"Mannerism" is a term borrowed from art history which is often loosely applied to the music of Carlo Gesualdo. Though with many such terms, the definition is fuzzy, retrospective, and not completely analagous to music. It does, however, offer some help in understanding the bizzarre-ness of Gesualdo's late style. Long after his contact with Ferrarese musicians who were stretching the limits of sixteenth-century musical theory, long after his celebrated murder of his wife and semi-retirement into mystical contemplation, Gesualdo seems consciously to have sought a new style of composition which bore special fruit in his last two books of madrigals. In it, he bends the "rules" of music at will, to express with abundant and painfully vivid musical gesture the dense and powerful emotions of his text. Nowhere is his gregarious musical style more evident than when he is setting a text of painful emotions such as Tu m'uccidi, o crudele ("You are killing me, o cruel one!").



No hope, however faint, lightens the poet's load in Tu m'uccidi, and Gesualdo uses every musical trick in his arsenal to effect this over-the-top emotionalism. He uses, in fact, nearly every musical pitch known in Europe at the time, which is actually more than the twelve tones of the piano. And from the opening measures, he uses them in extraordinary ways. In the first seven measures of music ("…o cruel one") he commits over a dozen infractions of the "rules" of counterpoint. Then in a mere three and a half measures of apparently simple chords ("wicked murderer of love") he travels from b-major completely across the harmonic spectrum to e-flat! Chromatic melodies replace the chromatic harmonines as the poet calls her "my death," and mention of "harsh martydom" triggers even sharper and more painful suspensions. But the worst is yet to come. The poet says that he only goes to martyrdom shrieking; Gesualdo reaches a powerful harmonic arrival on two utterances of that word, and then becomes intensely personal. The poet's cry is that Oimè, he dies loving. On the exclamation, Gesualdo reacts much as Edvard Muensch does in The Scream; Gesualdo attacks the listener's ear with perhaps his harshest unprepared dissonances ever heard at the time. There follows two nearly atonal sequences on "I die," and an explosion of virtuosic melismas on "loving." In case anyone in his audience has missed the point, he repeats these most disruptive—and most expressive—passages.

© Timothy Dickey, All Music Guide