Carlo Gesualdo [Napoli, c. 1561-Avelino, 1613]: Omnes amici mei á 6
| Feria Sexta, In Primo Nocturno | Responsoria et alia ad Officium
Hebdomadae Sanctae spectantia [1611].
La Compagnia del Madrigale.
The expression of the passions.
Lorenzo Bianconi wrote about Carlo Gesualdo and his works:
«I. Life
The Gesualdo family was invested with the principality of Venosa by
Philip II in 1560, when Carlo’s father Fabrizio (d 1591) married
Girolama Borromeo, niece of Pope Pius IV and sister of Cardinal Carlo
Borromeo. About the same time (1561) Carlo’s uncle, Alfonso (Archbishop
of Naples, 1596–1603), was elected cardinal. At Naples in 1586, after
the death of Fabrizio and Girolama’s eldest son, Carlo Gesualdo, heir to
the title, married his cousin Maria d’Avalos, daughter of the Marquis
of Pescara. The outcry and rumour excited by the assassination on 16
October 1590 of Maria, surprised by her husband ‘in flagrante delicto di
fragrante peccato’, and Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria, notorious
for two years as her lover, reached a level commensurate with the noble
rank attained by the Gesualdo family in Naples. The double aristocratic
murder was given suitable publicity in the widely disseminated Corona
Manuscript chronicle (see A. Borzelli: Successi tragici et amorosi,
Naples, 1908), and in a collection of verses commemorating the tragic
lovers composed by Tasso and the best-known Neapolitan poets including
G.B. Marino, Pignatelli, G.C. Capaccio and Cortese (see A. Quondam in
Storia di Napoli, v/1, Naples, 1972, pp.405ff). This event, romanticized
by novelists from Brantôme to Anatole France, still results in accounts
of Gesualdo with such titles as Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa:
Musician and Murderer (C. Gray and P. Heseltine) or Assassinio a cinque
voci (A. Consiglio, Naples, 1967); they show how effective has been his
act of retribution in spreading his fame. Nevertheless, Gesualdo
prudently retired to his estate at Gesualdo, which became his permanent
residence. Because of the notoriety generated by the incident, his
passionate dedication to music, which until then had been cultivated in
semi-secrecy (his first book of madrigals was originally published under
the name of Gioseppe Pilonij), also became renowned.
Music
provided the chief interest of Gesualdo’s visit to Ferrara in 1594, as
may be seen in the letters of Count Alfonso Fontanelli (see Newcomb,
1968 and Pirrotta, 1971), who was appointed the prince’s equerry by Duke
Alfonso II. Gesualdo’s marriage to Leonora d’Este, the duke’s niece,
contracted in 1593, offered Gesualdo not only the rehabilitative value
of an illustrious marriage outside the kingdom of Naples, but also the
attraction of a brilliant musical centre. In accordance with Ferrarese
custom, music played a large part in the marriage celebrations on 21
February 1594. Bottrigari described the festivities in La mascara (in
I-Bc), the organist Ercole Pasquini composed a favola boscareccia for
the occasion, I fidi amanti (Verona, 1593), Vincenzo Rondinelli
dedicated his treatise on acoustics De soni, e voci (in I-FEc) to the
prince, and the local poets wrote special verses. Above all, Gesualdo
was chiefly occupied with music-making throughout the time he spent at
Ferrara, until early 1596, interrupted by at least two visits to
Gesualdo, from 15 May to 29 December 1594, and from late summer to 4
December 1595.
