.” . 4 Lan! Dichiaratione della lettera, published as an appendix to Claudio Monteverdi’s Scherzi musicali (Venice, 1607), reprinted with an introduction by Iain Fenlon, Bibliotheca musica bononiensis, sec. 4, no. 80 (Bologna, 1998). See also

Giuseppe Gerbino’s review, “Fontanelli’s Complete Madrigals,” Notes 59: 3

(2003): 751-53. 42. See Benedetto Croce, History of the Kingdom of Naples, trans. Frances Frenaye

(Chicago, 1970), 56, who speaks to the tradition of the Neapolitan knight errant seeking out countries at war during times of peace at home, and who observes that “according to Boccaccio Naples was ‘splendid’ above all other cities of Italy for the ‘frequency of its jousting.’” See also Wendy Heller, Marisa Biaggi, Richard Wistreich, “Di Marte io canto: Voices of Warriors,” workshop, Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland, 2006; and Wistreich, “Real Basses, Real Men—Virtt

and Virtuosity in

the Construction of Noble Male Identity in Late Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in TroJa: Trossinger Jahrbuch fiir Renaissance Musik 2: Gesang zur Laute, ed. Nicole Schwindt ( Kassel, Basel, 2003); and Wistreich, Courtier, Warrior, Singer: Giu-

lio Cesare Brancaccio. Performing Identity in Late Renaissance Italy (Ashford, UK, 2007).

43. Einstein, Italian Madrigal 2: 496 states that Lassus’s Lagrime di San Pietro is “an old man’s work, comparable in its artistry, its dimensions, its asceticism only

to the Musical Offering and the Art of Fugue.” 44. See especially Glenn Watkins’s edition of Sigismondo D’India’s Third and Eighth Book of Madrigals (Rome,

1980 and 1991), and Michelangelo Rossi,

The Madrigals, ed. Brian Mann, Monuments

of Renaissance Music (Chicago,

2002).

45. Regarding the history of “expression” see Nancy Kovaleff Baker, “Expression, GMO. 40.oC

Chromaticism was to become one of the central cornerstones of the Doctrine of Affections. See George Dyson and William Drabkin, “Chromatic,” GMO.

47.

Rob C. Wegman, “Artistic Temperament and Melancholy in the Renaissance,” conference paper at Music and Melancholy, 1400-1800, Princeton University, 26-27 October 2002. See also Wegman, “‘And Josquin Laughed . . .’:

Nores

to

PacGess

57-61

BD

Josquin and the Composer’s Anecdote in the Sixteenth Century,” pt. 2. Journal of Musicology 17 (1999): 319-57. 48. Giovanni Battista Doni, Compendio del trattato de’ generi e de’modi della musica (Rome, 1635), 112. 49. Penelope Gouk,

“Science and Music, or the Science of Music” in Towards

Tonality, ed. Peter Dejans (Leuven, 2007), 46. See Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. David Bryant (Cambridge, 1987), 7. For further arguments and demonstration of the possibilities see Alan Curtis’s recording of Book VI, Symphonia 94133.

- Tommaso Campanella, Medicinalium juxta propria principia (Leiden, 1635), 11: “Princeps Venusia musica clarissimus nostro tempore cacare non poterat: nisi verberatus a servo ad id adscito.” Trans. after Cecil Gray and Philip Heseltine, Carlo Gesualdo, Musician and Murderer (London, 1926), $1. . See Watkins, 82-83.

. The above quote is cited in Oskar Diethelm and Thomas F. Heffernan, “Felix Platter and Psychiatry,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Science 1 (1965): 19. . See Cogliano, Omicida, 121-22. . Crayton, “Un ritratto,” v. See also William B. Ober, Bottoms Up! A Patholo-

gist’s Essays on Medicine and the Humanities (Carbondale, IL, 1988), particularly

chapter 1, “Bottoms Up! The Fine Arts and Flagellation,” and Chapter 3, “Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa: Murder, Madrigals, and Masochism.”

. Laurie Goodstein, “Catholic Group Says of ‘Da Vinci Code’ Film: It’s Just Fiction,” New York Times, 7 February 2006.

$7. See Crayton, “Un ritratto,” v. 58. After I noted Crayton’s more compassionate tone in assessing Gesualdo’s psy-

chological profile, he replied to me thus: “You may remember that we previously discussed ‘schools’ of psychological theory. You noticed right away that I had made use of a ‘kinder, gentler’ interpretative scheme which is usually termed ‘self psychology.’ Gone is Freud’s raging inferno of rampant sexual and murderous impulses driving us; the new focus is on how we regulate the way we feel about ourselves. Freudian mayhem becomes a desperate derivative of the Self’s attempts to regulate itself.” E-mail to the author, 6 January 2006. 59. We have no way of knowing when his posthumously printed collection of six-voice madrigals may have been composed. CHAPTER igs 2.

3. MAcic,

MELANCHOLY,

AND

SPIRITUAL

EXERCISES

Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor (London, 1987). Jennifer Radden, “Melancholy through Our Contemporary Lens” in The Nature of Melancholy From Aristotle to Kristeva, ed. J. Radden (New York, 2000),

19-29. See also Wegman, “And Josquin Laughed.”

324

NorTEs

TO

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62-68

2B See Bouwsma, Waning of the Renaissance, 161; and especially Gouk, “Science and Music,” 45ff and $3ff. Als Jerome Groopman, “Faith and Healing,” New York Times, 27 January 2008. §. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. 1 (1621), cited in Radden,

Nature of Melancholy, 17. . See Burton, Anatomy, pt. 3, 425.

. See Bouwsma,

Waning of the Renaissance, 125-26.

. See Watkins, 360.

. Burton’s discussion of religious melancholy in The Anatomy of Melancholy, part

foe Wes AS, | 2

3, Section 4, occurs in the “Section on Love-Melancholy,” viewed as a distress

prompted by one’s love for God. L@z A fine performance of this work conducted by Philippe Herreweghe may be heard at www.youtube.com/watch?v-FhuZgGHT9pQ. 1ais Gesualdo’s last will and testament begins by beseeching the Holy Father for his infinite mercy and begs the intercession of the Virgin Mary as well as the glorious Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, the Archangel Michele, and finally Saints Domenic, Carlo Borromeo, Mary Magdalene, Catherine of Siena, and

Francis of Assisi. . The dimensions of the picture are 481 cm. X 310 cm. . See Watkins, 31, for the complete inscription.

. The chronology here revises that provided in Watkins in light of the recent determination of both date and authorship of the altarpiece. . This is visible in the frontispiece published in the first edition of my Gesualdo: The Man and his Music (Oxford, 1973). . Possibilities had included Sister Corona, sister of Carlo Borromeo; the wife of

the murdered Duke of Andria; and Gesualdo’s second wife, Eleonora.

. The ruff first appeared around 1555 and remained popular throughout the seventeenth century, not only in Spain but with variation in many other European countries. . See Vaccaro, Carlo Gesualdo, 168, for a detail of the picture.

19. See Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, 2 vols., trans. by William

Granger Ryan

(Princeton,

NJ, 1993), a thirteenth-cen-

tury work widely used in the Renaissance and a favorite source book for iconography. . Catherine was buried under the high altar of the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva

in Rome.

Later, however, her head was removed

and

taken to Siena, where to this day it is enshrined in the Dominican church there.

.In later centuries, confusion followed over the presence of three Marys: the “sinner” of Luke 7:36—50; the sister of Martha and Lazarus, Luke 10:38—42 and John 11; and Mary Magdalene.

NOTES

TO

PAGES

68-78

2215

DP\p See also Luke 8:2. DK, For more on Mary Magdalene see Luzzaschi, Sacrae Cantiones, xxviti-li. 24. One should not judge the dissonance quotient of “Illumina nos” from

the completion made of it by Stravinsky, who not only added the bass voice but also modified the rhythmic placement of some of the upper voices.

25) Stravinsky, Selected Correspondence, ed. and tr. Robert Craft (New York, 1984), vol. 2, 329. Krenek also made a translation for Craft of Gesualdo’s Psalms of the Compline, see ibid., 338. XS:

See Frederick W. Sternfeld’s review of Wolfgang Boetticher’s Orlando di Lasso und seine Zeit, 1532-1594, Musical Quarterly 45 (1959): 549. For a rich discus-

sion of number symbolism in Renaissance music in general see Willem Elders, Symbolic Scores: Studies in the Music ofthe Renaissance (Leiden, 1994). 2a Trattato della musica scenica (Rome,

1632), ch. 17, p. 47. Charles Burney, A General History of Music (London, 1776), 220, fn. g. 29. Tinctoris served as singer, chaplain, and court tutor in the theory of music at the court of King Ferrante I and most of his writings and compositions date from his time in Naples. 30. Terminorum Musicae Diffinitorium, ed. Carl Parrish (London, 1963), 13. a3: Ottaviano Petrucci, Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A [1501], ed. Helen Hewitt 28.

and Isabel Pope (Cambridge, MA, 1942), 90. Bek Heinrich Glareanus, Dodecachordon [1542], ed. and tr. Clement A. Miller (N.p. 1965).

33. See Elders, Symbolic Scores, especially “Canon and Imitation as Musical Image

of the Three Divine Persona,” and Roger Bray’s review of Symbolic Scores in Music and Letters 76.4 (1995): 607-11. 34. Alfred Mann, J. Kenneth Wilson, and Peter Urquhart, “Canon,” GMO. 35. Bouwsma, Waning of the Renaissance, 162. 30. Carlo Piccardi, “Carlo Gesualdo: L’aristocrazia come elezione,” Rivista italiana

di musicologia 9 (1974): 83, confirms the hypothesis that Gesualdo may have been innocent of the Molinaro publication. See, however, Gesualdo, Paritura,

7-8, in which the editors convincingly propose a direct connection between this publication and the Neapolitan composer Scipione Dentice, whose Primo Libro de Madrigali had been published by Molinaro only the year before. CHAPTER . Bianconi,

““Gesualdo,”

NGO,

4. Last WORDS and

Piccardi,

“Carlo

Gesualdo,”

104-16,

test Gesualdo’s sacred music at length against the tenets of the CounterReformation.

. Piccardi, 109, related it thus: “In divinis officiis, auat omnino in ecclesiis, nec profana cantica, sonive, nec in sacris canticis molles flexiones, vocis magis

gutturae oppressae quam ore expressae, aut denique lasciva ulla canendi ratio

2210

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TO

PAGES

78—80

abhibeantur.” But see also the editorial by Valentino Donella in Bollettino Ceciliano, October 2007, which includes a slight variation on this text.

