During the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth, Italian madrigals began to assume forms built upon the internal arc of a poem's dramatic expressive content rather than the skeleton of its scansion. In the madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo, particularly those of this fifth and sixth books, this is carried almost to the point of caricature, as seen in the five-voice madrigal from Book V, Mercè grido piangendo. Indeed, the text and the music of this piece exemplify the potent mixture of passion, violence, and impulsiveness that characterized his music as well as his personal life. A powerful aristocrat, Gesualdo was known for the insatiability of his desires, which bordered on sadomasochism—and he is known to have enjoyed being whipped; his jealous love drove him to murder on one occasion. His over saturation of desire is easily discernible in the text of the madrigal under consideration here. A panoply of the most poignant madrigalistic poetic devices are delivered within a few lines of text, which characteristically employs the language of torture and suffering to convey erotic intensity: cries of pain conveying cries of pleasure, mercilessness representing ardor, fainting and (especially) death evoking ecstasy. These kinds of poetic conceits, of course, are common to the madrigal genre, but rarely are they so extravagantly deployed. Likewise, few musical realizations of such texts are as unrestrained as Gesualdo's is of this one. This is sensed from the second word, "grido" (I cry), which Gesualdo sets with a sudden leap in the top voice and a dizzying shift of harmony. Short, repeated phrase fragments all but obscure the continuity of the text, which is shot through with gaping, gasping rests. At the exclamation "Ahi lasso," the homophonic texture likewise splinters into imitative fragments, trailing off to vividly suggest fainting. The most dramatic chromatic twists are reserved for the two references to death in the chordal passage near end of the first section and in the bizarre, imitative counterpoint at the end of the second section (which is repeated). The poem comes to a close with the words "Io moro" ("I die"), the three final syllables set to an odd motive—made of an upward half-step followed by a disorienting downward step—which weaves itself into a dense, imitative web before finally brilliantly emerging on an unexpected major sonority.

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