Cavalieri, whom Gesualdo met at Rome on his way to
Ferrara on 19 December 1593, commented ironically in a letter on the
prince’s mad passion for music, and Fontanelli, after his first meeting
with Gesualdo on 18 February 1594, related that the prince was
exhibiting the scores of his first two books of madrigals, that he
praised Luzzaschi, that he took with him on his travels musicians such
as Scipione Stella and (it seems) Francesco Rasi, and that he played the
guitar and the lute. Alessandro Piccinini later recounted (Intavolatura
di liuto … libro primo, Bologna, 1623) that in the same year (1594) he
gave two of his archlutes to Gesualdo, who afterwards presented one of
them to the ‘Cavalier del Liuto’. At Ferrara Gesualdo heard the famous
nuns of S Vito. At Venice, according to Fontanelli’s letters of 21 and
23 May 1594, he chose to remain incognito in order to avoid official
ceremonies, but continued to discuss music, praising the musicians of
Ferrara and scorning those of Venice, including Giovanni Gabrieli. He
also composed madrigals, and presumably arranged the printing rights of
his madrigals with Gardane. At Padua he visited Costanzo Porta. In
Gesualdo, between June and October 1594, he wrote some music for
performance by the Ferrarese Concerto di donne, and during the Christmas
period he was the guest of Jacopo Corsi at Florence. By the end of 1594
he had returned to Ferrara with the lutenist Fabrizio Filomarino and
the singer and viol player Ettore Gesualdo.
Gesualdo’s presence
in Ferrara, and his obsessive melomania, sustained with an ‘affetto
napoletanissimo’ (Fontanelli), seem to have provoked the ducal printer
Baldini to start publishing again the most important local madrigalists,
the earliest deliberate manifestation of the seconda pratica. After the
publication between May and June 1594 of his first two books, signed by
Stella, Gesualdo himself, having discarded ‘quel primo stile’, composed
and published his third and fourth books in March 1595 and 1596
respectively. Ettore Gesualdo, who signed them, admired their
‘invention, artifice, imitation and observance of the words’, in
contrast to the ‘lightness’ of the first two books. During the same
period Fontanelli published his own Primo libro, and Luzzaschi three
more books of madrigals of which the fourth, dated 10 September 1594, is
dedicated to Gesualdo. These publications of 1594–6 consolidated the
professional reputation of Gesualdo, who had previously been considered
merely an accomplished amateur. Before 1594 there is only an unspecific
mention of Gesualdo’s artistic merit, in canto xx of Tasso’s Gerusalemme
conquistata, but in February 1595 Raval, a professional musician,
described Gesualdo as a madrigal composer in his Madrigali a 3, 5, 8
voci (Rome, 1595). During his months at Ferrara, Gesualdo profited from
the unique opportunity offered to him by the duke’s musical
establishment, where he could meet Luzzaschi and virtuoso court
musicians on a professional basis without departing from the
aristocratic reserve that was a feature of avant-garde musical circles
at Ferrara, where reserve, competence and esotericism were shared by
composers, performers and listeners alike.
Gesualdo’s attempt,
from about 1595, to establish a group of court musicians at the castle
of Gesualdo, outside the influence of the Neapolitan academies, was
probably inspired by Ferrarese example. Micheli related in the preface
to his Musica vaga et artificiosa (Venice, 1615) that he worked for
Gesualdo before 1599, together with Stella, G.B. di Paola, Nenna and
Effrem, only the last of whom is known to have served Gesualdo until
1613. From that time Gesualdo spent almost his entire time on his
estate; his visits to Naples became infrequent, and music-making seems
to have constituted his refuge from the world. In 1603 G.P. Capuccio,
one of his courtiers, had Gesualdo’s two books of Sacrae cantiones
published by Costantino Vitale at Naples, but in 1611, for his last
works (the fifth and sixth books of madrigals, still signed by Capuccio,
and the Responsoria), Gesualdo acquired his own palace printer, G.G.
Carlino from Naples, perhaps in imitation of the court printer at
Ferrara.