. In response to a query Prof. Stefano Mengozzi wrote as follows in a communcation of 26 January 2008: “If ‘molles flexiones’ were ‘chromatic inflections,’ and if those were the enemy in sacred music, then why would it matter whether you produce them with the mouth or with the throat, and what does it mean to do either anyway? I have looked at the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, and the term ‘flexio’ seems remarkably rare in Latin theory, even though the term had a musical meaning from the Middle Ages to the late Renaissance. Isidore of Seville defines Cantus as ‘inflexio vocis per arsim et thesim,” that is, “the inflection of the voice ascending and descending,’ but nowhere to be found is the expression ‘mollis flexio,’ not to speak of its presumed opposite, “dura flexio.’ . . . It occurs to me that one possible translation of ‘molles flexiones’ is the ‘portamento’ or gliding figure, or other guttural sounds that you hear sometimes in modern performances.” . Lewis H. Lockwood, “Vincenzo Ruffo and Musical Reform after the Council

of Trent,” Musical Quarterly 43 (1957): 348-49. . Watkins, 264-65. For a clarification of the Council of Trent’s action with

respect to the issue of textual intelligibility see Craig Monson, “The Council of Trent Revisited,”

JAMS 55 (2002): 1-37.

. The practical result, clearly observable in Giovanni Ghizzolo’s Concerti all’uso moderno of 1611 and especially welcomed by organists for its inclusion ofa continuo, demonstrates that such new practices could also on occasion be found in the company of achromatic melodic subject, though harmonized by predictable dominant-tonic progressions. See Robert Kendrick, The Sounds of Milan, 1585-1650 (Oxford, 2002), 258-63. For more on Federigo Borromeo’s

views on the role of music and its Neoplatonic foundation, which claimed music’s practical effect on the soul and on behavior, see p. 98. . It appears in Vicentino’s L’antica musica ridotta alla moderna pratica [1555], fol. 67.

. See Guido Pannain, ed., L’Oratorio dei Filippini e la Scuola Musicale di Napoli (Milan, 1934), lili. 9. Lewis Lockwood, The Counter-Reformation and the Masses of Vincenzo Ruffo (Vienna, 1970). 10. A sample from Gesualdo’s “Tristis est anima mea” may be seen and heard at “Carlo Gesualdo,” GMO,

ex. 4.

- See also Watkins, 211-12, for some comparative examples. . Bianconi, “Gesualdo,” GMO. . | bother to mention the fine acoustical properties of Santa Maria delle Grazie having tested them repeatedly in person and at various places, including the choir balcony at the rear of the church.

NOTES

TO

PaGEs

81-85

BAY

14. For a detailed study on Gesualdo’s Responsoria and their relation to the concept

of Mannerism see Maria Manuela Toscano, Maneirismo inquieto: os responsorios de Semana

Santa de Carlo Gesualdo, pref. Rui Vieira Nery, 3 vols. (Lisbon,

2007). 15. Indeed, here death once more takes on the notion of the “uncanny” as it would later be described by Freud (“The Uncanny”) and by the romantics such as Edgar Allen Poe (“The Premature Burial”) and E. T. A. Hoffmann (“The Sandman”). 16. Although no longer part of the official rites of the Catholic Church, various abbreviated versions of Tenebrae are still celebrated in some Catholic churches as well as Protestant ones. 17. Gary Tomlinson,

Music in Renaissance Magic (Chicago,

1993), 145. A great

deal of this discussion takes issue with D. P. Walker’s view of the relationship between text and music outlined in his Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958; repr. University Park, PA, 2000). The force of

Ficino, Neoplatonism, and even numerology on Wagner’s operas has also been subjected to detailed scrutiny. See Jonathan Christian Petty and Marshall Tuttle, “The Genealogy of Chaos: Multiple Coherence in Wagnerian Music Drama,” Music and Letters 79 (1998): 72-98. See also Ruth Tatlow, Bach and the Riddle of the Number Alphabet (Cambridge, 1991). 18. Thomas

Christensen,

“Genres

of Music

Theory,

1650-1750,’

>

in Towards

Tonality (Leuven, 2007), 15.

19. The number 729 is also, since 1916, the reciprocal of the fine-structure con-

stant for hydrogen. 20.

See Maricarmen Gomez, “Sibyl, Song of the,” GMO.

Dales

Whatever our resistance to this game of numbers today, it is fascinating to learn how Mark David Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon, was obsessed with the number 27 as a continuation of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, a book with 26 chapters that Chapman was carrying when he shot Lennon. But, amazingly, we also learn that Lennon himself was profoundly attached to the number 27 stemming from his interest in numerology and to the number nine in particular, together with all its multiples. Interestingly enough, he lived in New York at the famous Dakota apartments on West 72nd Street. See Robert Rosen, Nowhere Man: The Final Days ofJohn Lennon (Oakland, CA, 2002).

Ay Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 125. AB Tomlinson, 132. 24. See Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Phi-

losophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2007), regarding the idea that medical and spiritual cures were pursued in tandem by physicians and

moralists in the early modern period. 25% Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 133.

B28

Notes

26. Tomlinson,

TO

PAGES

86-91

141.

Dy.

For a sample of Borromeo’s writings on the subject see Kendrick, Sounds of

28.

There is a large literature on Renaissance numerology, magic, and other related topics, a perspective similarly on display in English literature, where Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare mull over the magical, transforming power of art. It is also well to note that a mixture of natural magic, alchemy, and other occult sciences continued to resonate in the world of music theory throughout the seventeenth century. See especially Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England

29. 30. AY. OE

Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 237-38.

Milan, 98.

(New Haven, CT, 1999). See “Ethos,” GMO.

Facsimile edition, edited by Edward Lowinsky (New York, 1959).

Di Benedetto and Fabris, “Naples.” 33) See Scipione Cerreto, Della prattica musica vocale et stramentale (Naples, 1601), 173. The importance of this extension was audible not only in the late Italian

madrigal but well into the Baroque and later periods: one need only recall the poignant lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas or the Crucifixus from Bach’s B-minor Mass to sense its impact. See Ellen Rosand, “The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament,” Musical Quarterly 65 (1979): 346-59; Peter Williams, The Chromatic Fourth (Oxford, 1997); and Glenn Watkins, “D’India,

the Peripatetic” in Con che soavita: Studies in Italian Opera, Song, and Dance, 1580-1740, ed. Iain Fenlon and Tim Carter (Oxford, 1995), 43-48.

34. See Roland Jackson, “On Frescobaldi’s Chromaticism and Its Background,” Musical Quarterly 57 (1971): 255—69, for a rich survey of the issue. 35. See McClary, Modal Subjectivities, 165, and Ross Duftin, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (New York, 2006). . The canzon francese, if it is by Gesualdo, would be the sole exception; the more stably chromatic gaghiarda could readily be performed by viols or keyboard. . See Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, CT, 1986), 91-93.

. Pierre Boulez, “The Musician Writes: For the Eyes of the Deaf?” trans. Robert Samuels, in The Pleasure of Modernist Music, ed. Arved Ashby (Rochester, NY, 2004), 205.

. See Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 370-71.

. See Edward Said, “Thoughts on Late Style,” London Review of Books (August 2004). . See Di Benedetto

and Fabris, “Naples,” for a more

complete view of the

Neapolitan aristocratic circle. Regarding the Neapolitan aristocracy see also Buckley Harris Crist, “The ‘Professional Amateur’: Noble Composers, Court

NorTes

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PAGES

92-101

329

Life, and Musical Innovation in the Late Sixteenth-Century” (Ph.D. diss., Yale

University, 2004). AQ. An interior inscription announces its dedication “al Nome di Gésu e all’Immacolata Concezione di Maria,” and the church became popularly known as the “Gésu Nuovo.”

43. “Carolus Gesualdus / Compsae Comes Venusiae Princeps / Sancti Caroli Borromaei sorore genitus / coelesti clarior cognatione quam regum sanguine North-mannorum / sepulcrali sub hac ara sibi suisque erecta / cognatos cineres cinere fovet suo / donec una secum animentur ad vitam / Societas Jesu sibi superstes ac postera / integrae pietatis / oculata semper testis memor posuit / quod vero hanc ipsam gentilitiam aram / An. Sal. Hum MDCLXXXVIII Irruente terremotu magna ex parte labefactum / Dominicus Gesualdus Sancti Stephani Marchio / Pristino restituerit nitori / eadem Societas hoc grati animi addidit auctarium.” I was initially informed of this burial site by Michele Zarella on a visit to Gesu-

44.

aldo and the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in 2005. See also Annibale

Cogliano, “La pala del perdono: topos della seconda meta del XIX secolo,” Centro Studi e Documentazioni Carlo Gesualdo, http://carlogesualdo.altervista .org/pagine/pala_perdono.htm; Informatio relevij illustrissimae donna Isabellae Jesualdae, principissae per mortem illustrissimi uondam domini Caroli Jesualdi eius avi, sequuta sub die 8° septembris 1613, capta per me Ioannem Antonium de Filippo commissarium Regi Camarae Summariae; and the archives of S. Canio di Calitri, according to which the body of Gesualdo had been interred in Santa Maria della Grazie in Gesualdo, later to be transported to the Gest Nuovo in Naples. See also Cogliano, Omicida 146-47.

45.

“Visita Apostolica di PierAndrea Benedetti, vescovo di Venosa, anno

1630,”

Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Congregazione del Clero e dei Regolari, Visita Apostolica n. 162, foll. roo—102. See Cogliano, Carlo Gesualdo, 147: “le ossa

mortali di Carlo e di suo figlio Emanuele” were interred “nella stessa cassa plumbea.” 40. The statues of Jeremiah and David have been variously and erroneously attrib-

uted to Costantino Masai and Andrea Lazzari. The spire of San Domenico, in the piazza outside the church where Gesualdo’s first wedding took place and just across the street from the Palazzo San Severo, was also designed by Fanzago and begun following the plague of 1656.

47.

See Angela Schiattarella, Gest Nuovo (Castellammare di Stabia, Italy, 1997), VEE ED

CHAPTER

§. CONVERSATIONS

AT THE BRINK

. Conversation with the author around 1955.

_ The essentially complete collection of Leibowitz’s letters to Schoenberg came

38 O

NOTESEL

OF RAGESST

Or

10:0

as a gift to the University of Michigan in the early 1970s from Schoenberg’s sons, Ronald and Lawrence, as a result of the university’s discussions with the

Schoenberg estate regarding the possibile relocation of the Schoenberg Archive to its School of Music building in Ann Arbor. The location of LeibowitzSchoenberg correspondence can be summarized thus: seventy-four items are housed at the University of Michigan; three at the Library of Congress; and the location of two early items cannot currently be identified. . See Sabine Meine, Ein Zwolfténer in Paris: Studien zu Biographie und Wirkung von René Leibowitz (1913-1972), (Augsburg, 2000), 162-66, for a few brief excerpts

and a clear interpretation of the essence of the correspondence. . See Schoenberg, “Composition With Twelve Tones (1)” [1941], in his Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein (New York, 1975), 218.

