The Renaissance composer wrote hauntingly sublime music – and committed a grisly double murder before descending even further into psychosis. As a new stage work revisits his life, its director asks if art can be separated from artist
C
arlo Gesualdo wrote some of the most darkly sublime music of the late Renaissance. He also savagely murdered his wife and her lover in their bed. Now be honest: which would you like to discuss first?
The art will always be secondary to the atrocity, however magnificent the madrigals and sacred music. Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, had been cuckolded by the Duke of Andria in a long-running tryst that had become the scuttlebutt at court. The premeditated double murder of 1590 was a truly grisly affair, concluding in the public display of their mutilated bodies on the steps of the palazzo for several days.
Gesualdo’s biography is often reduced to this act, yet his own end, too, was harrowing. Twenty years on, the prince had retreated to his estate to indulge in a life of ritualistic agony, reportedly employing servants to beat him thrice daily to ease sleep and constipation. This domestic nightmare included the presence of two concubines accused by his second wife of witchcraft against him. Their ghoulish testimonies, elicited under torture, suggest a household that had descended into a gothic psychosis.
