Writers and musicians alike have struggled to capture the essence of Carlo Gesualdo's late musical style. Gesualdo's critics point to his chromatic excesses and the disruptive lack of flow in his madrigals; his partisans argue an essential continuity between mainstream "Renaissance" counterpoint and even his wildest conceits. A more balanced middle view takes both into account and notes the tension in Gesualdo's music between the balance and perfection of the classical Renaissance style, and a more extravagant musical reaction to evocative local contrasts in his texts. Both elements, for instance, are palpably present in a late madrigal, such as his five-voiced Ardita zanzaretta, published in Gesualdo's Sixth Book of Madrigals of 1611.

As with many of Gesualdo's madrigals, any superficial reading of his music clearly shows the disjunctions in his musical fabric as they reflect his text. The text in this case, though by the famous poet Torquato Tasso, is an unassuming little verse about a pesky mosquito that bites the poet's beloved on her lovely breast; she squeezes it and kills it, and the poet longs to die in the same manner, upon her sweet breast. Gesualdo's setting proceeds in a series of obvious musical contrasts: the flitting flight of the mosquito, the "cruel pain" it inflicts upon its victim, its flight and return (with a direct musical pun on fugge, for which he suggests a fugue), the painful squeezing, and death once again set in more harsh harmonic language. Gesualdo saves his most aching gestures for the poet's assertion that he "ah! will succumb" to the "sweet poison" of her embrace; at this moment the vocal lines contain both chromatic half-steps and dramatic leaps of diminished octaves and minor ninths. Aldous Huxley called this very piece a "concentrated version of the love-potion scene in [Wagner's] Tristan."

Yet these apparent disjunctions transpire within a relatively stable harmonic world. The poem, despite its many mentions of pain, eagerly and positively awaits the erotic death. The madrigal begins in G major, and its final cadence, though salted with chromatic inflections, strongly arrives on the same sonority. At several internal moments where the poet considers the hopes he has of enjoying his beloved, the music even settles into C major harmonies. Numerous musical breaks arise from the conventional contrast of homophonic sections and points of imitation. Even the more extravagant harmonic passages may be viewed merely as more sensual permutations on fairly classical contrapuntal motion.

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