Previously on Music Arcades, the story of how I became interested in Gesualdo's Sixth Book of Madrigals, and how difficult it proved to get a recording of them. My search finally came to an end on April Fool's Day this year, when I came across this new recording on Amazon and ordered it.
Herzog notoriously 'enhances' facts in his documentaries. The murders of his wife and her lover are well-documented and extreme enough already. This first clip makes the case that, were it not for his murdering, Gesualdo's music might not be so well known today, nor proclaimed as "visionary". That's certainly a new spin on promoting your music by being interesting in other ways.
Herzog can't leave it there, however. In Herzog on Herzog
The ending of the film was also more obviously contrived. Once a trickle of doubt creeps in, it can quickly become a flood. Did Gesualdo genuinely anticipate chromatic composition techniques that anticipated 20th century approaches at the turn of the 17th century? I'm musicologically clueless, but the CD sleeve notes take a more sober line, saying that the fascination with him "is not because his style was unique, but because he imbued the Mannerist style of the time with the most colours" — though they do go on to say that elements of Gesualdo's style make it seem "as if he had cast his glance four centuries into the future". And later they hint that the taint of that murderous life still lingers:
[I]t seemed as if we had been struck by the ghosts of Gesualdo's murdered wife and her lover, or even possibly by the spirit of Gesualdo himself; might he have disapproved of our interpretation. A brief yet chilling summary of incidents that occurred during our rehearsal and concert periods: endless traffic jams on the highway, two cars totally written off, various missed and cancelled flights, a concert venue that lost its financing and therefore caused the entire second festival to be postponed for nine months, power failures in the area where we were recording and thunderstorms during our concerts. And there was more: three deaths in the families of members of the quintet, although these were happily offset by the birth of a splendid child to our soprano; this, nevertheless, meant that the entire programme for the second festival had to be re-rehearsed with another soprano!
I hadn't noticed before but the translations of the madrigals' words frequently read exactly like one of those little sketch pieces on 69 Love Songs
If you desire my death,
Cruel one, I will die happy
And after death I will still adore you alone.
But if you should wish that I not love you —
Ah, the thought alone of it
Fills me with pain and my soul faints.
There was a BBC radio documentary about Gesualdo last month: I wish I'd paid more attention to it now.
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