Il «Monumentum pro Gesualdo» di Stravinsky come interpretazione critico-analitica

Stravinsky wrote the Monumentum pro Gesualdo in 1960, by re-elaborating three Gesualdo’s madrigals for orchestra: two of them from the fifth book (Asciugate i begli occhi, and Ma tu, cagion di quella); one from the sixth book (Beltà poi che t’assenti). Stravinsky was not new to re-elaborating Gesualdo’s works: three years before he had re-integrated the missing parts in three of the Sacrae cantiones.

In the Monumentum the re-elaborating process is decisively more evident, mostly in the first madrigal, though he hold very strong relations with the original material: this intimate relation with the source makes it an ‘artistically interpretative’ work.

Several critics maintain that Stravinsky, by eliminating the text from the composition, emphasizes the chromatic elements of Gesualdo’s style (in the sense of harmonic verticality), and alienates them from the contrapuntal context to which they are due: but the Monumentum presents interesting and hitherto unknown aspects just as regards the analytical interpretation of Gesualdo’s madrigals.

This article presents an analysis of the first madrigal by comparing its original form with the ‘artistically interpretative sense’ peculiar to the Monumentum.