The prince’s melancholy, already known before 1594, grew
deeper. A secret and therefore reliable political document draws an
eloquent portrait of Gesualdo in 1600: ‘he has an income of more than
40,000 ducats-worth of grain. His ancestors were very French [i.e.
anti-Spanish] in outlook, but he is opposed to innovation, attends to
money-making and does not delight in anything but music. He keeps a
company of men-at-arms’. There are also reports on the ill-treatment of
his wife, and of divorce proceedings begun by the Este family. Leonora
frequently complained of the boredom she suffered on the estate, where
in fact she did not arrive until the end of 1597, after the inevitable
transfer of the duchy of Ferrara to the papacy; even then she spent long
periods at Modena with her brother Duke Cesare, thus provoking urgent
messages from Gesualdo, who disapproved of her absences. A letter
written in September 1609 confirms that, contrary to the general state
of the Neapolitan nobility, the prince’s financial position was good,
and that he was willing to purchase the domain of Castellammare di
Stabia from the Farnese family, so that Leonora, who disliked the
climate at Gesualdo, could enjoy more salubrious air. The letter also
illustrates the prince’s social intolerance; he proposed that Leonora
should spend the winter at one of his villas in the outskirts of Naples,
where he would not be able to join her, because his own ill-health
would not allow him to attend the vice-regal court. The prince’s
psychopathic deterioration during his last years is amply documented;
and Gesualdo’s morbid, bigoted veneration for his uncle, Carlo Borromeo,
canonized in 1610, as seen in his obstinate correspondence with
Cardinal Federico Borromeo to obtain relics and a portrait (see
illustration and Piccardi), completes the clinical picture of the
prince’s melancholy. After the death in October 1600 of Alfonsino, his
son by Leonora, he commissioned the famous altarpiece in the church of
the Capuchins at Gesualdo; beneath a sacra conversazione, it depicts
Carlo Borromeo, Leonora, Gesualdo himself and the purified soul of their
dead son. Gesualdo’s preoccupation with the extinction of his line
proved justified: his death came three weeks after that of his only
surviving child, Emanuele, his son by his first marriage, who had been
entrusted with the entire management of the family estates.
Gesualdo’s complete retirement from city life was part of a general
return to feudalism in the kingdom of Naples during a period of grave
economic, social and political crises which resulted in direct control
by the nobility over its own lands. Nevertheless, his renunciation even
of the exercise of this power, despite his relatively flourishing
financial position, and his refuge in music, imply an anguished
knowledge of his loss of real power, exclusion from the world and the
absence of any future.
II. Literary and stylistics sources
Gesualdo’s output can be divided neatly into two sections; the works he
formally acknowledged (his six books of five-voice madrigals, the two
books of Sacrarum cantionum and the Responsoria) but had published, as
was the custom of the nobility, by a courtier; and those not originally
intended for publication. To the latter category belong the few works
printed after his death: the madrigals for six voices published by
Effrem in 1626, three canzonettas for five voices (in RISM 161615 and
161811), a psalm in the Salmi delle compiete (Naples, 1620), and some
works known only in manuscript. This latter group comprises two
canzonettas in a book of spiritual parodies, mostly Neapolitan in
origin, a chromatic galliard for four voices entitled ‘Principe di
Venosa’ in a keyboard manuscript, and an extensive and complex ‘Canzon
francese del Principe’ in the extravagant and fantastic style of Macque
(ed. in CEKM, xxiv). The works that Fontanelli mentioned in his letter
of 25 June 1594, ‘a motet, an aria’ and ‘a dialogue for three soprano
lines’ as well as five or six ‘madrigals full of artifice’, can also be
placed in this category. This list not only demonstrates Gesualdo’s
versatility in every kind of musical style, including monody, but also
clearly underlines his intentional discrimination between the lighter
sorts of composition and the deliberate contrapuntal complexity of the
works destined for publication. A. Bossarelli Mondolfi, with some
justification, suggested the attribution to Gesualdo of an unsigned
piece in Verovio’s Lodi (RISM 15956) and it is possible to suspect
Gesualdo as the composer of much other anonymous music, such as the
responses for Holy Week, ‘written by a composer who wishes to conceal
his name’, included in Fabrizio Dentice’s Lamentationi(Milan, 1593); but
this is to ignore the essential fact that with his nine official
publications Gesualdo purposely gave a specific image of himself. This
image is itself problematic enough, as an examination of his choice of
poetry for the madrigals shows.
The first two books, disguised
under a false name until their unexpected publication at Ferrara in
1594, set epigrammatic texts by Guarini, Gatti, Alberti, Celiano, Grillo
and particularly Tasso, which had frequently been set to music before.
