#composersmonthly

As a last item for Gesualdo before moving on to Saariaho for a bit, I thought it might be interesting to share a transcription of a madrigal by Pomponio Nenna, a composer who lived and worked in the court of Gesualdo. The scholarship on Nenna (primarily Watkins and entries in Grove, though Gustave Reese mentions him, as well) says that Nenna was a skilled composer who may have exercised some influence on Gesualdo, perhaps even teaching the prince at some point. The conclusion, however, is that whether Nenna influenced Gesualdo or vice versa, Gesualdo is inevitably the much more adventurous, and thus interesting, composer.

A bucket-list piece to experience in person, Georg Friedrich Haas’s String Quartet No. 3, which is performed in complete darkness. The piece ends with a string quartet version of a Gesualdo response for Holy Week.

As a way of closing off our extended time with Gesualdo, I’ll take a (few) page(s) out of Glenn Watkins’s book, The Gesualdo Hex. Watkins includes a useful appendix that he calls “A Gesualdo Breviary,” essentially a list of pieces and musicians indebted to Gesualdo in some way. I’ll take only a few of these entries and post them here as a way of extending somewhat the conversation around Gesualdo we’re having here.

To begin, one of the pieces that is a focus of Watkins’s book: Stravinsky’s Monumentum pro Gesualdo, an orchestration of three of Gesualdo’s madrigals for chamber orchestra. The three madrigals are:

“Asciugate i begli occhi”

“Ma tu, cagion di quella”

“Beltà poi che t’assenti”

The last of these is particularly interesting to hear! There’s certainly some reminiscence of Webern’s Klangfarbenmelodie here, too.