After completing four books' worth of Italian Madrigals in the span of just two years (1594-96), Carlo Gesualdo allowed a very lengthy gap to elapse before releasing any more of his secular music to the public. His motivation for the gap remains unclear. The dedication to his 1611 Fifth Book indicates that he had been writing madrigals all along, but only now decided to publish them, since corrupt copies were already circulating. More recent analysis of the music has seen the gap either as an "incubation" period for Gesualdo's most mature style, or as reflective of his worsening mental state over the intervening years. Some elements of all three reasons may have combined. Certainly Gesualdo took extreme care over the 1611 print, having brought a printer and complete printing press all the way to his castle for the task. And certainly the music in the Fifth and Sixth books show signs of both continuity with Gesualdo's earlier style and newer, more personal stylistic ground. A madrigal such as the five-voiced work from the Fifth Book, Dolcissima mia vita, can exemplify the stylistic melting pot.



From the opening measures of Dolcissima mia vita, Gesualdo infuses a relatively conservative voice-leading style with a more expressive harmonic idiom. The actual key of the piece is only implied (though strongly so) by the opening bars, which address the "sweetest one, my life, my life" in conventionally expressive harmonic language. In the following half-verse, however, the composer contrasts his declamatory opening phrases with a more urgent syncopated motive as the poet asks her "why do you withold…?" In providing the object of the question ("the help that I crave"), Gesualdo takes off into more adventurous harmonic areas, quickly moving to F-sharp major and then a remarkably distant C-sharp major sonority made even spicier by a cross-relation. Both this harmonic sequence (similar to the opening of his Beltà, poi che t'assenti) and the following imitative motive which allots very fast runs to all voices as they describe the fire burning in the poet's heart, betray Ferrarese influence. Yet the ending is all Gesualdo. As the poet considers death from his desire, the composer constructs a passionately difficult imitative passage, based on small melodically chromatic motives going in both directions, and often syncopated as well. A highly traditional plagal cadence, complete with melodic ornament, does little to alleviate the feeling of unease.



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