Composer and... murderer. Celebrated for the double murder of his wife and her lover, Carlo Gesualdo deserves as much, if not more, for his groundbreaking work in the art of the madrigal. Born into a noble Italian family of illustrious forebears, Don Carlo Gesualdo was born in Venosa on March 8, 1566. The fourth child of the Prince of Venosa and Geronima Borromeo, he was not expected to succeed his father, and received a classical education in which music played an important role, from learning the lute to composing. However, the death of his elder brother Luigi after a fall from a horse, when he was only twenty-one, prepared him to become heir to the family titles and estates. He was to marry a first cousin four years his senior, Maria d'Avalos, daughter of the Duke of Pescara, twice widowed and mother of two children. The union, celebrated on April 28, 1586, gave rise to major festivities. At the same time, his first works, three Ricercares for four voices, were published. Trained at the musical academy set up by his father, he showed an early aptitude for the lute, singing and composition, with Giovanni de Macque, Bartolomeo Roy and Pomponio Nenna as his masters. Although he gave birth to a son named Emanuele, the marriage failed to live up to expectations on both sides, and on the night of October 16-17, 1590, when he surprised his wife with Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria, he took the lives of the two lovers through the intermediary of his servants. The "crime of the century", involving three noble families, caused a scandal and gave rise to literature, both by Torquato Tasso, known as Le Tasse, and in France with Brantôme. It also established the prince's reputation as a composer, and although he was in no danger of being condemned for this crime of honor, he nevertheless had to take refuge in his estate at Gesualdo to escape vengeance. On his father's death on December 2, 1591, Gesualdo became one of the wealthiest landowners in southern Italy, and two years later, on February 21, 1594, he married Eleonora d'Este, a member of the family of the Duke of Ferrara, where he settled and published his first two collections of madrigals. Unfortunately, the couple fell out, and the death of their son Alfonsino at the age of five in 1600 only worsened their fate. Returning to his estate, he spent most of his time separated from his wife, and finally isolated himself when his grandson died in 1610, the year of his birth. Gesualdo went into penance, inflicting flagellation on himself and commissioning the painter Giovanni Balducci to paint Il perdono di Gesualdo (1609), depicting him kneeling before his canonized uncle Charles Borrommée, the Virgin and Christ. His music took a religious turn with the Tenebrae responsoria (1611), a masterpiece of sacred music in which "Thou shalt not kill" appears as a counterpoint to the first theme. Following the death of his son Emanuele from a fall from his horse on August 20, 1613, he retired to his bedroom, where he himself died on September 8, 1613, at the age of 47. He left a rich catalog of 150 works, including six books of one hundred and twenty-five madrigals for five voices, testifying to the evolution of his harmonic language up to the point of chromaticism, and including daring chord progressions and dissonances. The refined first two books of 1594 were followed in 1595 and 1596 by a mature third and fourth book, in which Gesualdo mastered the art of juxtaposing music with the violent or sensual emotions of the text, giving substance to the "black legend" of the composer's life. Then in 1611, the fifth and sixth books gave way to experimentation, with a poignant seventeenth madrigal, Moro, lasso, al moi duolo. A sixth book of six-part madrigals was published posthumously in 1626, but remains incomplete. The second part of his work, sacred in tone, comprises two books of Sacrae cantiones published in 1603, which are as demanding in their use of counterpoint as they are virtuosic in their use of canon and cantus firmus. His instrumental music, little known and unpublished during his lifetime, is limited to a few pieces for lute or harpsichord: a Gagliardel principe di Venosa discovered in 1958 and a Canzone francese del Principe preserved in the British Library. Honored by his contemporaries, Gesualdo remained a composer in vogue during the Baroque period thanks to his innovations, before falling into disuse and dividing the Romantics over his use of tonality, before his rehabilitation in the second half of the 20th century, In the second half of the twentieth century, the composer's work was rehabilitated, thanks in particular to an editorial update of what appears to be a visionary work that continues to inspire its counterparts, from Stravinsky to Zappa, via Edgard Varèse, Lalo Schifrin, Peter Maxwell Davies, Péter Eötvös, Matthias Pintscher, Brett Dean, Salvatore Sciarrino, Wolfgang Rihm and Erkki-Sven Tüür.
