mme_hardy | The things you learn

I have an Allegri album I really love, A Sei Voci's "Miserere Mei, Messe, Motets", so I decided to go hunting for other Renaissance polyphony. I chose the Hilliard Ensemble's recording of the Gesualdo Tenebrae. The album notes commented, "Carlo Gesualdo's name will always conjure up a special image: When he discovered that his wife had been unfaithful, he had her and her lover murdered and left on his palace steps, impaled on the same sword. "

Well, golly. His second marriage, to a d'Este, was unhappy as well (big shock); Wikipedia comments, " According to Cecil Gray, 'She seems to have been a very virtuous lady ... for there is no record of his having killed her.'" Good to know. Wikipedia says that Gesualdo was tortured by guilt for the rest of his life, and that some the-life-is-the-work types attribute the difficulty and chromatic complexity of his music to guilt.

Again following Wiki links, I found the Concerto delle donne, an all-female group of singers who flourished at the court of Alfonso II di Farrara in the late 15th century. "The women performed up to six hours a day, either singing their own florid repertoire from memory, sight-reading from partbooks, or participating in the balletti as singers and dancers." I need to hunt up some of the music written for them.

In my 20s and 30s I used to spend time reading Britannica and cursing the difficulty of tracing cross-references; I'd grab a volume in the evening and read some of the good bits. Wikipedia, with all its problems, provides a similar experience without my having to get up out of my chair and grab a different volume.