. For an in-depth discussion of the issue see Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge, 2003). . See Mark Stephen Carroll, “Jean-Paul Sartre, René Leibowitz and the Musi-

cian’s Conscience,” Context 22 (2001): 89-94. . See Sabine Meine, “René Leibowitz,” GMO.

. Milton Babbitt, review of Schoenberg et son école and Qu’est ce que la musique de douze sons in JAMS 3 (1950), 57-60. . “Pierre Boulez, el inventor de sonidos,” La Musica Emol, 13 October 1996.

Io.

jai

Author’s translation. Reinhard Kapp, “Shades of the Double’s Original: René Leibowitz’s dispute with Boulez,” originally published in Zeitschrift fiirMusiktheorie 2 (1987), Heft I, reproduced in Tempo 165 (1988): 2-3, translated by Inge Goodwin. All citations from the Leibowitz-Schoenberg correspondence are courtesy of and with the permission of the University of Michigan Special Collections Library.

12. Jan Maguire, “René Leibowitz (1913-1972),

Tempo 131 (1979): 7.

oe He specifically refers to measures 8 and 12 in the first movement of the concerto. T4. Arnold Schoenberg, Letters, ed. Erwin Stein, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York, 1964), 236. This letter was written in English. St Schoenberg Letters, 245-47. Original written in English. 16.

See Glenn E. Watkins, “Schoenberg and the Organ,” Perspectives ofNew Music

(1965): 119-35. in Marilyn Mason, the only person ever to perform Schoenberg’s organ varia-

tions for the composer, has stated that Schoenberg insisted that the “recitative” should be played only with 8' stops, and in order to honor the successive markings of mf, f, and ff of the monophonic main theme, she drew multiple 8' stops on the enclosed Swell division, which permitted dynamic gradations. Schoenberg also expressed great displeasure with the mixture stops, which

NorTes

TO

-PaGes

109=11

33 il

Prof. Mason felt was due to his lack of exposure to the organ and the sound of mixtures. Curiously, however, the autograph score discloses that Schoenbe rg wrote out simultaneous octaves in four different registers in the pedal. The question of octave doubling obviously continued to haunt the composer. For recollection of her meetings with Schoenberg, see her “Lessons with Schoenberg,” in Reflections 1947-1997, ed. Marilyn Mason and Margarete Thomsen (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997), 132-34. 18.

Schoenberg et son école (Paris, 1947), trans. Dika Newlin as Schoenberg and His School (New York, 1949), 126-29, and especially L’évolution de la musique, de Bach a Schoenberg (Paris, 1951), 216-17.

19. Schoenberg’s opening harmonic accompaniment has since been analyzed in ways that Leibowitz did not perceive at the time. See especially Andrew Mead, “Twelve-Tone Organizational Strategies: An Analytical Sampler,” Intégral 3

(1990): 93-169. 20.

Leibowitz had written: “For the Schoenberg program I would Chamber Symphony, op. 38, Suite, op. 29 (or Quintet, op. 26), leon, op. 41, Ist Chamber Symphony, op. 9; for the other concert: ican composer (L. Stein?) or perhaps Actus Tragicus by Erich Itor I think is very good (or both); a work of my own; a work by L. Webern’s Symphony op. 21 or Concerto, op. 24.” CHAPTER

ey

6. “ON

REVIENT

suggest: 2nd Ode to Naposome AmerKahn, which Dallapiccola;

TOUJOURS”

. Arnold Schoenberg, “Tonality and Form” (1925), in his Style and Idea, 256.

. As we shall discover, Stravinsky was equally incensed by a prevailing indifference to the vertical aspect of music among twelve-tone composers. See an interview with Jay S. Harrison, New York Herald Tribune, 21 December 1952, and Igor and Vera Stravinsky: A Photograph Album (New York, 1982), 31. . Schoenberg, Structural Functions ofHarmony (New York, 1948), 18. ow 4. Arnold Schoenberg Correspondence: A Collection of Translated and Annotated Letters Exchanged with Guido Adler, Pablo Casals, Emanuel Feuermann, and Olin Downes, ed. Egbert M. Ennulat (Metuchen, NJ, 1991), 221. ibide mst

6. William Bolcom, letter to author of 3 July 2003. . See, Sabine Feisst, “Arnold Schoenberg—American,” in abstracts for a meeting of the American Musicological Society, Quebec, 2007, 148. The inclination,

of course, could be traced further back still to Karl May’s cowboy and Indian stories and their successors, which had been popular among German-speaking people since the nineteenth century. . Schoenberg, Style and Idea, 109-10.

. See William W. Austin’s observation of this point in his Music in the 2oth Century, from Debussy to Stravinsky (New York, 1966), 207.

Bnaee

NOoOmES.

TO

PAGES

116-122

. Schoenberg, Letters, 164. Charles Rosen, “Schoenberg: The Possibilities of Disquiet,” in his Critical Entertainments (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 280-81. 12.

See Caroll, Music and Ideology, chapters 7-9, for a rigorous consideration of this issue.

See Glenn Watkins, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley, DOO), 22D=D?).

:

. Pierre Boulez, Notes of an Apprenticeship (New York, 1968), 271; enlarged version of“Schoenberg Is Dead,” The Score (May 1952). _See Antoine Goléa, Rencontres avec Pierre Boulez (Paris, 1958), 44.

. Regarding the exodus of students from Messiaen to Leibowitz, see Christopher Boivin, La classe de Messiaen (Paris, 1995), 56-62.

See René Leibowitz, “Olivier Messiaen: Ou l’hédonisme empirique dans la musique contemporaine,” L’arche 9 (September 1945): 139, and Pierre Boulez,

“Proposals,” in his Notes of an Apprenticeship, 61; originally published in Polyphonie 2 (1948). 18. Pierre Boulez, Claude Samuel, and Gilbert Amy, Eclats 2002 (Paris, 2002), 370,

author’s translation. 19. Eclats 2002, 397, author’s translation. The full title of Leibowitz’s book to which Boulez refers is L’évolution de la musique, de Bach a Schcenberg (Paris, 195 I). 20.

Eclats 2002, 398—99, author’s translation.

21.

But compare in this regard Richard S. Hill’s early analysis of Schoenberg’s Ode in Notes 7 (1949): 133-35, with Martin Boykan’s “The Schoenberg Trio:

22

Tradition at an Apocalyptic Moment” in Music ofMy Future: The Schoenberg Quartets and Trio, ed. Reinhold Brinkmann and Christoph Wolff, Harvard Publications in Music (2000), 161-72. . For later perspectives on the work see Tomi Makela, “Schénbergs Klavierkonzert Opus 42: Ein romantisches Virtuosenkonzert? Ein Beitrag zur Analyse der kompositorischen Prinzipien eines problematischen Werkes,” Die Musikforschung 45 (1992): 1-20; and Dika Newlin, “Secret Tonality in Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto,” Perspective of New Music 13 (1974), 137-39.

23, See also Boulez, Eclats 2000, 204. Boulez further articulates the importance of Dufay with respect to rhythm (in the company of Philippe de Vitry, Guillaume de Machaut, and Claude Le Jeune) in Notes of an Apprenticeship (New York,

1968), 143-44. 24. Domaine Musical, foreword to the inaugural season booklet, 1953-54, 71-72.

See Dominique Jameux, Pierre Boulez, trans. Susan Bradshaw (London, 1991), 61-62. DS. The remaining concerts were largely given over to the same group of preferred

composers plus Varése, Berg, Bruno Maderna, Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, and

NOTES

TO

PAGES

122-126

Bios

two World War I pieces: Debussy’s En Blanc et noir and Ravel’s Frontispice. See Jameux Boulez, 71-72, for the complete programs and Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 387-90, regarding the original context of the Debussy and Ravel pieces. 26. Guillaume de Machaut, Musikalische Werke, ed. Friedrich Ludwig (vol. 4, ed. Heinrich Besseler) (Leipzig, 1926-54); a new edition of the works, issued in 2

vols. as Polyphonic Music of the Fourteenth Century, 2-3, ed. Leo Schrade (Monaco, 1956), appeared shortly thereafter. It was republished in 5 vols. as his Oeuvres compleétes, with prefaces by Stanley Boorman (Monaco, 1977). The Dufay edition was edited by Besseler (1951-66) with important introductions to each volume. 27 The fact that Craft’s first Gesualdo recording used Wilhelm Weismann’s 1931

Peters Edition of eight Gesualdo madrigals as a point of departure (clearly visible in a photo made ofthe group at the time) indicates the scarcity of available editions. eye

See Boulez, Notes of an Apprenticeship (New York, 1968), 287.

29. Michael Hicks, “Exorcism and Epiphany: Luciano Berio’s Nones,” Perspectives

of New Music 27 (1989): 254.

30. Luciano Berio, “Meditation on a Twelve-Tone Horse,” Christian Science Monitor, 15 July 1968. 30. Private communication to the author. 52, See Pierre Boulez, “Schoenberg est mort,” in his Relevés d’apprenti (Paris, 1966), 271. The article first appeared as “Schoenberg Is Dead,” in The Score

6 (1952): 18-22. Regarding the larger argument of the force of the serial movement for young composers in American institutions of higher learning see Joseph N. Straus, “The Myth of Serial “Tyranny,” Musical Quarterly 83 (1999): 301-43; Anne C. Shreffler, “The Myth of Empirical Historiography: A

Response to Joseph N. Straus,” Musical Quarterly, 84 (2000): 30-39; and Straus, “A Response to Anne C. Shreffler,” ibid., 40.

3 w . See also Boulez, Eclats 2002, 383. Speaking of the postwar climate, Boulez remarked that it was also a time when one resented that Schoenberg’s heritage had been taken over by inferior imitators.

34. Personal communication, 25 March 2003. 35 See Shreffler, ““The Myth,” and Straus, “A Response.” Whatever the distinction between European and American practice, it should be adjusted to include Milton Babbitt’s early interest in rhythmic serialism, along with pitch ordering, in his Three Compositions for Piano (1947-48) prior to Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités (1949) or Boulez’s wholesale ordering of various

parameters in Structures I (1951). See Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1988), 528-30. 30. Despite the powerful forces reviewed above, a similar caution must be applied

BAL

NOTESET

OMBAGES

IO

ha

to the notion that serialism invaded and ultimately conquered a majority of composition departments of American universities for any length of time. Once again we are talking about matters of historiography, the way things get reported, repeated, and ultimately accepted. 37: Mann, Wilson, and Urquhart, “Canon,” GMO. 38. Said, “Thoughts on Late Style.” This material is reworked in a somewhat dif-

ferent way in Said’s On Late Style (New York, 2006), 6-7. 39. See Watkins, “Schoenberg and the Organ,” 119-35.

