Sparge la morte

Gesualdo’s madrigal of the same title, from his 4th book of madrigals (I)

Sparge la morte is one of a series of works (others being Carlo for strings and electronics, from 1997, and the music for Jiri Kylian’s One of a Kind, from 1988) in which I have turned for inspiration to the life and music of Carlo Gesualdo (1560–1613), Prince of Venosa, esteemed composer of idiosyncratic and highly accomplished vocal music of the Mannerist style and perpetrator of one of the most heinous and widely publicized criminal acts of Italian society in the 16th Century, namely the murder in 1590 of his own wife Maria d’Avolos and her lover, Don Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria.

Not surprisingly, this Gesualdo character has been regarded as a fairly notorious figure ever since. Historians to the present day still seem undecided as to the true merits of Prince Carlo the composer, unable to separate the characteristics of his compositions, with their harmonic extremities and surprises and their textural complexities, from the infamy of Gesualdo the murderer. There are, no doubt, numerous contemporaries of his whose music would be just as worthy of the kind of attention now given to Gesualdo, composers such as Marenzio and Luzzaschi, who didn’t fan the flame of fame by butchering their spouses. But I believe that with Carlo Gesualdo one shouldn’t try to separate his music from his life and times. They are intrinsically interrelated. The texts of his later madrigals, thought to be written by Gesualdo himself, abound with references to love, death, guilt and self-pity. Sparge la morte, in its original form, comes from his Fourth Book of Madrigals from 1596 and, although considerably earlier than his acknowledged masterworks such as the final books of madrigals and the Responsoria, is a fine example of his mature style, itself also full of the aforementioned themes of love, death, remorse, etc.

The genesis for my work, Sparge la morte, goes back to music I wrote in 1998 for Jiri Kylian’s full evening ballet for the Netherlands Dance Theatre’s One of a Kind, written in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Dutch Constitution. This work featured a solo cellist (on stage with the dancers) and tape. Sparge la morte, a favourite madrigal of Kylian’s, was used as a major source of motives throughout the first two acts of the work. The opening of the work presents melodic fragments of the madrigal as short cello phrases. It outlines a path, shrouded in the mystery of ponticello strings and percussion, that leads us eventually to the madrigal itself, sung by a consort of five voices. Gesualdo’s music works its precarious charm upon us, finally eliciting from the cello its very own “madrigal”, a soliloquy that soars to the instrument’s very highest register.

© Brett Dean, 2005