can only be “misunderstanding.”
But it is an inevitable misunderstanding, even a necessary one. There is little to be gained in
complaining that the disproportionate interest we now take in Gesualdo’s chromatic madrigals, at the
expense of his sacred music or his instrumental dances or any other less spectacular side of his output, is
“a mistaken overemphasis,” as Bianconi so challengingly puts it.^16 Our modern (mis)understandings of the
past are not mistakes but the products of changed historical conditions. We value in Gesualdo something
his contemporaries could not have valued, because we know what they (and he) did not—namely, their
future, which is now our past. That knowledge can hardly be erased from our consciousness.
EX. 17-20 Carlo Gesualdo, Moro, lasso, mm. 1–12