The ultimate madrigalian stage was reached by Carlo Gesualdo (1560–1613), the Prince of Venosa
near Naples in southern Italy. A colorful figure, himself a nobleman in no need of patronage (and with a
biography rich in lurid anecdote as only a nobleman’s could be), Gesualdo’s name derives equal notoriety
from his having ordered the murder of his unfaithful first wife and from his astonishing musical
compositions. It would be the wiser course, perhaps, to resist the temptation to link the two sides of his
fame, but there is no gainsaying his music’s lurid aspect, reported in his day (by a diplomat slightly
annoyed by Gesualdo’s “open profession” of an art better practiced by his employees) as being an art
“full of attitudes.”^13
Gesualdo brought to its peak the tradition of “uncanny” chromatic artifice initiated fifty years earlier
by Lasso, and applied it to the new, supercharged vein of erotic love poetry. Moro, lasso (“I shall die, O
miserable me”) comes from his sixth and last book, published in 1611, about the latest date at which
continental music in the “a cappella” polyphonic style could claim to represent a current idiom rather than
a stile antico. Before we even touch upon the music, it would be well to take a look at the poem, just to
satisfy ourselves that it is indeed a poem with meter and rhyme: