Word: gesualdo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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TIME'S music staff is to be congratulated for fine stories on two comparatively unknown yet great musicians: Gesualdo, long dead and almost forgotten except by a handful of music lovers, and Don Elliott, long a musician's musician, whose star is just beginning to rise...
Young Don Carlo, third Prince of Venosa, eighth Count of Consa, 15th Lord of Gesualdo, etc., etc., was content with the carefree luxury that befell his lot as a second son. He rarely went home to his small and dull town of Venosa, instead lived in nearby Naples, gathered the finest Renaissance musicians and poets around him, and himself became famed as a lutanist and singer. Of an evening, he would put to sea with one of his poet friends, and spend the night improvising songs and madrigals. He might have sung away his whole life, but his elder brother...
...kind. He eventually chose his 20-year-old cousin, Donna Maria d'Avalos, a girl of "surprising beauty," and even more surprising reputation: her first husband had reportedly died from trying to appease her insatiable sexual appetite. In due course, she presented Don Carlo with two children, but Gesualdo lost interest in his wife, and she fixed hers on a handsome nobleman...
...cuckolded husband broke into their bedroom on the dark midnight of Oct. 16, 1590, and slew the lovers, or had them slain. Later, convinced that the second child was not his, he shook the cradle so ferociously that the infant could not catch her breath and suffocated. Thereupon Gesualdo settled into a life of remorse and debauchery-he was so beset by evil "demons" that he had himself whipped daily-out of which came some of the world's most remarkable music...
Ahead of His Time. Between 1594 and 1611, Gesualdo published six books of madrigals that contain such daring harmony and such sensitivity that many historians consider him centuries ahead of his time, see in him a musical contemporary of Richard Wagner. Until recently, the modern public has had little chance to savor the sorrows of Gesualdo, but now a first-class LP has been released on the Sunset label with five singers led by young (28) California Conductor Robert Craft, a protege of Composer Igor Stravinsky. The album is "presented by" Author Aldous Huxley, who has long been fascinated...