Tasso was acquainted with Gesualdo, and during November and December
1592 sent him from Rome 36 madrigals to set, of which Gesualdo published
only one, Se così dolce e il duolo. The textual parody Sento che nel
partire of d’Avalos’s famous Ancor che col partire is also the most
chromatic of the madrigals in the first two books. It is particularly
remarkable that Gesualdo, then and later, invariably used the madrigal
form alone, renouncing the sonnet (with the exception of Mentre madonna
il lasso fianco posa) and therefore all Petrarchism, and the sestina and
ottava and therefore all epic texts. Of authors of the verses in books
three to six, issued after his first experience of Ferrara, only three
(all Ferrarese and including Guarini) are identifiable. Many texts of
the later madrigals are in the style of Guarini, and one by Guarini
himself, T’amo mia vita, appears at the end of the fifth book – a
madrigal that had already been issued in a collection of previously
unpublished works by Neapolitan composers (RISM 160916). It shows
Gesualdo’s most ‘public’ vein, characterized by an exceptionally sparing
use of dissonance, chromaticism and widely ranging note values, in
contrast to the other madrigals in the fifth book. Guarini, Pocaterra
and Marino figure among the authors of the posthumous madrigals. It is
worth noting that, despite Gesualdo’s preference for epigrammatic,
conceptual texts, Marino, the paragon among writers of such poetry, does
not appear in the six five-voice madrigal books, possibly because
Gesualdo did not wish to borrow from his Rime, which had been too
extensively plundered by composers since their first publication in
1602.
It is important to realize that the selections made in the
last two books are from musical rather than poetic models, made by the
rejection of certain possibilities rather than by adherence to them. The
madrigals in the first two books include those set to music during the
1580s by many other composers (e.g. Marenzio, Monte, Macque and
Monteverdi), and it is impossible to pick out any definite stylistic
influences from this broad and unspecific relationship, apart from those
in the Libro secondo written ‘all’imitazione del Luzzasco’. The 1595
and 1596 books, on the other hand, consist mainly of compositions with
few previous connections. The last two books (and the madrigals for six
voices) contain, as well as numerous texts set only by Gesualdo, many
shared with Luzzaschi’s sixth and seventh books (11), and with the
madrigals of Nenna (six) and Fontanelli (two). The debt to Luzzaschi and
Nenna is immediately evident since most of these texts had not been set
by any other composer. It is known from Leonora d’Este’s letter of 7
April 1600 that Nenna was no longer among Gesualdo’s courtiers at that
date, so it may be presumed that the madrigals in Gesualdo’s fifth and
sixth books that reveal a considerable adherence to Nenna, not merely
textually, but particularly musically, were all composed before 1600,
and that they were written in rivalry or in imitation of each other. The
textual borrowings from Luzzaschi’s sixth book (1596) also probably
date from the period immediately after Gesualdo’s stay at Ferrara, or
perhaps from a time when he was still in personal touch with Luzzaschi.
The retrospective dating inferred by G.P. Capuccio when in 1611 he
published the fifth and sixth books, ‘after the world had been waiting
avidly for 15 years since they were composed’, does not sound totally
fictitious. Nor is it impossible that Nenna, who published his
Gesualdian madrigals only after he left the prince’s service, should
figure among those unnamed imitators and plagiarists of the prince’s
madrigals, intended solely for ‘domestic consumption’, who were
denounced by Capuccio.