AO. See Tim Lawrence, “Said, Late Style and the Aesthetic of Exile,” Third Text

38 (1997): 15-24. 4

=

Anthony Tommasini, “Four String Quartets, Written by One Man Over Half a Century,” New York Times, 9 March 2007.

42. “The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin: A Conversation with Richard Taruskin,” www.oup.com/us/brochure/0195169794/qa.pdf.

43. 44.

Letter to René Leibowitz, 4 July 1947, in Schoenberg, Letters. Said, On Late Style, 13.

AS.WN Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and

Wesley V. Blomster (New York, 2004), 19. See also Adorno’s “Late Style in Beethoven” in his Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley, 2002), 564-67. 40. Edward Rothstein, “Twilight of the Gods,” a review of Edward Said, On Late

Style (New York, 2006), New York Times, 16 July 2006.

47. Schoenberg, Style & Idea, 144. See also Anthony Tommasini, “No Supertitle Goes Here, and That’s

a Good Thing,” New York Times, 22 July 2007, which

argues that Britten, Verdi, Wagner, Rossini, and virtually all opera composers did not intend that audiences should get all the words. Tommasini wrote a follow-up article, “So That’s What the Fat Lady Sang,” New York Times, 6 July 2008. 48. See especially Charlotte M. Cross and Russell A. Berman,

eds., Political and

Religious Ideas in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg (New York, 2000), and Cross and Berman, eds., Schoenberg and Words: The Modernist Years (New York, 2000). . Doni, Compendio, 112. . Hugo Leichtentritt, “The Renaissance Attitude towards Music,” Musical Quarterly 1 (1915): 615. . Madrigali a cinque voci, trascritti in notazione moderna con sottoposto un sunto per pianoforte, ed. Udebrando Pizzetti (Milan, 1919).

. Egon Wellesz, “Schoenberg and Beyond,” Musical Quarterly 2 (1916): 89. . Recorded on Naxos 8.557520.

. David Gompper in conversation with the author, November 2007.

NOTES

TO

PAGES

133-141

3385

SS. See Anthony Tommasini, “Unraveling the Knots of the 12 Tones,” New York Times, 14 October 2007. CHAPTER

7. CANTICUM

SACRUM

. Said, On Late Style, 148.

- Note the title of the concluding volume of Stephen Walsh’s biography: Stravinsky: The Second Exile, France and America, 1934-1971 (New York, 2006). . See Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 154—56, for a discussion ofthese national anthems.

- Rachard Taruskin, The Russian Stravinsky (Berkeley, 1996), provides an analysis of his life and works through the opera Mavra of 1922. Sy

Richard Taruskin, “Nationalism,” GMO.

6. Journal de Genéve, 14 November

1928, quoted in Vera Stravinsky and Rob-

ert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York, 1978), 630, fn. 43.

Compare the first part of the second sentence here with one made by the composer in Komsomolskaia pravda, 27 September 1962, on his return to Russia: “T have spoken Russian all my life, I think in Russian, my way of expressing myself is Russian. Perhaps this is not immediately apparent in my music, but it is latent there, a part of its hidden nature.” . Arnold Whittall, “Stravinsky in Context,’ "in The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Jonathan Cross (Cambridge, 2003), 38, 40. Recognition that the attention Stravinsky accorded Austro-Germany escalated especially after World War I has been advanced elsewhere at length. See Watkins, Proof Through the Night, 140-54. oo

. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Conversations with Igor Stravinsky (Garden City, NY

y196r); 129:

. Ibid., 116-17. See also Walsh, Stravinsky, the Second Exile, 370. Io.

Russell Lynes wrote an article entitled “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” that appeared in the February 1949 issue of Harper’s. A chart on American tastes classified from highbrow to lowbrow appeared in Life magazine two months later on 11 April 1949.

in.

See Scott Messing, Neoclassicism in Music (Ann Arbor, MI, 1988), 22, for further

evidence of an interest in early music in Russia. . See ibid., 132-35.

.See Glenn Watkins, “Canon and Stravinsky’s Late Style,’ in Confronting Stravinsky, ed. Jann Pasler (Berkeley, 1986), 224-25, 230-35. The expression is borrowed from a symposium entitled “Building Music,” sponsored by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in May 2004, in >

which parts of this material were presented. Est The consecration of the Duomo

of Florence in 1435, for example, brought

2316

NOTES

TO

PAGES

141-149

forth the commission of an extraordinary motet by Guillaume Dufay, whose

formal proportions between the sections were specifically structured to replicate the measurements of the Temple of Solomon. See Craig Wright, “Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores, King Solomon’s Temple, and the Veneration of the Vir-

gin,” JAMS 47 (1994): 395-441. 16.

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York, 1922),

chap. 2. : igh. Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum eventually did play in Walt Disney Hall, on 5

June 2004. For a review of the sea change that eventually occurred in international concert halls see Nicolai Ouroussoff, “The Best Buildings You Ever Heard,” New York Times, 3 June 2007.

Stephen Walsh, “Stravinsky,” GMO; Walsh states that approval of the request came only “‘a month before the premiére.” See also Claudia Vincis and Paolo Dal Molin, “Mo(nu)mento di Carlo Gesualdo,” Acta Musicologica 76 (2004): 227: 19. V. Stravinsky and R. Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 183. 20. Ibid., 429. OE. Ibid. 22. Robert Craft, Glimpses of a Life (New York, 1992), 8-9. 23% Robert Craft, “A Concert for Saint Mark,” The Score 18 (1956). See also Craft, “Igor Strawinsky: Canticum Sacrum ad honorem Sancti Marci Nominis,” 18.

Tempo 40 (1956). Craft’s direct architectural parallels of 1957 were later cast somewhat aside when he noted that “Stravinsky did not, however, base the

Canticum on an architectural analogy—as, for example, Busoni did in a fugue inspired by the proportions of the Palace of the Popes at Avignon.” See V. Stravinsky and R. Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 433-34. 24. Robert Craft, notes to recording, Igor Stravinsky, the Composer, vol. 7 (Music Masters Classics 01612-6752-2). 2S. See Watkins, Pyramids, 262-63 and especially 370-71. 26.

See Messing, Neoclassism in Music, 133, regarding opinions registered by both Roland-Manuel in “La quinzaine musicale—L’octuor d’Igor Stravinsky,” L’éclair, 29 October 1923, 3, and Nadia Boulanger.

27. See Robert Craft, “Concert for St. Mark,” and his “Strawinsky: Canticum Sacrum.” 28.

See Watkins, “Canon and Stravinsky’s Late Style,” 224-26.

29. Stravinsky, Selected Correspondence, 3: 393-94. 30. See Egidio Pozzi, “Stravinskij l'inattuale? Otto lettere inedite di Stravinskij:

le vicende di un commissione veneziana,” Catalogo della Biennale Musica 1999, La Biennale di Venezia, ed. Egidio Pozzi (Venice, 1999), 152. See also Robert

Craft, preface to Gesualdo-Stravinsky, Tres Sacrae Cantiones (New York, 1960). “Venice would not hear of aNeapolitan in the precincts of San Marco.”

Nores

To

PAcgs

149-156

Besar),

ary Robert Craft, “A Note on Gesualdo’s ‘Sacrae Cantiones’ and on Gesualdo and Stravinsky,” Tempo 45 (1957): 6. bon Stravinsky, Selected Correspondence, 1: 257. 33. As Stravinsky’s letter to Nabokov of 19 February 1958 confirmed, problems with Piovesan, premieres, and Gesualdo were to resurface with the first per-

formance of Threni.

34.

Glenn

Watkins,

“Canon

and Stravinsky’s Late Style,” 224-27.

See also

Claudia Vincis, “Stravinskij ricompone Bach: Le Choral-Variationen tiber das Weihnachtslied ‘Vom Himmel hoch, da komm’ ich her,” in Album Amicorum Albert Dunning in occasione del suo LXV Compleanno, ed. Giacomo Fornari (Turnhout, 2002), 689-712. 35. Milton Babbitt, “Remarks on the Recent Stravinsky,” Perspectives of New Music

2 (1964): 49. 306. See Leonard Stein, “Composition with Twelve Tones,” in Schoenberg, Style

and Idea, 235 and 248; and Watkins, “Canon and Stravinsky’s Late Style,”

240. 37. Heinrich Isaac, Choralis Constantinus, vol.

2 [Nuremberg,

1555], ed. Anton

von Webern, Denkmaler der Tonkunst in Oesterreich, 32, Jahrg. XVI/1 (Vienna, 1909). Bye. Isaac, Choralis Constantinus,

Book 3 [Nuremberg,

1555], ed. Louise Cuyler

(Ann Arbor, MI, 1950). 39. In an interview with Stravinsky in July 1952, after the Paris Festival in May,

Albert Goldberg quotes the composer saying “Erwartung is a wonderful work,” Los Angeles Times, 20 July 1952. AO. New York Herald Tribune, an interview with Jay S. Harrison, 21 December 19§2, reprinted in Igor and Vera Stravinsky: A Photograph Album (New York, 1982), © Robert Craft, p. 31. Reproduced by permission of Robert Craft. mite In the words of two American avant-gardist admirers of Stravinsky, such procedures had the net result of bringing “each product ‘down’ to the ‘zero’ level, with all forms starting in the same pitch class.” See Charles Wuorinen and Jeffrey Kresky, “On the Significance of Stravinsky’s Last Works” in Confronting Stravinsky, ed. Jann Pasler (Berkeley, CA, 1986), 263. Robert Craft, A Stravinsky Scrapbook, 1940-1971 (London, 1983), 56. See also Gs Stravinsky’s letter to his publisher of 19 May 1956 in Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents, 434.

43. See Robert Craft, Glimpses of a Life (New York, 1992), 59-60. 44. Stravinsky had only recently emulated the opening fanfare-like “Toccata” to Monteverdi’s Orfeo with his Overture to The Rake’s Progress. A 45. practice continued by Francesco Cavalli and G. F. Handel, among others. 406 ._A passage quoted from Plato, which refers to the ancient Phrygian harmonia (Republic, §399a).

338

47.

