Unlike the bulk of Gesualdo's sacrae cantiones (sacred motets), which set texts full of anguished repentance and passionate longing, many of the texts in the motets addressed to the Virgin Mary are simple, loving prayers, such as Maria, Mater gratiae (Mary, Mother of Grace). The pain audible in them is a transfiguration of the basic emotions heard in the secular madrigals: the anguish of separation from the beloved. It's still an unrequited love, but now it is a mystical love, less sharp, but more rich. Gesualdo, for all his violent behavior in life and music, achieves an uncanny tenderness, a prayerful vulnerability in his Marian motets. This comes out of his minute sensitivity to the play of light and shadow created by his harmonic progressions.

The style of the sacrae cantiones is conservative compared to the composer's late madrigals and responsories, harking back no doubt to Gesualdo's precursors, in general more diatonic and ear-friendly. His famous personality, however, often intrudes, albeit eloquently, and without a sense of discontinuity. We find ourselves expecting the secure sonic world of say, a Palestrina, and wind up slipping instead into a Gesualdine chromatic inferno. Maria, Mater gratiae is the safest thing you're likely to hear in late Gesualdo, and even it can slow-roast the unwary. The entire work is an almost unbroken, imitative texture with all five voices. Harmonically, it vacillates between fairly chromatic, and very chromatic accumulations around a clear, directional tonality. The simplicity of the individual motifs, continuous texture and fairly conservative voice leading, make it almost easy listening, but the aching vulnerability, raw as an open wound, in many passages, prevents complacent comfort.

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