Motus Mentis

An article in the current New Yorker begins:

On the night of October 16, 1590, a palace apartment near Piazza San Domenico Maggiore, in Naples, was the scene of a double murder so extravagantly vicious that people are still sifting through the evidence, more than four centuries later. The most reliable account of the crime comes from a delegation of Neapolitan officials, who inspected the apartment the following day. On the floor of the bedroom, they found the body of Don Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria, whom a contemporary described as a “model of beauty,’ one of the handsomest young men of his time. The officials’ report stated that the Duke was wearing only “a woman’s nightdress with fringes at the bottom, with ruffs of black silk.’ The corpse was “covered with blood and pierced with many wounds,’ Lying on the bed was the body of Donna Maria d’Avalos, the famously alluring wife of Don Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa. Her throat had been cut and her nightshirt was drenched in blood.

Interviews with eyewitnesses left no doubt about who was responsible for the murders. Gesualdo had been seen entering the apartment with three men, shouting, “Kill that scoundrel, along with this harlot!’ The report ended with the observation that Gesualdo had left town. A prince being a prince, there matters rested.

Don Carlo Gesualdo was more than just a vengeful prince, however: he was also a composer, as one contemporary observer noted, “of infinite art”. He wrote choral music — madrigals — of a sort that had never been heard before, and the like of which was not heard again until the twentieth century. His compositions, which I had never listened to before last night, seem to occupy two worlds at once: a familiar and beckoning realm of sublime and uplifting harmony, and a strange, alien dimension of unnameable dissonances and constantly shifting keys. Listening to his music is a kaleidoscopic, almost hallucinatory experience; no sooner has the spirit come to rest in a pool of limpid sunlight than the scene shifts, through brief passages of swirling and often terrifying darkness, to the next open glade. The music is never still, and to surrender to it is to be borne away to a dreamlike place of lonely, haunted beauty.

Wikipedia’s article on Gesualdo notes:

The evidence that Gesualdo was tortured by guilt for the remainder of his life is considerable, and he may have given expression to it in his music.

Surely he did. Go to YouTube, search for ‘Gesualdo’, and listen.