But it is more likely that this was a
conscious if limited concession to a fundamental principle of madrigal
composition, the imitation of other composers’ works. An obvious example
is Itene, o miei sospiri, a parody of Luzzaschi’s Itene mie querele,
which uses not only the verbal imagery, but also, one by one, the
musical metaphors of its model. An even more striking case, if it is not
a plagiarism, is Mercè grido piangendo; the motifs and their treatment
by Nenna and Gesualdo are practically the same, and at the words ‘morrò
dunque tacendo’, both use a simultaneous chromatic alteration for all
the voices (‘quae omnibus chordis signum usurpat’, as Doni noted in
1647, Lyra Barberina, i, 243). It is not possible in such circumstances
to establish the order of priority between model and imitation, nor is
it very important; Gesualdo’s compositions are always the more audacious
and complex. That he purposely reserved his imitations to a court
musician (Luzzaschi) and to a ‘cavalier di Cesare’ (Nenna) confirms that
membership of the avant garde of the seconda pratica was then the
prerogative of nobility, and in this respect it is noteworthy that
Monteverdi’s examples of seconda pratica composers are all noblemen:
Gesualdo, Cavalieri, Fontanelli, Branciforte, Del Turco and Pecci
(preface to C. Monteverdi: Scherzi musicali, Venice, 1607).
Gesualdo’s admitted admiration for Luzzaschi, shared by the entire
Neapolitan circle of musicians, had several causes. The prince
wholeheartedly followed Luzzaschi’s habit of clothing even the least
pretentious madrigal in serious, expressive, richly worked music. In
practice this ‘nuova maniera’, outlined in the preface to Luzzaschi’s
Sesto libro, justified any compositional or stylistic licence in the
interests of musical effect or affect. In Farnetico savio (Ferrara,
1610), Alessandro Guarini compared Luzzaschi and Gesualdo with Dante,
because, ‘in imitation of the words … they do not avoid harshness, nor
shun dissonance itself, artistic against the rules of the art’ and ‘do
not fear to employ hard, unusual and strange sounds’ (see F. Degrada,
Chigiana, xxii, 1965, p.268). But while the eccentric style of a
madrigal such as Itene mie querele represents an extreme case in
Luzzaschi’s works, Gesualdo, ‘with his nobility and fanciful talent’,
used the style constantly. In the same way, the striking similarity
between the expressive music of Nenna and Gesualdo does not extend to
Nenna’s sacred music, which, unlike Gesualdo’s, conforms to the
stylistic limits prescribed by liturgical rules.
Gesualdo shared
Luzzaschi’s interest in the chromatic arcicembalo made by Vicentino and
kept at the court of Ferrara. The chronicler Sardi related that
Luzzaschi played this instrument during the Este–Venosa wedding
celebrations, and it is known that Stella and Gesualdo later tried, in
vain, to construct a similar chromatic instrument in Naples. The
practice and theory of such an instrument had an undoubted influence on
Gesualdo’s stylistic evolution; his writing encompassed an almost
complete chromatic scale (the only chromatic change which never appears
is F), and frequently used variations on the ancient chromatic
tetrachord (ex.1 and ex.3, bars 5–7 below). Had the arcicembalo been
less impractical, it would have constituted the one possible link
between chromatic counterpoint and the newer forms of mixed vocal and
instrumental music; thus Gesualdo’s coherent choice of the madrigal
style based on artifice rather than any kind of ‘nuova musica’ should be
seen in the light of the inability of contemporary keyboard instruments
to cope with extreme chromaticism. It also destroys the myth, believed
by Ambros among others, of an empirical, irrational Gesualdo, trying out
his chromaticism ‘auf dem Klavier oder der Orgel’.
Gesualdo’s
artistic ‘models’ are not confined to Luzzaschi and Nenna. His formation
probably took place through an interchange of experiences with the
musicians frequenting Fabrizio Gesualdo’s house about 1585, and the
early madrigals are not unlike those dedicated to Michele and Scipione
Gesualdo by Marien. But Carlo Gesualdo’s first published composition was
a motet in the Liber secundus motectorum by Felis (RISM 15852), so he
was presumably a disciple of the latter, and also of Macque, who
included three of Gesualdo’s ricercares in his Ricercate et canzone
francesi, dedicated on 1 October 1586 to Gesualdo himself. Felis’s
membership of Fabrizio Gesualdo’s academy is conjectural; Macque’s is
verified. Moreover, Gesualdo adopted a number of devices typical of
Macque’s later madrigals, such as the deliberately archaic use of the
falsobordone for the three upper voices (cf Macque, Tu segui, o bella
Clori and Gesualdo); chromatic tetrachords (Macque, Io
piango and Gesualdo); a falling sequence of chromatic semitones
(cf Macque, Poi che’l cammin, and Gesualdo, Or, che in gioia credea, and
see Doni, ii, 73); relationes non harmonicae (Macque, La mia doglia,
and Gesualdo, Resta di darmi noia, penultimate bar); and sudden rests
and emphatic repetitions, or unexpected changes of rhythm. More
generally, a madrigal such as Macque’s cheerful Cantan gli augelli (RISM
160916) shows that harmonic progressions by 3rds, far from representing
any kind of ‘triadic atonality’, are rather a neutral extension of
modality as commonly practised by Neapolitan musicians, and not only by
Gesualdo. But while Macque freely scattered such devices through his
works, Gesualdo used similar methods and irregularities continuously,
sometimes simultaneously and inevitably ostentatiously.
