Word: gesualdo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
MASTRO-DON GESUALDO, by Giovanni Verga (454 pp.; Grove Press; $3.50) is now reissued in the U.S. for the first time in 20 years. When D. H. Lawrence, who translated the book from the Italian, first discovered the works of Giovanni Verga, he wrote enthusiastically: "He is extraordinarily good-peasant-quite modern-Homeric . . ." Best known outside Italy for a minor work-his story Cavalleria Rusticana, on which the libretto for Mascagni's opera was based-Author Verga ranks second only to Manzoni among Italian novelists. Born in Sicily in 1840, he planned as his major work a kind...
...Gesualdo is a village-eye view of the drama that fascinated other 19th century novelists, including Balzac: the drama of a society in which the aristocracy is withering, while the middle class and even the peasantry are elbowing their way into the mirrored halls. The book's hero is a harddriving, shrewd peasant who grows rich, to the dismay of the seedy local gentry. The story is chiefly concerned with the battle between tough, energetic Mastro-don Gesualdo and that gentry-with the rich ones who connive to block his designs on their dwindling lands, with the impoverished ones...