It can be difficult to separate the notorious facts of Carlo Gesualdo's life from the eccentricities of his music. The noble Count of Venosa, though well-connected in Italian society and even related to the powerful Cardinal Borromeo, fell into an act of grevious double murder when he discovered his wife cavorting with another aristocrat. Gesualdo later became a semi-recluse, manifested a deeply depressive personality, and hired young men to whip him daily in penance for his sins. Romantic imagination, not to mention imagination in our own time, may quickly connect Gesualdo's dreadful personal circumstances with the intense and often violent chromaticism in his madrigals. On the one hand, there exists a perfectly sound historical reason for his interest in the musical avant-garde of his day; Gesualdo is known to have visited the mannerist court of Mantua, and was delighted by the chromatic innovations of Luzzaschi's music. Yet in Gesualdo's setting of the painful Italian text "Io parto, e non più dissi," he does seem musically to wallow in an almost personal pain.

Gesualdo's five-voiced madrigal Io parti, published in 1611 but probably composed earlier, adopts a straightforward structure, as several analysts have noted. Gesualdo centers the piece's tonality around the mournful "key" of E Phrygian, and returns to this chord often. Yet between the E chords, he flails about in veritable extacies of pain. The devil is in his musical details. The poetic speaker declares "I am leaving," and says no more; Gesualdo presents one single rhetorical statement and an early chromatic cadence. The poet's dolore comes in two passages of non-standard downward suspensions, the second with poignant half-steps; the following imitation evokes his "breaking heart." The second poetic voice, Clori, speaks "in tears," which Gesualdo gives particularly wrenching chromatic motion, and with "interrupted cries" set to breathless rests in the middle of words. Clori's plaintive and pitiable lines, in fact, continue to meander through nearly all the 12 harmonies of the chromatic scale. The speaker responds that though he had been in death (again set to chromatic motion), he now lives (in quick and syncopated imitation). His spirits had been "spent" (seen in diving melismas) but now return to life to hear Clori's "pitiable accents." Gesualdo thus ends on a more uplifting note, and even treats his singers to a pun. Italian improvisation practice taught singers how to perform accenti, or improvised ornaments; he writes such melsimatic ornaments into the score as the text's final word is accenti.

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