Publisher's Synopsis
Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Verona, 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 those tendencies.;Glenn Watkins' extended study of Gesualdo's life and works was originally published in 1973. Alongside detailed analysis of Gesualdo's madrigals and of his few works in different genres, this edition contains much new biographical material, particularly on the latter part of the composer's life.