NoTES

TO

PAGES

156-164

Boulez has properly observed that most musicians are able to play the inversion of a given motive, while the same does not hold true for a retrograde of any length. Stravinsky’s music strikingly matches the latter description. See Boulez, “The Musician Writes,” 208.

48. See Iain Fenlon, “Music, Ceremony and Self-Identity in Renaissance Venice,”

Music & Anthropology, Journal of Musical Anthropology of the Mediterranean 1

(1996). 49. Giulio Ongaro,

“Venice, To 1600,”

GMO.

See also Wilton Mason,

“The

Architecture of St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Venetian Polychoral Style: A Clarification,” in Essays in the History, Style, and Bibliography ofMusic In Memory of Glen Haydon, ed. James Pruett (Chapel Hill, 1969), 171-73. §0. See Craft, Stravinsky Scrapbook, 57, 125. ite Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations, 22. CHAPTER

. The Origin of German

8. SACRAE

CANTIONUM

Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne

(London,

1985),

223. . Allan Kozinn, “Check the Numbers: Rumors of Classical Music’s Demise Are

Dead Wrong,” New York Times, 28 May 2006. . Robert Craft, “The Murderous Prince of Madrigalists,” High Fidelity, September 1961, 54-56, 130-31. “Aestimatus sum” was a Holy Week response, not a

madrigal, however. This work was ultimately recorded by Craft on a Gesualdo disc for Columbia records along with another of the responses from the same set, “Tristis est anima mea.” . This was due, he said, to the fact that Mrs. Adams had heard from Paul Henry

Lang, who had visited the Oratorio Filippini in October 1956, that the original publication was unavailable. The mistakes in “Tristis est antma mea” were equally egregious. At the text “et immolari pro vobis” (“and I go to be sacrificed for you”) Adams had transcribed a series of four G#s in the Cantus on the word “et immolari”; the correct reading is three G#s followed by a G natural. The expressive difference is dramatic. . See Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations, 33-34.

. Craft’s letter of 1 August includes a possible program, consisting of Lassus, “Laudate Dominum”;

Gesualdo sacred music: Psalms, a motet, Benedictus,

the two canonic motets (in my completions, it would seem, as Stravinsky had not yet made his versions), a response; Luzzaschi, “O dolcezza” (Craft remarks, “a wonderful piece”), Monteverdi,

152. Intermission. Webern,

“Lauda Jerusalem”; J. S. Bach, Cantata

Triosatz, opus posthumous, of 1925, (‘‘a fascinat-

ing sketch, nothing to do with the published Trio,” Craft adds); Stravinsky, Epitaphium (“a little piece for Prince Furstenberg, a memorial”); Stockhausen, Zyklus or Boulez 1st Mallarmé Improvisation; Schoenberg, Pierrot lunaire. By

Nortes

TO

PAaGEs

L64—=173

339

August 16 Craft changed the program as follows: Town Hall—Bach, Cantata 131; Monteverdi, Ballo; Stravinsky, Les Noces; Carnegie Hall—Debussy, Martyr de San Sabastien suite; Schoenberg, Die Gliickliche Hand; Stravinsky, Le Sacre; Gesualdo, sacred music; Luzzaschi, trio; Tallis, Lamentations; Monteverdi, “Lauda Jerusalem”; Stravinsky and Webern trios; Schoenberg, Pierrot.

- See Dorothy Lamb Crawford, Evenings On and Off the Roof (Berkeley, 1995), 150, 158—$9, 275; and Vincis and Dal Molin, “Mo(nu)mento,” 235. - My transcription was made from a British Library manuscript of Neapolitan keyboard works generously provided me by Roland Jackson. For the evidence behind the attribution see Watkins, 291-95. . The article appeared in his collection of essays Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (New York, 1956), also published as Adonis and the Alphabet (London, 1956), and reprinted in his On Art and Artists, ed. Morris Philipson (New York, 1960). 10.

See Aldous Huxley, Letters, ed. Grover Smith (London, 1969), nos. 722, 723,

Wille

Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, vol. 2: 1939-1963 (New York,

12.

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York, 1954), 50.

724, and 792. See also Vincis and Dal Molin, “Mo(nu)mento,” 235.

1974), 205. 13% Huxley, ibid. T4. Aaron Copland diary in the Aaron Copland Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress. The location of the diary within the collection is box 244, folder

13. I am grateful to Mark Katz for directing me to this source. Reproduced by permission of The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., copyright owner. iS; See chapter 10. 16. A volume of miscellaneous works (Psalms of the Compline, an instrumental gagliarda and canzon francese) was delayed until 1967. Gesualdo’s six books of madrigals, edited by Francesco Vatielli, had also been published in Rome in 1956-57 as part of the Monumenti

series of the Istituto italiano per la storia

della musica, Rome.

7 Portions

of this correspondence

were

previously reported in Watkins,

“Canon,” 232-36. 18. See Watkins “Canon,” 218—30, for the canonic features of these works.

19. For further details behind these completions as well as Stravinsky’s current

infatuation with canon see ibid. 20.

Walsh, Stravinsky, 647, n. 27, corroborates this.

21.

Lillian Libman, And Music, 81.

22. Jay Harrison, “Stravinsky Conducts Own Work at Town Hall,” New York Herald Tribune, 11 January 1960. 233 Walsh, Stravinsky, 417, incorrectly states that Lang did not attend this concert and sent his assistant, Jay Harrison, instead.

24. A good two minutes longer than most later recorded performances.

340

NOTES

TOVRAGES

175 —LoE

25. See Schoenberg, Style and Idea, 53-76. 26. His gesture did not imply, of course, that other human faculties should or even could be abandoned; he spoke of hierarchies. Pierre Boulez has also spoken engagingly of the combat between ear and eye, the latter yet another factor central to the act of composition. See Boulez, “Musician Writes,” 221-22.

27. Walsh, Stravinsky, 335-36.

28. See Steve Swayne, “American Musicology at the Crossroads, Contemporary Music in the Crosshairs: The Ideological Battle at G. Schirmer, Inc., at the

end of World War II,” in abstracts for a meeting of the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society (Quebec, 2007), 84-85. 29. Indeed, the topics that Craft and I exchanged were often as much about old music as new. In fact Craft’s letter, above, had begun with an acknowledgment

of information I had passed on to him, namely that two of the instrumental galliards he had recorded on an earlier Gesualdo disc were actually by Giovanni de Macque, a probable teacher of Gesualdo and member of his father’s academy, and that a third was by another pupil of Macque, Giovanni Maria Trabaci. At the same time I also shared with him my high opinion of Macque’s Seconda Stravaganza, concerning which Craft responded “I don’t know, and beg you to send.” I did, in fact, send him a copy, and he obviously liked it enough that praise for the work found its way into the next conversation book, Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Memories and Commentaries (Garden City, NY, 1960), IIT. CHAPTER

9. CLOSE

ENCOUNTERS

1. Igor Stravinsky’s paraphrase of Verdi (in a letter to Arrigo Boito, 4 October 1887), Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, tr. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge, MA, 1942), 43. 2. Ibid, 42.

3. Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, Expositions and Developments (Garden City, NY, 1962), 118-19.

4. The Sacher Archive contains several complete Gesualdo madrigals in Stravinsky’s hand. See Vincis and Dal Molin, “Mo(nu)mento,” ’ 221-51, for an elegantly detailed review ofStravinsky’s association with Gesualdo, with special reference to the Sacher Archive. 5. Robert Craft, “The Murderous Prince of Madrigalists,” High Fidelity, September 1961, 130. 6.C

Talk at the luncheon centered on which pieces should be recorded first for the newly projected Stravinsky edition by Columbia Records. Craft, ever ready with his legal-size yellow pad, took notes regarding repertoire suggestions as well as snippets of talk for later use in the conversation books.

Norges

TO

PAGES

181-190

BM il

. See Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise (New York, 2007), 388, regarding Boulez’s

stay at the Tropicana. . Bianconi, “Gesualdo,” GMO.

. Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions, 120. 10. Leibowitz, Schoenberg and His School, 26. Leibowitz’s summary statement occurs under the rubric of “Chromaticism” in his historical survey that opens chapter 2: Wt, Compare this with Martin Scherzinger’s objection to Adorno’s claim of “arbitrariness” in the pitch row of Schoenberg’s op. 23, no. 5. See his “In Memory of a Receding Dialectic: The Political Relevance of Autonomy and Formalism in Modernist Musical Aesthetics” in The Pleasure ofModernist Music, ed. Arved Ashby (Rochester, NY, 2004), 82. w2. Stravinsky and Craft, Memories, 100. eae Joseph Straus has called our attention to a characteristic of endings in Stravin-

sky’s late style, also traceable to his earlier works, “in which the concrete concerns of the preceding work seem to melt away in a sense of timeless ecstasy.” Joseph Straus, Stravinsky’s Late Music (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 139. 14. Stravinsky. and Craft, Expositions, 106. I had actually used the term “hocket” in my description of the Monumentum for the Columbia recording of it, which was made in June prior to its premiere in Venice in September. IL "A.

In 1938-39, Poulenc had set the following Tenebrae texts in his Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence: “Vinea mea electa,” “Tenebrae factae sunt,”

29

66

“Tristis

est anima mea,” and “Timor et tremor.” Carl Schmidt has also recounted that

during 1962, the last full year of Poulenc’s life, he could be found discussing the situation of Schoenberg at the time with Max Deutsch. He noted, too, that Poulenc devoted the first four of his last days at Noizay correcting proof of Sept répons. See Carl B. Schmidt, Entrancing Muse: A Documented Biography of Francis Poulenc (Hillsdale, NY, 2001), 455 and 460. 16. Walsh,

Stravinsky, 500. See Glenn Watkins, “Canon,” regarding Stravinsky’s

obsession with canon during this period. Wy In the latter instance Diaghilev had chosen the source model, but Gesualdo was only to an extent Stravinsky’s choice, too. Although he had already completed the three Gesualdo motets a few months before, Stravinsky dedicated the Monumentum to Craft with an announcement to the effect that “You made me do it, and I did it.” 18. See Milton

Babbitt, “The String Quartets of Bartok,” Musical Quarterly 35

(1949): 377-85, and Alan Forte, “Bartok’s Serial Composition,” Musical Quarterly 46 (1960): 233-45, on Fourth String Quartet. See also Watkins, Pyramids, 362, for a more complete discussion of Stravinsky’s 19. sense of history in this work.

BAD

20.

Notes

TO PAGES

192-200

See Marina Ritzarev, Eighteenth-Century Russian Music (Burlington, VT, 2006), Gave

21.

See Richard Taruskin, “The Traditions Revisited: Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles as Russian Music,” in Music Theory and the Exploration of the Past, ed. C. Hatch and D. W. Bernstein (Chicago, 1992), 525-50.

