- Date: 1611
- Composer: Carlo Gesualdo
- Period: Renaissance (1450-1599)
Review
The music of Carlo Gesualdo has lived in controversy from the inception of his late style. His contemporaries either marvelled at his harmonic license or plugged their ears at how he stretched the musical language of his time. From the first historians of European classical music, judgements ranged from praise for the "exemplary" music which contains the "sweetest modulation conceivable," to castigation for his "harsh, crude, and licentious modulation," which is "not only repugnant to every rule, … but extremely shocking and disgusting to the ear;" since then his list of notable champions have included Aldous Huxley and Igor Stravinsky. Whether sweet or repugnant, Gesualdo's music challenges the listener to follow often surprising turns of melody and harmony; it does so always in overt service to specific images and concepts in the text. Whether that service gives exemplary power to the text or goes so far that it makes a mockery may be in the taste of the listener.Extreme emotional contrasts, for example, lie at the heart of an anonymous text he set for five voices in his 1611 Fifth Book of Madrigals, Occhi del mio cor vita. The poet addresses his beloved as the "heart of my life," yet her eyes deny him any help or hope; if those eyes do not marvel at how he adores her, perhaps instead they will marvel at his death. Gesualdo takes this unhappy depiction of dissonance between two lovers, and embeds it in music rife with sharp harmonic contrasts. Immediately after the very opening chords, which rhetorically address the eyes of the beloved in straightforward harmonies among all voices, the same eyes mi negate: deny him, or literally "negate" him. Gesualdo negates the full choral sound by shifting to a single voice, and the simpler harmonies by an immediate chromatic cross-relation. In fact, he peppers the ensuing music with three such cross-relations, and a host of painful suspensions. The poet concludes that it is a good time to die, and the composer laishes chromatic motion upon two repeated phrases to that effect. But the most "licentious" modulation comes only at the end. The poet's devotion, set to strong and more traditional harmonic motion, is contrasted to the marvel of his death. It is on the mention of death that the most jarring chromatic shift shakes the underlying harmonic framework; Gesualdo is even bold enough to approach the very final cadence ("I die") with chromatic motion in the bass. ~ Timothy Dickey, All Music Guide
