Gesualdo’s harmonic progressions, more fully saturated than any predecessor’s with true chromatic
voice leading (often in two, sometimes even in three voices at once), is often compared with much later
music (most often, perhaps, with Wagner’s). Those inclined to make such comparisons—such as Igor
Stravinsky, the famous Russian composer then living in Hollywood, who became fascinated with
Gesualdo in the 1950s and even orchestrated three of his madrigals—are also inclined to look upon
Gesualdo as a “prophetic” composer, so far ahead of his time that it took two and a half centuries for the
rest of the world to catch up with him.
As ought to be clear, even without a peek at Wagner’s work, such ideas are based on dubious
historical assumptions. The most groundless one is that all of music is moving in one direction (say,
toward Wagner and beyond), and therefore some music is farther along the path of destiny than other
music. But of course Wagner’s chromaticism depends for its effect (and even its sheer intelligibility) on a
great deal of aural conditioning that Wagner’s contemporaries had all been subjected to (as have we), but
that Gesualdo’s contemporaries had not. Gesualdo’s harmony, however radical, was in no sense ahead of
its time. As in the case of Lasso, its ingredients were familiar and its progressions not unprecedented.
What was unique in his music was not its sound or its syntax, but its concentrated intensity.
Within the terms of sixteenth century style, moreover, Gesualdo’s greatest audacities are not harmonic
per se, but consist rather in the frequent pauses that disrupt the continuity of his lines, often followed by
harmonically disconnected resumptions that coincide (as in Moro, lasso) with the ahi’s, the affective or
downright suggestive exclamations of desire or (given their proximity to words invoking death) of
satiation (Ex. 17-20). This linguistic realism, betokening emotional realism and even physiological
realism, can still make us uncomfortable when listening to Gesualdo in public. That discomfort has led
many writers, even modern ones, to write the Prince of Venosa’s extravagances off as being inartistic,
even (as befits a prince) “amateurish.”^14 Poetry lovers also resist Gesualdo, for his fragmented,
discombobulated music completely devours the poem in the course of realizing its affetti, turning it into
what often sounds like fairly inarticulate prose.
Gesualdo’s modern reputation (or modernist reception) poses interesting historical questions. On the
one hand, as suggested above (and as the Italian scholar Lorenzo Bianconi has eloquently complained), by
drawing factitious connections between Gesualdo and other daring harmonists, the modern revival of
interest in him has fueled the invention of “an imaginary, heroic history of visionary prophets”^15 (Lasso →
Gesualdo → Wagner → Stravinsky, or something of the sort) and has obscured rather than illuminated the
actual historical and cultural conditions that nourished their various activities. On the other hand, without
benefit of some of these false historical notions, interest in Gesualdo would never have quickened in the
twentieth century the way it did; his works would have been studied and performed far less than they have
been, and probably with a far less sympathetic understanding.
Which is not to say that modern understanding of Gesualdo (or any cultural figure from the past) is or
can ever be the same as contemporary understanding. It is motivated by new interests and a different
intellectual climate, and the passage of years or centuries irrevocably alters the context in which any
artifact of the past is perceived. Modern understanding, then, cannot be anything other than new
understanding and—if difference is automatically equated with loss (which of course it need not be)—it