22. See Watkins, “Canon,” 235. 23h See Watkins, 217—46. 24. Walsh, Stravinsky, 435. AS. I can still see Claudio Spies working quickly to provide the horn parts at the rehearsal when Stravinsky changed his mind. 26. See Claudio Spies, “Some Notes on Stravinsky’s Requiem Setting,” in Perspectives on Schoenberg and Stravinsky, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ, 1972), 223-49. PagfeRegarding game theory and Stravinsky, see Watkins, Pyramids, 136-39. 28. Stravinsky and Craft, Expositions, 96-97.

Rosamund Bartlett, “Stravinsky’s Russian Origins,” The Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky, ed. Johnathan Cross (Cambridge, 2003), 3, reflects similar opinions made by Richard Taruskin and Stephen Walsh thus: “Above all, because of a sense of cultural inferiority which stemmed from the fact that Russia’s musical tradition was so much younger than that of other European nations, he came to disavow his own musical heritage, which necessitated embroidering a complex tapestry of lies and denials.” 30. Robert Craft, “My Life With Stravinsky,” New York Review of Books, 10 June

20%

1982.

31. It first appeared in Musique russe: études réunites, ed. Pierre Souvtchinsky (Paris,

1953), and was later published in Boulez’s Notes of an Apprenticeship, trans. Herbert Weinstock (New York, 1968), 72-145.

QP), Eric Walter White, Stravinsky (Berkeley, 1979), $43. 33. See Watkins, Pyramids, 360-74. 34. Robert Craft, Stravinsky: Chronicle ofaFriendship (New York, 1972), 64. 35. Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations,

79. It is a judgment that is echoed in Boulez’s encyclopedia article on Schoenberg of 1961, where he states that “the years from 1908 to 1915 produced all of [Schoenberg’s] most significant works.” He goes on to cite op. 11 and opp. 15-22 as “glorious” pieces that “sum up Schoenberg’s creative personality. It was in that universe—not tonal, but not yet serial—that he showed his most brilliant gifts, his greatest vitality.” See Boulez, Notes of an Apprenticeship, 361-62.

30.

See Anne C. ShrefHler, “Ideologies of Serialism: Stravinsky’s Threni and the Congress of Cultural Freedom,” in Music and the Aesthetics ofModernity, ed. Karol Berger and Anthony

Newcomb

(Cambridge,

MA,

2005), 217-45.

Regarding the Congress see also Walsh, Stravinsky, 261, 276, 285, 287, and 369, and especially Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology.

NOTES

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PAGES

200-209

RN?

37- See Carroll, ibid., 2 and 125, and Frederick Goldbeck, “Avantgarde: Ciphers,

Games and Spells,” in his Twentieth-Century Composers, vol. 4: France, Italy and Spain, ed. Nicolas Nabokov and Anna Kallin, introduction by Nicolas Nabokov (London, 1974), 126. . Schreffler’s richly pursued argument traces the entire story, both before and after Threni.

. Stravinsky and Craft, Conversations, 103.

. Kubler, Shape of Time, 45. . See Watkins, Pyramids, 373-74.

. A remark . Boulanger the tango . New York 1952. See ne.

I heard Boulanger make on several occasions. offered a similar but somewhat differently worded bit of advice to artist, Astor Piazzolla. Herald Tribune, an interview with Jay S. Harrison, 21 December Igor and Vera Stravinsky: A Photograph Album (New York, 1982),

45. See Taruskin, “Traditions Revisited,” 525-50. 46. The Library of Congress holds the autograph score of Monumentum pro Gesualdo,

however, and the two Gesualdo canonic motets are in the private collection of the present writer. Copies of several Gesualdo madrigals in Stravinsky’s hand, undertaken in preparation for the Monumentum, are in the Sacher Archive, however.

47.

Greg Sandow, “A Change of Tone,” a review of Stephen Walsh, Stravinsky: The Second Exile (2006), New York Times, 30 April 2006. 48. See Jennifer Dunning, “Balanchine and Stravinsky, Reunited,” New York Times, 18 January 2007. CHAPTER

10.

STOKING

THE

FLAME

. “Sonnets in Marble,” review of Desiderio da Settignano exhibition, National Gallery of Art, Washington, New York Times, 10 August 2007. Reprinted by permission.

. As late as 1968 1n his article “Carlo Gesualdo and a Musical Correspondence of 1594,” 409, Anthony Newcomb reported that not only had Stravinsky and

Huxley demonstrated an interest in Gesualdo’s music but also that “there are several phonograph records of his music.” The implied rarity 1s telling. . Stravinsky, Selected Correspondence, 2: 332-33. A footnote adds: “The transcrip-

tions, from the Library of Congress copy of the 1611 score book, were the work of Lawrence Morton and the present writer.” . The quotation appeared on several recordings, including Columbia KL $718, Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince ofMadrigalists: Tributes to His Astonishing Life and Music. . Lamentatio Jeremiae prophetae (1941-42) was written following study of Ock-

34

4

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PAGES

209-212

eghem, and Krenek reported on this in “A Discussion of the Treatment of Dissonances in Okeghem’s Masses as Compared with the Contrapuntal Theory of Joh. Tinctoris,” Hamline Studies in Musicology, vol. 2 (St Paul, 1947), 1-26. For his knowledge of Ockeghem’s music Krenek would have been indebted to Dragan Plamenac’s edition, the first volume of which appeared in 1927 (reprinted 1959). Further traces of Ockeghem fever also surfaced in

works of Ligeti, Harrison Birtwistle (an arrangement of Ockeghem’s “Ut heremita solus”) and the Dutch composer Ton de Leeuw (Lamento Pacis), a work divided into three parts, dedicated respectively to Gesualdo da Venosa, Zeami (cofounder of Noh drama), and Ockeghem. . Stravinsky, Selected Correspondence, vol. 2, ed. Robert Craft (London, 1984). 7. The author’s doctoral dissertation on mid-sixteenth-century settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah also dated from 1953. . Virgil Thomson, A Virgil Thomson Reader (New York, 1984), 390.

. See John C. G. Waterhouse, “Luigi Dallapiccola,’” GMO. 10.

A choral performance, with several voices to a part, was also released in 1957

on Archive Production, ARC

3073, of six Gesualdo madrigals: “Luci serene

e chiare”; “Ecco moriré dunque; Ahi gia mi discoloro”; “Io tacero”; “Invan dunque, o crudele”’; “Dolcissima mia vita”; “Itene 6 miei sospiri”; and “Moro

lasso al mio duolo.” ree.

They were “Dolcissima mia vita” and “Io pur respiro,” > which appeared on

12.

Regarding the elusive issues subsumed under the rubric of “performance prac-

Overtone LR 4 in 1954.

tice,” however, see Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York, 1995).

ity As she put it in conversation with the author. T4. Crawford, Evenings,

150-51.

sy See Laurenz Liitteken, “In ‘der standigen Mischung von Kunst und Wis-

senschaft,’ Hindemiths Tatigkeit an der Universitat Ziirich im Spannungsfeld eines umfassenden Musikbegriffs,” in Der spate Hindemith, ed. Ulrich Tadday, Musik-Konzepte, 16. Louis Andriessen,

125/126 (Miinich, 2004), 69-85.

“Carlo Gesualdo di Venosa,” De Gids 4 (1968): 256-61,

republished in his The Art of Stealing Time, ed. Mirjam Zegers, trans. Clare Yates (Todmorden Lancs, UK, 2004), 87-94. Andriessen’s curiosity was to

remain keen, and as late as 2006 he could be spotted attending an entire evening devoted to an integral performance of Gesualdo’s Book VI by the Kassiopeia Quintet in Amsterdam and be heard expressing fascination with the Gesualdo component of Helmut Krausser’s hit novel, Melodien. The performance was by the Kassiopeia Quintet at the Noordkirk, Amsterdam, 13 October 2006. ith See Rokus de Groot, “Ockeghem and New Music in the Twentieth Cen-

NOTES

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PAGES

212-217

345

tury,” Tijdschrift van de Koninklijke Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 47 (1997): 206-7. 18.

Another advertised connection was made clear in June 2003, when the Dutch composer Jan van Vlijmen was invited to assemble an entire program at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. His choices included the Gesualdo-inspired Violin Concerto, an excerpt from Nono’s opera Prometeo, and Stravinsky’s Monumentum pro Gesualdo together with his completions of Gesualdo’s Tres sacrae cantiones.

19. Optionally for mezzo-soprano and guitar. 20. David Stevens, “The Newest Monument in Paris:

A World of Music,” Inter-

national Herald Tribune, 17 January 199s. PaVe 22

http://www-old.ircam.fr/cdmc/ostinato.37.html.

Giovanni

ludica, Il principe dei musici: Carlo Gesualdo di Venosa (Palermo,

1997), 13. 23. The Italian text in Giovanni Iudica, Il principe dei musici: Carlo Gesualdo di Venosa (Palermo,

1997), 13, reads: “La mia idea base,” dice Boulez, “era di

trarre una intera opera manipolando lo spettro di suoni vocali attraverso la tecnica della interpolazione, compressione ed espansione. La fonte sonora primaria di questa mia opera é un estratto dalle Tenebrae di Carlo Gesualdo. La musica é di umor nero ed in essa si evocano il testo e lo stile dello scenario vocale di Gesualdo.” 24. E-mail communication to the author of 16 November 2006. 25. Jean Frangois Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis, 1997), 229. 26.

Interview by Dorle J. Soria. “Gyorgy Ligeti: Distinguished and Unpredictable,” in Monk Mink Pink Punk no. 9. First published in Musical America, September 1987. Prepared for the Web by Josh Ronsen, February 2003.

DG. Alex Ross, “Searching for Music’s Outer Limits,” New York Times, 20 March

1993. Interview, “Fighting shy,” in Modern Composers, 26 July 2001. ZO Sistema musica, Associazione antidogma, May 2004, offers an extended explanation of the purported connection between Gesualdo and Ligeti. 30 A further footnote to this unlikely composerly coupling appeared two weeks later in a review by Anthony Tommasini, “‘Alice in Wonderland,’ by Peter Westergaard, With Bells and Whistles,” New York Times, 21 June 2006, which refers to “the sustained, high-pitched singing of the chorus, which often sounded like some curious mix of Gesualdo madrigals and Ligeti atmospherics.” See Michael Church, “Murder and Madrigals,” The Independent, 7 June 2004, at Diss

n. 60, below.

