Gesualdo Tenebrae

"There is something deeply troubling and inscrutable in Gesualdo’s music, something that any listener, even the most inexpert one, will unfailingly experience. This most particularly holds for Tenebrae responsoria (1611), his definitive statement, his monument, his testament. It is as if this work, firmly embedded in the framework of liturgy for the Holy Week and reaching back to the practices of the Gregorian chant, would constantly extend over its boundaries and transgress its time and setting, immediately addressing modernity...” Mladen Dolar, Out of Joint (2020)

More than 400 years later, the music of Carlo Gesualdo still seems strikingly avant-garde. Composed for his own private use during his final years, and likely unheard during his lifetime, Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsories are of unmatched intensity. This is music at the end of an epoch; at once steeped in and a radically unsettling subversion of the traditions of the sixteenth century.

The first set of Responsories for Maundy Thursday (Feria V) evoke Christ’s abandonment, betrayal, and death. Gesualdo’s dramatic settings reflect the angst of the passion story, alongside his own bloody encounter with death – in 1590 he murdered his wife Maria d’Avalos and her lover Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria, when he discovered them ‘in flagrante delicto’. Gesualdo’s punishment was as self-inflicted as the crime. His status as prince saved him from criminal persecution; instead he saw out his days living as a recluse, tormented by grief and guilt.

Translating literally to ‘darkness’, the plural form of ‘Tenebrae’ is fitting; it implies a multiplicity, all-encompassing shadows;  a plunge into darknesses of both deeply personal grief and of universal sorrow.

Luminescence Chamber Singers
Roland Peelman