Gesualdo: The man and his music

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (1560-1613), is equally celebrated as the composer of madrigals of great power and tortured complexity and as the murderer of his wife and her lover. His life and compositions are not unconnected. His neurotic sensibility found an ideal outlet in the Mannerist tendencies of late Renaissance music, and his works are the most extreme examples of these tendencies.