Carlo Gesualdo - Influence and Reputation

Influence and Reputation

Gesualdo had a limited influence at the time, although Neapolitan composers of polyphonic madrigals imitated his work up to the 1620s. Composers including Sigismondo d'India, Antonio Cifra, Michelangelo Rossi, Giovanni de Macque, Scipione Dentice and Girolamo Frescobaldi wrote polyphonic madrigals in imitation of Gesualdo's style. He was forgotten after the Renaissance and it was only in the 20th century that he was rediscovered. The life of Gesualdo provided inspiration for numerous works of fiction and music drama, including a novel by Anatole France, a short story by Julio Cortázar, and an opera by Franz Hummel. In addition, 20th century composers responded to his music with tributes of their own: Alfred Schnittke wrote an opera in 1995 based on his life, Igor Stravinsky arranged Gesualdo's madrigal "Beltà, poi che t'assenti" as part of his Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1960), and contemporary composer Salvatore Sciarrino has also arranged several of his madrigals for an instrumental ensemble. In 1997, the Australian composer Brett Dean paid homage to Gesualdo in 'Carlo'—an intense and affecting work for string orchestra, tape and sampler. Péter Eötvös asserts his madrigals were influenced by Gesualdo.

In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley writes of Gesualdo's madrigals:

Mozart's C-Minor Piano Concerto was interrupted after the first movement, and a recording of some madrigals by Gesualdo took its place.

'These voices' I said appreciatively, 'these voices – they're a kind of bridge back to the human world.'

And a bridge they remained even while singing the most startlingly chromatic of the mad prince's compositions. Through the uneven phrases of the madrigals, the music pursued its course, never sticking to the same key for two bars together. In Gesualdo, that fantastic character out of a Webster melodrama, psychological disintegration had exaggerated, had pushed to the extreme limit, a tendency inherent in modal as opposed to fully tonal music. The resulting works sounded as though they might have been written by the later Schoenberg.

'And yet,' I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to these strange products of a Counter-reformation psychosis working upon a late medieval art form, 'and yet it does not matter that he's all in bits. The whole is disorganized. But each individual fragment is in order, is a representative of a Higher Order. The Highest Order prevails even in the disintegration. The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work. At least you aren't lulled into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely fabricated order. You have to rely on your immediate perception of the ultimate order. So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it's dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn't get back, out of the chaos...'

Though Gesualdo's influence was exceptionally limited during his lifetime, his work has been rediscovered and appreciated as a precursor to later, equally expressive and technically difficult styles of music.