MADRIGAL

Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, lay face-down on the table. At each corner stood a manservant holding the ropes that bound his limbs; six more circled him with canes, delivering audible blows to his bare back. Gesualdo moaned. He’d finished his compositional duties for the day, having conceived yet another masterpiece of harmonic dissonance, and so felt free to surrender himself to the pleasures of flogging.

Eyes closed, he pondered the surrounding walls of his ancestral castle—dark stone rising from earth to form mezzanines, secret chambers, arches, turrets. To be ensconced in one’s private fortress, safe from the ugliness of the world, of other people . . . what could be sweeter? Of course, there was the nuisance of his wife, Eleonora. She was a cunt—and a nasty gossip, besides. Well, she had her living quarters and her embroidery.

The main thing was that he, Gesualdo, be left undisturbed.

* * *

Princess Eleonora sat in her bedchamber writing a letter to her half-brother, Cardinal Alessandro d’Este. She knew how the corrupt atmosphere enveloping the House of Gesualdo set tongues wagging, that—on top of everything else—rumors now circulated that she and the Cardinal shared an incestuous passion. It was nonsense, of course. Still, she couldn’t help blushing as she poured out in words her ardent longing for Alessandro’s company—as though one should be ashamed of familial devotion!

While mistaken about so much else, her husband, it seemed, was right about one thing—commoners were vile.

Of course, the Prince was no saint himself. In fact, Eleonora despised him. No matter how beautiful his music might be, Gesualdo remained a sallow, weasel-faced scoundrel who smelled of cabbage and treated the Princess like a criminal. Little wonder, then, that people thought she’d been driven into another’s arms!

She finished the letter, stood, and crossed to the couch, where she stretched out on her back—then lifted her nightgown over her naked belly and reached down to caress the damp tuft of her sex.

“Alessandro,” she whispered. “Alessandro.”

* * *

Gesualdo prowled the music hall in an ecstasy of agitation.

Obviously, Luzzaschi, Monteverde, and even Nenna had acquired privately circulated manuscript copies of Gesualdo’s scores and then shamelessly used some of his more striking innovations in their own work. Talentless fops! Ungrateful turncoats!

“He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish,” snarled the Prince, “the same shall betray me!”

He looked around for a sword or halberd. Finding none, he took a lute from a nearby chair and, gripping it by the neck, smashed it against a column.

Afterward, standing bewildered with a fistful of tangled strings, he choked on his tears.

“Tasso, my friend,” he cried. “You are missed! You are missed!”

* * *

Torquato Tasso, dead since 1595, would have felt keen sympathy for his friend Don Carlo. The author of the verse epic Jerusalem Delivered had, after all, spent seven years locked in an asylum because the Duke of Ferrara, jealous of Tasso’s gifts, wanted him out of the way. Not even the advocacy of Montaigne himself had helped Tasso’s case. There was simply no end to the lengths the mediocre would go to punish the great.

Tasso lived his final days hounded by doubt and anguish, certain that all his supporters had abandoned him.

Two hundred years later, Goethe would write a play about Tasso, casting him as a romantic martyr to a society of philistines.

Meanwhile, Tasso wrote some of his most admired occasional verse in mourning for Don Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria, and his lover, Maria d’Avalos—murdered in 1590 by Don Carlo Gesualdo.

* * *

Gesualdo knelt in his private chapel. The painting in the arched niche of the altar, commissioned nearly ten years earlier, had lost none of its power to torment.

Christ stood at the top, flanked by the Archangel Michael, St. Francis, the Blessed Virgin, Mary Magdalene, and other holy figures—each of whom raised an imploring face to the Redeemer on behalf of the man in the lower lefthand corner, Don Carlo Gesualdo. The Prince’s uncle, Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, stood behind his nephew with an arm around the sinner’s shoulders. Between these two men and a Franciscan nun in the opposite corner leaped the flames of Purgatory, where two victims—Gesualdo’s first wife, Maria, and her now notorious cavaliere—were being rescued by angels. An oversized naked toddler floated in the center of the piece—a puzzling detail of secret significance, known only to the composer himself.

Gesualdo loved to prostrate himself before this painting, to be whipped into a frenzy of remorse.

“I beg you!” he shrieked. “Forgive me!”

* * *

Gesualdo mounted the spiral staircase, followed by three assassins. When they reached the entrance to Maria’s apartment, the Prince scared off the maid who slept at her post, crashed through the door with one blow of his boot, and entered brandishing a torch.

“Ah, traitoress, I will kill you!” he cried. “You’ll not escape me now!”

Both Maria and Don Fabrizio lay sweat-soaked and exhausted—the Duke dressed in the Princess’ silk nightgown.

“There he is!” the Prince shouted.

The assassins swooped in.

They fired bullets into the Duke’s chest. They dragged him to the floor. Pinning him down with their knees, they stabbed him again and again. Blood spurted from his wounds.

Don Carlo stood over his terrified wife. “Will a Gesualdo be made a cuckold?” he cried.

The Princess begged for mercy, for absolution.

The dagger blade flashed as he hacked through her tender belly. Her legs flailed. Disgusted by the smell of sin that rose from her body, Gesualdo struck hard at its source.

The three assassins pulled the Prince away.

“The deed is done,” they said.

When the men reached the door, Gesualdo turned back and leaped again at his wife. He plunged the knife through her ribs, through her breast.

“I do not believe she is dead!” he cried. “I do not believe she is dead!”

* * *

Gesualdo sat on the chamber pot attempting to relieve himself. Having been insufficiently flogged the hour before, he found it rough going.

His wails of despair rang throughout the castle.

* * *

To Don Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria, the most degrading detail of the whole incident, the most bruising to his considerable vanity—had he known—would have been the nightgown.

Hadn’t Maria herself, when suspicion arose that her husband knew of their perfidy, chided Carafa in his fear for bearing a “woman’s heart”? Is that why she’d dressed him so? Could she, in her conniving way, have foreseen and possibly planned their humiliating deaths?

Even so, it would have been hard to predict that Gesualdo, unsatisfied with mere double homicide, would drag their bodies out onto the stairs and then post a public notice, inviting all of Naples to come gape at the murdered reprobates.

Such perversity simply couldn’t be anticipated—because if it could, the Duke of Andria, you may be sure, would have worn his best breeches.

* * *

Delirious and nearly strangled by chronic asthma, Gesualdo wandered the empty corridors.

He no longer composed.

He would write again to Federico Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan. Surely some arrangement could be made. He required a relic, a portrait—anything!—from the person of his dead uncle, the recently canonized San Carlo.

He must fortify his soul.

* * *

Donna Maria d’Avalos was both first wife and first cousin to Carlo Gesualdo. Barely twenty-five at the time of their marriage, Maria had already been wed—and widowed—twice. Her beauty and charm were legendary—so much so that her first husband was said to have dropped dead after three years from a surfeit of sensual indulgence.

Maria made no secret of her passionate nature. If only Don Carlo had proved worthy of it!

The Prince acknowledged her existence only long enough to beget a son—after which he turned his attention to music, hunting, and the occasional, ill-concealed dalliance with a kitchen maid. He treated the Princess with perfect contempt, as though she were a heifer whose only purpose was to birth his male heir.

The Duke of Andria, by contrast—handsome, confident, and insatiable—had called her a goddess.

In the end, when Gesualdo fled to his castle in the foothills, his title shielded him from punishment. He scribbled furiously all night long.

Maria lay in the ground.