32) Commentary by Brett Dean, 2005. See also Alan Kozzin, “‘Sparge la morte’:

34 6

NOTES

1©oO PAGES

218—220

A Conversation of Cultures, Spoken Through a Cello’s Voice,” review of performance by Maya Beiser, New York Times, 11 March 2006. 33. While Pintscher’s Hérodiade-Fragmente (1999) was promoted by two other Gesualdines, Abbado and Pollini, the thought that Pintscher’s connection with

those two figures prompted his take on Gesualdo diminishes in light of the fact that he had already written his Ritratto seven years earlier, at the age of twenty-one.

34.

Pintscher’s later score, Tenebrae, written for the Salzburg Easter Festival, points

to an affinity for yet another corner of Gesualdo’s art. 35. Here a hexachord,

extracted from the seven-note

set found in Boulez’s

. explosante-fixe . . .,” ” a work written in memory of Igor Stravinsky, ultimately leads to a passage derived from Gesualdo’s “Belta, poi che t’assenti” (whose familiarity had been secured by Stravinsky in the final movement of Monumentum pro Gesualdo) through a revoicing of the first phrase placed in the strings above a piano ostinato at the coda. The magical effect of the closing citation is perceived more as a suggestive resonance than as a quotation. The composer notes the following: “Commissioned by the pianist Martin Katz, the work was written for a concert in honor of Glenn Watkins upon his retirement 66

from the University of Michigan in 1996, and dedicated to him.” 30. The texts are: “Tristis est anima mea,” “Ecce vidimus

eum,” “Velum tem-

pli sicssum est,” “Tenebrae factae sunt,” “Caligaverunt oculi mei,” “Recessit

pastor noster,” and “Aestimatus sum.” Demonstration samples of these pieces may be heard at www.singerpur.de/en_cds/cd13.html. The ensemble Singer Pur also conjures up images of Gesualdo on its CD, Oehms Classics OC 354, through a set of commissions by contemporary composers, including a setting of Psalm 53 labeled “Responsoria delle tenebre” by Salvatore Sciarrino, the noted Italian composer previously known for his attraction to Gesualdo. 37- Rihm’s publisher, Universal Edition, referred to the Sieben Passions- Texte and

Vigilia pieces as ““Gesualdo works” in an e-mail to the author of 4November 2008. Reinhold Brinkmann has noted that the addition of instrumental interludes to reflect the spiritual essence of the text calls to mind Haydn’s setting of The Seven Last Words, originally for orchestra alone, later with added choral parts, and finally in an arrangement solely for string quartet. 38. Communique to the author, 1 September 2007. 39. See www.david-chevallier.com/documentations/gesualdo-variations-docinternet. pdf. 40. Gesualdo Da Venosa. Words and Music by Franco Battiato and Manlio Sgalambro. © 1995 EMI April Music Inc., EMI Music Publishing Italia and L’Ottava

SRL. All Raghts Controlled and Administered by EMI April Music Inc. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission. The work may be heard at

www. youtube.com/watch?v=n33rEXwuH8M.

INGTES,

TOLPAGES:

2 21 =326

Bway

Al. Personal communication from Nuria Schoenberg, 16 March 2009. See also Gerard Pape, “Luigi Nono and his fellow travellers,” Contemporary Music Review 18 (1999): 57-65, which details Nono’s exploration of the acoustic properties in the music of the Gabrielis and Tallis; Bellini’s innovative use of silence as a spatial device; and Gesualdo’s exploration of chromaticism as a path

out of the fixed world of diatonicism. 42. Paul Griffiths, “Echoes Across the Centuries In a Perpetual Revolution,” New

York Times, 4 April 2000. Letter to the author, 11 August 2008. 44. Jeremy Eichler, “Evolution, Not Revolution, as Schoenberg Might Say,” New York Times, 14 February 2006. Richard Goode’s eight-event “Perspectives: Richard Goode” series at Carnegie Hall in 2005-06 was complemented by a two-part companion series of talks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Richard Goode: In Conversation with Sarah Cahill.” There, on 26 January 2006, he once again contrasted the art of Gesualdo with that of Schoenberg. 45. See opening definition, Glenn Stanley, “Historiography,” GMO. 40. Alfred Brendel, Alfred Brendel on Music: Collected Essays (Munich, 2001), trans.

43.

Richard Stokes (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 79.

47. Ibid., 169. 48. It should be noted in passing that Warlock’s role in promoting what we now

49.

call “early music” ought not be underestimated, any more than his early enthusiasm for Schoenberg. Along with Wanda Landowska and Arnold Dolmetsch, he was one of the first in Europe to fan the flame of the early music movement, even though “authenticity” was not the guiding watchword. And already by 1912, when he was not quite eighteen, Warlock had written an appreciation of the Viennese master’s “free-atonal”’ works. During his work on the project, D’Avalos contacted me by phone, and upon his request I sent several Gesualdo volumes that he had been unable to acquire.

50. I was introduced from the stage by name with a hand gesturing to where I was

seated in the director’s box prior to walking on stage. Rostropovich and Peter Wagner, who was to sing the title role, were sitting behind me, and I heard a softly commanding voice from one of them, “Stand up! Stand up!” I did. The applause swelled politely, and I waved back, only slightly embarrassed. I thought: “Can you imagine this kind of recognition happening at the Metropolitan Opera in New York?” Upon my return to Ann Arbor I readdressed this very question to my colleague Martin Katz, who has played for some of the great opera divas of our time. His answer, with a smile, came quickly: INGVEL. iat, Schnittke wrote to me in German, thus: “Ich will eine Oper tiber Gesualdo schreiben (als Skizze habe ich’s schon gemacht)—und sie wird (mit Maestro

348

NOTES

TOUPAGES

226-2374

Rostrapovich) bei der Wiener Staatsoper uraufgefiihrt (in neunzehn hundert fiinf und neunzig). Leider / weiss ich viel zu wenig / tiber diese phantastischste Figur der Musikgeschichte—aber Ich liebe und verehre sie sehr!” Sa) See Ronald Weitzman’s review, ““Schnittke’s ‘Gesualdo’ in Vienna,” Tempo,

no. 194 (1995): 30-32. $3. Schnittke’s opera, Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1983-94), which followed

54.

almost immediately, was more favorably received. See Charles T. Downey’s review in Jonarts, 2 February 2005 (Web log: http:// ironarts.blogspot.com/2005/02/schnittkes-gesualdo-in-vienna.html). A review by the critic Larry L. Lash, “Schnittke’s Gesualdo at the Wiener Staatsoper,” London Financial Times, 27 December 2004, concluded with the following

judgment: “Schnittke wrote a lot of interesting, groundbreaking music. But Gesualdo should be reserved for bored musicologists with time on their hands.” For a decidedly more positive review see Weitzman, “Schnittke’s “Gesualdo’ in Vienna.” SS. Cicognini was not the only seventeenth-century dramatist to write a play with the Gesualdo story at its base. See especially John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice of T6287 56. See Edward T. Norris, “The Italian Source of Ravenscroft’s Italian Husband,”

Review of English Studies 10 (1934): 202-5. See Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 142, where he argues Jean-Antoine

de Baif’s belief “that chansons thus constructed would create musical miracles like those ofthe ancients.” . Recorded on Kairos 0012022K AIT.

. Recorded on Harmonia Mundi ZZT 040802. . Quoted in Michael Church, “Murder and Madrigals,” The Independent, 7 June

2004, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/murderand-madrigals-731319.html.

. Ibid. Many of these points were elaborated in an extended personal correspondence with the author. CHAPTER

II.

GESUALDO

FEVER

. Niloufer Ichaporia King, Interview with Hannah Love, 2008, at www.ucpress .edu/books/pages/10722/10722.interview.php. Used with permission of the University of California Press. . Werner Herzog, Herzog on Herzog, ed. Paul Cronin (London, 2002), 258. © Faber & Faber, quoted by permission. Fricke was leader of the band Popolvuh and provider of the sound tracks for all of his movies. . Herzog’s film is available on DVD (Image Entertainment, 2002). Herzog, Herzog, 260-61. For more on Herzog and Gesualdo see Dariusz Czaja, Rw “Fragmentary Presences: The Portraits of Carlo Gesualdo,” Film Quarterly _

NOTES

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PAGES)

234=236

349

47-48 (2004): 244-65. Czaja argues in the conclusion that the quintessential

thing in an artist’s life is expressed in his work. Biography, therefore, is destined to suffer an epistemological defeat. WN

. Ina

letter to Herzog dated 17 November 2007.

- Leonetta Bentivoglio, “Gesualdo da Venosa, Un film di Bertolucci sul musicista,” La Repubblica, 2 February 2004, p- 45. See also Isabel Owen, “Filming with the Devil,” Cherwell Online, 30 April 2004.

. Stuart Jeffries (The London

Guardian), “Bernardo Bertolucci Revisits the

Past,” Taipei Times, 27 February 2008. oo

. Anatole France, The Well of Saint Clare, trans. Alfred Allinson (London, 1909), QI

SO),

. Others include Michel Breitman’s Testimone nell’ombra: Il giardino degli orrori di Gesualdo da Venosa of 1986 and Miranda Miranda’s Bellissima regina: La storia di Maria d’Avalos e Fabrizio Carafa from 2002. IO. It is one of three composer plays, which include Master Class (a confrontation between Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Stalin), Elgar’s Rondo, and Elgar’s Third I

H

12.

(regarding the failure of the composer to complete his Third Symphony). . Julio Cortazar, We Love Glenda So Much (New York, 1983). Ober, Bottoms Up! See particularly chapter 1, “Bottoms Up! The Fine Arts and Flagellation,” and chapter 3, ““Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa: Murder,

Madrigals, and Masochism.” 138 Another rash of studies appeared in the same year, including Denis Morrier’s Gesualdo; S. Giora Shoham’s Art, Crime and Madness: Gesualdo,

Caravaggio,

Genet, Van Gogh, Artaud; and Jean Marc Turine’s Gesualdo. 14. The full title is Melodien, oder, Nachtrdége zum quecksilbernen Zeitalter. 1S Louis Andriessen initially put me on to Helmut Krausser in February 2006, and the following October | read the appropriate parts in a French translation while in Amsterdam for a Gesualdo festival, during which the Kassiopeia Quintet performed Gesualdo’s last three madrigal books on successive days. GE This included recitations by the French actor Alain Cuny of texts by Jean Pierre Nortel, Ta parole comme une graine ailée—textes a dire pour des dramaturgies sacrees (May 2000). The idea began with a commission to provide commentaries for a performance of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Christ” with Alain Cuny as reciter. A request by the Ensemble Polyphonique de RadioFrance, directed by Charles Ravier, for nine poems to accompany the Holy Week Responses of Gesualdo followed with Cuny once again reciting Nortel’s texts: Da Gesualdo: I suoi luoghi, la sua musica. Drammaturgia musicale di Jean Pierre Nortel (dai Responsoria e dal Miserere di Carlo Gesualdo principe di Venosa). 7 The Gesualdo panel on the right corresponds to the David panel on the left, recalling not only an iconographical tradition of many European churches

250

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(Chartres, Sainte Chapelle) but also once more the figure of David at Gesualdo’s chapel in the Gest Nuovo in Naples. Thoma later pursued a series of even more varied spectacle-concerts that centered on Gesualdo and his music. These included “Trame Iconiche di una Resurrezione” (2000-2001) and “Le Retable du Prince de Venosa: II Polittico del Principe di Venosa,” a videoinstallation with sound. The latter was part of a presentation titled “Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe!—le Vesti del sogno.” In addition, her various projects have included the creation of a set of jewels and costumes inspired by an inventory of Gesualdo’s domicile. 18 . Jack Sargeant, “Outsider Art/Music.