III. Sacred works.
The musical characteristics of Gesualdo’s sacred works are, in diluted
form, those of his madrigals, with the exception of the rhythmic scheme
and of the graphic appearance; while the madrigals are always written
with the C mensuration sign, the motets and responses are in C.
In the Sacrarum cantionum contrapuntally through-composed motets are the
norm, sometimes with canonic artifice and cantus firmus (Da pacem,
Domine and Assumpta est Maria: their missing parts and those of Illumina
nos misericordiarum were imaginatively fabricated by Stravinsky in
1957–9). Some of the motets make discreet but manifest expressive use of
harmony and dissonance; the five-voice setting of O vos omnes almost
literally anticipates the more complex and grief-ridden six-voice
version in the Responsoria (1611). The latter are treated, in disturbing
contravention of all rules of post-Tridentine liturgical practice, in a
free style enriched with the molles flexiones of the madrigals. In
there is a concentration of dissonance, chromaticism and melodic
extravagance, especially in the sextus part, which is nearly as
affecting as the elaboration of the erotic madrigals; despite the
textual clarity of the setting, it contravenes the liturgical decree
that ordains a complete renunciation of all ornament during Holy Week.
Throughout the Responsoria Gesualdo used the emotive style that his
contemporaries reserved for rare single motets (Wert’s Vox in Rama or
Lassus’s Timor et tremor) and for their sacred madrigals. It must be
admitted that like the madrigals, the Responsoria were meant for private
performance at Gesualdo’s castle, and, moreover, were intended for one
listener, the composer himself. His paradoxical identification with the
religious theme is also evident in the 1603 motets, settings of
antiphonal, responsorial or para-liturgical texts, which dwell on
contrition, self-deprecation and a sinner’s supplications to the Virgin
Mary and to St Francis. Following a practice that is again
characteristic of the madrigal, Gesualdo borrowed no fewer than 14 of
the motet texts from Scipione Stella’s motet publication at Ferrara in
1595.»
The Responsoria by Carlo Gesualdo, published in 1611,
represent a remarkable emotional outpouring in sacred repertory from a
composer who was living out his final years amidst melancholy thoughts
and an increasingly precarious state of health. It was also significant
that these Holy Week pieces should appear in the same year as the
complex works in the Sesto Libro di Madrigali Madrigals: an association which La
Compagnia del Madrigale are keen to make with their new recording of the
Responsoria in a striking new release from Glossa. Having already
responded to the stylistic subjectiveness of the madrigals the
highly-skilled a cappella vocal ensemble (which includes singers of the
calibre and experience of Giuseppe Maletto, Daniele Carnovich or Rossana
Bertini) turns its attention to subject matter covering torment,
suffering, blood and death. Over three CDs Gesualdo’s creative musical
response to the Passion of Christ is interspersed with spiritual
madrigals from some of his best-known contemporaries (Luzzaschi,
Marenzio, de Macque and Vinci), whose religious texts further underline
the madrigalesque nature of the Responsoria. Also included are two
comparative rarities from Gesualdo’s sacred output, In te Domine
speravi and Ne reminiscaris, Domine.
This is simply essential.
