Product Description
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The last decade of the twentieth century alone spawned three
operas based on the life of the 'principe dei musici': Alfred
Schnittke's Gesualdo was premiered in 1995 at the Vienna State
Opera; then the following year came Franz Hummel's opera of the
same name, a commission from the city of Kaiserslautern; and in
1998 Salvatore Sciarrino wrote an opera for the Schwetzingen
Festival entitled Luci mie traditrici, after a sixteenth century
drama about a prince who murders his wife.
So Gesualdo was already the focus of a good deal of interest when
the Munich-based director and film producer Werner Herzog also
developed an interest in the composer at about this time. Herzog
seemed somehow predestined for the job. His preference for
eccentric protagonists, amply attested to in films such as
Aguirre, Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo starring Klaus Kinski,
went hand in hand with a musical streak that has won him a great
deal of admiration since the mid 1980s with regular opera
productions at the Bayreuth Festival, the Opera Bastille in Paris
and La Scala, Milan. Of course, one was never to expect a
creative artist of Herzog's talents to produce a conventional
documentary film.
Review
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"...The busy Curtis (who recently recorded Handel's Ariodante,
the first opera I ever heard him conduct, with Gauvin, and
DiDonato in the title role) actually appears on screen, leading
Il Complesso Barocco, in a 1995 Werner Herzog film, Gesualdo:
Death for Five Voices, newly out on DVD (ArtHaus Musik). It's a
film strange enough to be worthy of its supremely eccentric
subject, madrigalist Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613). And it takes the
music seriously enough not to hide it in a soundtrack but to give
it to us in full-frontal performances by Curtis and his
musicians, jeans-clad and ensconced in the ruins of the castle in
which Gesualdo died.
Because it's Herzog, and therefore no standard-issue biopic,
Death for Five Voices - also far too imaginative, even
speculative, to qualify as a documentary - begins with an
explanation of how the composer, after a life of sexual
misadventures, probably died of an infection caused by the
punitive whippings he hired a staff of 20 to administer nightly.
It answers the question, was he a masochist?, with a speculative
yes, noting that he also forced one of his servants (gender
unspecified) to share his bed, purportedly to keep him warm. The
Prince of Venosa's sexploits were famously, and infamously, with
women, but South of Market offers nothing to (you should pardon
the expression) top him. But Herzog and his talking heads tell it
better.
Today, Gesualdo is considered one of the greatest Renaissance
composers, and by any estimation the greatest chromaticist before
Wagner. Proof comes no more potent than the two madrigals Curtis
and his singers perform. There are also performances by the
Gesualdo Consort of London and, fittingly, a musical appearance
by an unnamed man with a bagpipe-like instrument who comes to the
castle regularly to blast out the spirit of an evil ghost.
Then there's a horse." -Tim Pfaff -- The Bay Area Reporter - June
17, 1010
Documentary films about composers, even when they are as smoothly
delivered and musically star-studded as Phil Grabsky's recent
pair on Beethoven and Mozart, often have about the charm of a
well-written encyclopedia article. That's why it's good news to
have back in circulation this wonderfully eccentric, auteurish,
and at times hilarious film on Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1630) by the
German director Werner Herzog.
Gesualdo's ear-bending harmonic audacity and the sheer breathless
invention of his madrigals famously inspired many 20th-century
composers, from Stravinsky to Alfred Schnittke. But it's also no
doubt "the murky aura of criminality and obsession,'' as this
DVD's liner notes put it, that has enticed many listeners to
learn more about the enigmatic composer. As the young prince of
Venosa, Gesualdo married his cousin Maria d'Avalos but, after
catching her in the act with another lover, notoriously murdered
both of them in cold blood.
Made for German television in the mid-1990s, "Gesualdo: Death for
Five Voices'' cannot be called a documentary in the conventional
sense. Yes, Herzog taps serious-minded performers but he also
stages completely invented scenes, like a surprise encounter with
an itinerant bagpipe player who drenches the walls of Gesualdo's
castle with music to keep the composer's evil spirit at bay. The
film crew also mysteriously happens upon a woman who believes she
is the reincarnation of the composer's murdered wife. In one
particularly comic moment, two Italian cooks hold forth from
their trattoria kitchen, analyzing the prince's supposed wedding
menu, marveling at its extravagance (2,000 oysters!) while
expressing horror at his murderous deeds ("He was the devil!'').
Often in this film historical truth and directorial fiction feel
equally strange. But Herzog's genuine passion for his subject
comes through clearly. So do the fine performances of Gesualdo's
madrigals by Il Complesso Barocco and the Gesualdo Consort of
London. And if you have sat through a lot of sober, earnest
composer documentaries, you will appreciate one that ends with
the delectably absurd scene of a conductor waxing poetic on
Gesualdo's music while grown men in outlandish costumes joust
behind him on horseback. -- Boston.com - July 4, 2010
The sordid tale of a murderous prince is alluring; all the more
so when the subject is also a supremely innovative composer for
his time. While certainly intriguing for music aficionados, Carlo
Gesualdo seems to have also left a legacy of fascination
bordering on obsession for the current-day inhabitants of the
village attached to his castle's ruins. In 1586, he married his
beautiful cousin, Maria d'Avalos. Only a few years later, in a
pre-meditated act of jealous rage, he murdered Maria and her
lover and displayed their bodies first on the steps of the house,
then preserved them for display in a nearby church. Being a
prince, he was never prosecuted for this "crime of passion" or
for subsequently killing their young son, nonetheless, he did
torture himself through unrelenting ellation for the rest of
his days.
Werner Herzog's movie Death for Five Voices takes his audience on
a tour of this house of horrors through the eyes of colourful
local inhabitants: the bagpiper who regularly flushes out evil
spirits, a mad opera singer who thinks she's the reincarnation of
Maria and local chefs who describe the decadent 120-course
wedding feast. A few of his madrigals are performed by the
Gesualdo Consort and Il Complesso Barocco led by Alan Curtis who
also provides useful musical commentary. Both of these ensembles
perform this difficult repertoire with its many harmonic and
rhythmic twists and turns most admirably, if a bit too scholarly.
The women do manage to evoke some of the ity of the "Three
Ladies of Ferrara" that Gesulado would have certainly known from
the house of his second wife Leonora d'Este (who later fled to a
nunnery).
I did prefer the inclusion of female voices when comparing these
performances with a recent of Gesualdo's Madrigals Book
1 by Delitiae Musicae, an all-male ensemble led by Marco
Longhini. That preference aside, this group does a superb job of
conveying the sweet and painful longings inherent in texts by
Guarini and Tasso made ever so much more excruciating by
Gesualdo's dissonances, chromaticism and quick tonal
discombobulations. The group's purity of tone and precise
intonation ensures that these turns are well articulated and
deeply understood.
Both DVD and CD releases provide artfully crafted ins into a
virtuosic but deeply disturbed individual. Gesualdo's history and
his music are neither for the faint of heart nor the
disingenuous. -- The Whole Note, Dianne Wells