The name of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, first spread across Italy because of a grand scandal. In 1590, after discovering his wife and her lover in flagrante, Gesualdo killed them both on the spot. Given all of the actors in this honour killing were drawn from nobility, news of the murder travelled particularly quickly; only later did his idiosyncratic corpus of strange harmonies emerge. 

Moro, lasso, al mio duolo, a morose yet sparkily inventive madrigal for five voices, comes from Gesualdo’s sixth and most stylistically adventurous book of madrigals, published in 1611, two years before his death aged 47. Gesualdo’s late madrigals are notable for their harmonic ingenuity. They are heavily chromatic, emotionally volatile, and utilise false relations—chromatic contradictions, where two voices overlap by a semitone at the same time to create a particularly scrunchy moment—frequently. The effect is polarising. Eminent 18th century music historian Charles Burney described the opening of Moro, lasso as “extremely shocking and disgusting.” But, over 400 years since Gesualdo’s death, it still sounds strikingly unlike anything else in the musical canon. 

© Hugh Morris 2025