St Martin-in-the-Fields, London
The twisted life and sublime music of the murderous Renaissance composer is examined with style
The story of Carlo Gesualdo gets more twisted the closer you look at it. He was a nobleman in Renaissance Italy who murdered his wife and her lover, before shutting himself away in a palace with a second wife and two concubines, amid an atmosphere of flagellation and suspected witchcraft. He was also the composer of vocal music so harmonically experimental that it still sounds as if it could almost be beamed in from another planet. Death of Gesualdo, created by the director Bill Barclay and vocal group the Gesualdo Six, tells the story to the composer’s own music, compelling us to look at it and keep on looking.
Like their 2023 creation Secret Byrd, it was co-commissioned by St Martin-in-the-Fields, and the dimly lit church setting lent an extra frisson to its premiere here. It starts in 1611, with the composer on his deathbed, then unfolds in flashback. Gesualdo is first seen as a child, represented by a puppet; then the actor Markus Weinfurter takes over. As a young man he’s given a piece of wood that might be a cross, a sword – or a lute, we realise, thanks to a bit of air-guitar-style miming as Gesualdo falls in love with music, a slightly silly episode that is perhaps the staging’s only false note.
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