Madrigali esemplari: analitica gesualdiana prospettica

The judgement concerning Gesualdo’s music was enthusiastic in the seventeenth century, when he was considered to be both a master of counterpoint (e.g. by Giustiniani) and an innovative composer (e.g. by Doni). Opinions were both positive (e.g. by Hawkins) and negative (e.g. by Burney) in the eighteenth century, and remained cautiously positive in the nineteenth. In the first part of the twentieth century we can observe the birth of an image of Gesualdo as an avant-garde composer, following the study of Philip Heseltine (1926); but in the second part of the century musicological research (in particular Dahlhaus’s studies, as well as other subsequent contributions, e.g. Cecchi and Catz) pointed out Gesualdo’s strict structural adherence to the traditional modal and cadential system.

For the present musicological research it would be useful to look back to Padre Martini’s approach to Gesualdo’s music, as set down in his treatise Esem­plare (1774-1775). The second part of the paper returns to Martini’s analysis of Gesualdo’s Moro, e mentre sospiro.

From this analysis we can gain fresh insight into an understanding of Gesualdo’s compositional techniques by focusing primarily on the varied use of the soggetti in the construction of different sections of the madrigal.