Barbican, London, March 22nd, 2001,”

Juxtapoz Magazine. 19. For detailed information on Baumhauer’s various Gesualdo projects see www

.till-ansgar-baumhauer.de. 20.

2

Lome

22.

Including A 20th Century Memorial, 1971-78; Malta Siege-Bell Memorial, 1992;

The Seafarer’s Memorial, 2001; and his Iraq Triptych, 2007. .Sandle adds that “It is also a deliberate visual joke in that it is literally an > ‘extended metaphor.” See Roberta Hershenson, “In the World of Art, a Crate is Much More Than a

Crate,” New York Times, 12 June 1988. For an audio-visual compilation (slides and cassette) see Memorials and Monuments: Michael Sandle in Conversation with John Spurling (Econ Arts). I met Mr. Sandle in London in the spring of 1970 through his friend Yolande Sonnabend, whose brother had inspired Sandle’s Gesualdo sculpture when he presented Sandle with a copy of one of Robert Craft’s recordings. Having borrowed the title for his piece from Stravinsky, Sandle asked me for the composer’s address so that he might send him a color photograph of his creation, which he did. The sculpture is currently in the collection of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. D2. Communication with the author of 29 May 2008. . Eric Asimov,

“Rustic No More, Aglianicos Sparkle,” New

York Times, 12

January 2005. A visit to these cellars and the accompanying restaurant in 2005 verified the glamorous reviews of the reporters and the photographers. . Angela Frucci, special to San Francisco Chronicle, 5 May 2005. . For another extraordinary wine story about a present-day Prince of Venosa, see Eric Asimov, “An Italian Prince and His Magic Cellar,” New York Times,

22 December 2004.

.On 7 October 2006 at 10 p.m. in the Church of San Samuele, his composite vision was realized as part of the Venice Biennale; see BMG

Editions, Inter-

national Newsletter, September-December 2006, 1. The entire cycle has been recorded on Harmonia Mundi, PL oor. 28. Note to Harmonia Mundi, PL oor.

NOTES

TO

PAGES

245-251

451

29 . Belting, Art History, 133. 30 . Jonathan Gilmore, “Discipline Problem,” a review ofArt History after Modernism by Hans Belting, Artforum International 42 (2003): 35-36.

CHAPTER 12. RETROSPECTIVES . Kubler, Shape of Time, 130. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. - Answer given to a question at an Art Alliance lecture in Philadelphia, cited by John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT, 1961), 68. Reprinted by permission of Weslyan University Press. 3 . See especially Wood, Purpose of the Past.

4 . See Jameux, Pierre Boulez, 221-22. 5). Claudio Abbado,

“Per Gesualdo da Venosa,” notes for The King’s Consort

performing Carlo Gesualdo, Madrigali, Ferrara Musica, 8 October 2003. Original in Italian; author’s translation.

. Original in Italian, author’s translation. . Claudio Abbado, “Per Gesualdo.”

. Abbado took note of Hindemith’s attraction to a Bach Invention, surely the chromatic three-part Invention in F minor; Beethoven’s

Egmont Overture,

Schubert’s Fourth Symphony; the “reprise” of the primo tempo of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto; inevitably, Wagner’s Parsifal and Tristan; Strauss’s Elektra; Mahler’s Ninth and Tenth Symphonies; and finally the dolorous effects found in Berg’s Wozzeck. In an interview with the New York Times only a few weeks previously, Abbado seemed less worried than the director of the Lucerne Festival about the difficulties of programming contemporary music. His prescription was remarkable and not intended as a simplistic antidote: “If you study Gesualdo and Monteverdi, then Bach, and if you know Schubert and Mahler,

then you'll understand Schoenberg.”> Once more we note a familiar pattern: begin with Gesualdo, end with Schoenberg. See Alan Riding, “A Conductor is Back, An Orchestra Reborn,” New York Times, 26 August 2003.

. The madrigal in question was known to generations of American students through its inclusion in the first volume of Archibald T. Davison and Willi Apel, Historical Anthology ofMusic (Cambridge, MA, 1946-50). Observing that the music rarely offers “more than a couple of harmonies in a row that point to the same mode,” McClary noted that the music with a key signature of one flat and a final cadence on F is brought to a halt at the text “Le tue dolcezze” on Db (VI of the parallel minor); McClary, Modal Subjectivities, 108, 111. For

10.

the musical example, see p. 286. Barry Millington, “Wagner,” GMO, embraced a broad range of literature, that no works of Marx were contained no proof that Wagner was unfamiliar

states: “Wagner’s library in Dresden both ancient and modern . . . The fact in Wagner’s library at Dresden provides with his ideas: radical theories would

BS

NOTES

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PAGES

250-255

have circulated freely in a major city such as Dresden.” The same argument might be applied to Wagner’s knowledge of Gesualdo. ee

See Bernhard Stockmann, “Carl von Winterfeld,” GMO.

12.

His collection now resides in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin.

ee Winterfeld, Johannes Gabrieli, 2: 94-97. 14. Kiesewetter’s book was Schicksale und Beschaffenheit des weltlichen Gesanges (Leipzig, 1841). Interestingly, Kiesewetter’s “collection of old scores, which he placed in the Austrian National Library, later served as an important resource for his nephew, the noted musicologist August Ambros.” See Stanley,

“Historiography.” 1% Katharine Ellis and Robert Wangermée, “‘Fran¢ois-Joseph Fétis,” GMO.

See also James Haar, “Music of the Renaissance as Viewed by the Romantics,” in Music and Context: Essays for John M. Ward, ed. Anne Dhu Shapiro and Phyllis

Benjamin (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 126-44, and Malou Haine, “Concerts his-

TO.

toriques dans la seconde moitié du rge siécle,” in Musique et société: Hommages a Robert Wangermée, ed. Henri Vanhulst and Malou Haine (Brussels, 1988), T2142: Francois-Joseph Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens (Brussels, 1835-44), 3:

469-70. £7) Wagner’s Die Meistersinger is one of the boldest examples of the composer’s attraction to the period. Yet here Wagner resists aping its style and embraces only a kind of anachronistic pseudo-Bach in the choral moments and the surface pattern of the Barform in the Prize Song. See Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley, CA, 2005), 247. ee Editions of Tudor church musicians that included Byrd, Gibbons, Tallis, Tav-

erner, Tomkins, and Tye appeared between 1922 and 1929. Among continental composers, an Obrecht edition was undertaken between 1908 and 1921, while one for Ockeghem,

begun in 1927, was not completed until

1992. Another for Josquin des Prez was delivered variously between 1921 and

1971, but beginning with an international Josquin conference in 1971 in New York, interest in the composer and new standards concerning editorial policies and attribution served to project a new twenty-eight volume Josquin edition, begun in 1987. 19. A Lassus edition by Franz Xavier Haberl and Adolf Sandberger was published between 20.

1894 and 1926. Other projected editions begun in 1958 and 1968

continue to the present day. See Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge, 1983), 106. . Indeed, in America the first volume of Davison and Apel’s Historical Anthology

of Music served for many decades as a common source of pre-Baroque music for students of the time. There, at least, Gesualdo’s persistent calling card,

NOTES

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SEs)

3

“Moro lasso,” is bypassed in favor of “Io pur respiro.” And a good choice it is, too, with its invocation of the so-called uncanny progression (D minor—F# major) at “o dispietato core” (oh merciless heart) and its literally breathtaking rests (on “respiro”) at the very opening. Carl Parrish and John Ohl, eds., Masterpieces ofMusic before 1750 (New York, 1951) also served as a less comprehensive source. The only Italian madrigal included is by Marenzio. The eight madrigals contained in the collection edited by Wilhelm Weismann (New York: Peters, 1931) are: “Luci serene e chiare”; “Ecco, moriré dunque” (prima parte), “Ahi, gia mi discoloro” (seconda parte); “Io tacerd” (prima parte), “Invan dunque o crudele” (seconde parte); “Dolcissima mia vita”; “Itene 6 miei sospiri”; “Moro lasso al mio duolo.”

2% Stravinsky and Craft, Memories, 109-11. 24. Karol Berger, Theories ofChromatic and Enharmonic Music in Late 16th Century Italy (Ann Arbor, MI, 1976), 121. See also Gouk, “Science and Music,” 67.

26 Karol Berger, “Prelude: L’ Orfeo, or the anxiety of the moderns,” in his Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley, CA, 2007), 19-20. DOs SeeOp.1cit

17,042:

Die Benito V. Rivera and Martin Ruhnke, “Joachim Burmeister,” DS.

GMO.

Even Dahlhaus, the leading European authority on the subject, put it bluntly: “The founder of the modern theory of chords is neither Zarlino nor Rameau, but Johann Lippius,” and adds, “Contemporaneously with Lippius, Thomas Campion recognized around 1613 that the proper root of a sixth chord is not the tone in the bass, but the third below it.” Dahlhaus Foundations, 114-15.

ZOE See Carl Dahlhaus, “Harmony,” GMO. 30. Letter from Leibowitz to Schoenberg, 12 September 1945. See chapter 4 for

other portions of the same letter. . Gesualdo’s “Languisce al fin,” Book V (at “L’affligge si”) offers a clear example of the former. Even when Gesualdo repeats the progression at some other interval, it can immediately trigger a random presentation of the complete chromatic (as at the close of “Mercé grido”) or of the virtually complete (eleven of the twelve pitches at the opening of “Moro lasso”). As I have noted in Watkins, 205, fn. 57, the twelve-note complex would also have been pro-

vided had an implied Phrygian cadential sequence been continued. For the Puccini example, see Cohn, Uncanny Resemblances, 296, ex. 8.

22) Cohns