Gesualdo’s use of dissonance is no more illegitimate than that of the composers Artusi cited as good examples. To create it, Gesualdo used two methods. The first entailed the use of chromatic accidentals, interpreted as ornaments. One note could be replaced by another a semitone apart without the chord changing its name or function. Gesualdo’s other ‘trick’ had already been used by twelfth-century French composers (although for them it wasn’t such a subtle manoeuvre). Every dissonance in a voice was justified by its relationship with a second voice, the second voice with a third, the third with a fourth, which in turn was related to a fifth. The final result was naturally plagued with harmonic tension in that each voice obeyed the rules of concordance with only one of the others, forming dissonances with all the others. Di Lasso had used this procedure in his Prophetiæ Sibyllarum, for example. But the difference is Gesualdo uses it all the time. In accordance with these principles of ‘expression’ criticised by Artusi, there didn’t seem to be many other options available apart from texts about love in which the most frequently found words were “cry” and “death”. These texts reached the limits of conceptual genius and beauty in S’io non miro non moro, from the Fifth Book of Madrigals: “If I gaze not, I die not, / without gazing I am not alive; / so am I dead, yet not without life. / O miracle of love, ah, strange paradox, / for living is not life, nor dying, death”.

You are killing me, o cruel one

“…Questioned, Pietro Malitiale, alias Bardotti, forty years of age, valet, in the service of Don Carlo Gesualdo for twenty-eight years, the above-mentioned Pietro Bardotti declared under oath that he did not know Don Carlo’s present whereabouts, and that he left on horse around seven hours of the night…” Everything seems to indicate that the relationship between Maria d’Avalos and the Duke of Andria went back some time. It was one of Don Carlo’s uncles, Giulio Gesualdo, who having discovered them embracing and resentful because he himself had been rejected by Maria, already twice a widow and famous in Naples for her beauty, denounced them to the prince. The latter pretended to go hunting, returning in secret in the early hours of Wednesday 17 October 1590 and surprising them in bed. The prince’s valet, Pietro Bardotti, and Maria’s personal chambermaid Laura Scala, who had witnessed the killing, were questioned. No conviction was recorded. The case was filed on 27 October on the Vicar’s order. It would seem the scandal had more to do with the fact that one of the victims was a duke, than with the question of adultery and the fact that Gesualdo had assassinated his own wife, as the Corona Manuscript commented, which published news from the court and Neapolitan nobles. At any rate, perhaps out of prudence—perhaps, some say, out of guilt—the prince left the city and moved into his castle in Venosa. Three years and four months later, accompanied by Ferdinando Sanseverino, Count of Saponara, Count Cesare Caracciolo and by the composer Scipione Stella, Gesualdo left for Ferrara to marry Leonora d’Este, Duke Alfonso II’s niece, on 2 February 1594. The festivities, described in Bottrigari’s La mascara, included a performance of I fidi amanti, a favola boscareccia composed especially for the occasion by Ercole Pasquini. Local poets also wrote verses for the occasion and Vincenzo Rondinelli dedicated his acoustics treatise De soni, e voci, to the prince.