Le composizioni sacre di Carlo Gesualdo: un approccio analitico sul piano della retorica musicale. Ma non solo

Both in the past and recently the attention on the sacred repertory of the Principe di Venosa has been, without any doubt, marginal or even superficial in comparison with the madrigalistic production. This study therefore gives itself the principal aim of beginning an exegesis, exhaustive as much as possible, through an analytical path mostly borrowed by classical rhetoric.

In his sacred music Gesualdo places himself in an autonomous position in regard to the post-council regulations: although he is much more thrifty in the use of chromaticism and dissonances, nevertheless the texts of the Sacrae cantiones, for instance, don’t belong to any particular liturgical moment, but originate from a strong expressive need focused on the themes of sorrow, anguish, repentance, plea and death.

There is a sort of stylistic fusion between the sacred and the secular genre, realized in a strict analogy with the relationship between word and music. The text determines the musical structure, originating the so called “soggetti”, that are the musical equivalents of stated words or imagines; through this procedure, regulated by the law of poetry, Gesualdo realizes every feature of the “affetti” implied in the words.

The large employment of rhetorical figures in Gesualdo’s sacred compositions – here showed by means of several musical examples – creates a dialectic relation between poetry and music where none of the two is mortified in comparison with the other.