by Anna Baker Smith
It’s the evening of Palm Sunday, early April and cold, the sky over downtown Amherst dark. Just inside an old stone church, our little choir of twelve is seated in a circle near the heavy wooden doors. On the wall behind us is a marble plaque, with the words of a long-dead parishioner dedicating the bell tower in memory of his now also long-dead wife.
This group has been rehearsing for a Tenebrae service to be held in a few days as part of Holy Week. Tenebrae means “the shadows.” There will be music and readings; candles will be extinguished one after the other throughout the service, leading up to an account of the crucifixion, finally leaving the church in darkness. This is our one rehearsal. The pressure is on, and I’m feeling the relief bordering on euphoria that comes at the end of a rehearsal when you realize you’ve made it through without humiliating yourself.
But for a chosen few this rehearsal isn’t over. Five singers get to stick around to run through a piece with five vocal parts. The leftovers, those of us not chosen for the task, are lingering. It’s late, but who can leave? We’re dying to hear Gesualdo.
*
If you’re a choral music aficionado, you already know about Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa, the 16th century Italian composer who murdered his wife and her lover. From his youth, he was obsessed with music, though for a time he was (ironically enough) intended for the church. He was the second son, but he outlived his brother, becoming the Prince of Venosa.
And you may have heard how the twenty-four-year-old prince caught his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto. Donna Maria d’Avalos, Gesualdo’s wife, had been having an affair with the Duke of Andria for two years, somehow managing to keep this from Carlo. When he did find out, with the help of the servants, he set up an ambush. The lovers were murdered in her bedroom.
Testimonies were extensive, all agreeing that the double murder was brutal, bloody, depraved. Like the wife of the art-collecting duke in Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” Gesualdo’s wife had a heart “too soon made glad.” The duke in Browning’s poem infamously says, “I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.”
But as with that duke, Gesualdo’s noble status kept him from being prosecuted. Such acts of revenge were considered justified at the time.
His reputation as a killer didn’t keep him from remarrying, though, this time to the niece of the Duke of Ferrara (the very duke from “My Last Duchess”), Eleanora d’Este. Unsurprisingly, his second marriage was not a happy one. She accused him of abuse and infidelity, and sought divorce, finally living apart from him. As Cecil Gray said in his 20th century biography of the composer, “She must have been a virtuous woman […] for there is no record of his having killed her.”
This marriage did allow Gesualdo to spend five years in the Court of Este, at that time the center of avant-garde music in Italy. For the rest of his life, he seems to have transferred his obsession back to music. However, his noble status couldn’t protect him from acts of revenge by his first wife’s family, so he eventually established his own accademia in the now well-guarded Gesualdo Castle.
*
But back in Amherst our little Tenebrae choir has had a long day, having assembled early to rehearse, then wave palm fronds and sing. The Palm Sunday service starts happy but ends miserable, with the reading of the Passion, the account of Christ’s last days. As a Buddhist who started going to the Episcopal church at age fifty-one, I’m still in awe of this week of psychodrama, so unlike the North Carolina Protestantism I grew up with. Maybe it’s the music, maybe it’s the story—but it works for me.
Yet on this night, at the beginning of Holy Week, as we are listening to the chosen five, it becomes clear that what isn’t working is this Gesualdo. The small group has moved to the front of the church, to be near the piano. At first their voices sound like what I’ve heard of Gesualdo, the trippy chromaticism and dissonance, not governed by the ordinary rules of harmony. I’m vicariously nervous. The choral music scene in Western Mass has many members who do not suffer fools. As a matter of fact, about sixty seconds in, one of the heavies, says loudly enough for everyone to hear—the ones singing, the conductor, even the long-dead composer—“Those are not the right notes.”
Alas, they weren’t. This was my first hint that this music might be a tad difficult, maybe even cursed.
*
About a year later, Jim and I are in Buckley Recital Hall at Amherst College, a concrete cavern that would serve well as a bunker in the event of nuclear attack. The audience has taken off their coats, shaken them lightly, removing a gray hair here or there, before draping them over the backs of the cushioned theater-style seats. This room is where many musical events take place, offered up like sheep to the slaughter to a discerning, hyper-educated audience.
We’re eager to hear this performance, not just because of the group’s hotshot young conductor and hotshot singers (some of whom have been reviewed by the New York Times and the New Yorker), but also because one of the pieces on the program is by Gesualdo. If anyone can sing his scary music, they can.
How disappointing then to learn in the conductor’s opening comments that she’s sorry, but they won’t be performing the Gesualdo this evening. She takes up her baton; the singers open their folders or gently wake up their iPads.
Jim and I just look at each other and wonder.
*
For many years Jim has been in a small early music group, each of them singing alone on their parts. At least once they were referred to as “the pre-eminent early music group in Western Massachusetts.” While this might sound a bit like when a rock band is described as “big in Japan,” they’re actually pretty good. How odd then to learn that a few years ago they, too, were rescued from having to perform a piece by Gesualdo. The excuse at the time was the rising pandemic, but he told me they’d been struggling. So now we’ve counted three times that groups have backed away from the difficult prince.
And I must relate another failure, one I was part of. A year after the first aborted Gesualdo mission, the entire Tenebrae group of Grace Church was going to take a crack at it. With a few voices on each part, we thought we could pull it off.
I practiced for hours before that rehearsal, determined not to screw up our chance to break what by then I was convinced was the curse of Gesualdo. Maybe it’s that we live in Massachusetts, with its history of hexes and witch trials. In the 1680s, a woman living on our street in Hadley was hanged as a witch. Even the Red Sox were allegedly cursed for trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees. We are an obsessive, superstitious lot.
I sat at the piano in our dining room, plunking out the haunting…I want to say…melody? I needed to know my part cold in case of demon possession.
We assembled just after dark, our director wisely opting to begin the rehearsal with Gesualdo. We were practicing in the parish hall—a room not known for fine acoustics, but I can’t blame the carpeting. We sang these words from the prophet Isaiah: Sicut ovis ad occisionem ductus est, / et dum male tractaretur non aperuit os suum. “He was led as a sheep to the slaughter, mistreated, but he opened not his mouth.” Traditus est ad mortem ut vivificaret populum suum. “He was delivered over to death so as to give life to his people.” The air was thick with liturgical gravitas.
But by page three, the die was cast. Without singling out any one vocal part, mistakes were made. After forty minutes, we voted to cut our losses—a now humbler choir realizing that if we were to include Gesualdo, we would need more rehearsal. He was yanked.
*
Now it’s March, the season of Lent. Soon it will be Holy Week, then Easter. The students are ready for spring, roaming the streets day and night, exerting their irrepressible life force over the stodginess of Western Massachusetts. Through the dark, over fields, lights glow, from windows and the filling stations along Route 9. As we fall asleep, a barred owl reminds us to see things another way, and another, and another…and to pay attention to our vowels.
But in the midst of so much beauty, I’m wondering, How is it that this transcendent music is tied to such violence? I don’t know, but I’m willing to try another approach: to relate to it as a kind of healing, an exorcism, as one might with any other form of haunting. Maybe learning Gesualdo’s music needs to be the psychodrama for us that composing it must have been for him. For more than a year now singers have been sitting and standing around the dining room table in our farmhouse, struggling to learn his music, to make sense of it all. Choral musicians are obsessive. We’ve moved into Gesualdo’s castle, to find out what’s there—to let the dead speak.
Listen to Gesualdo’s Sicut Ovis Ad Occisionem here.
Anna Baker Smith’s writing has appeared in Essay Daily, The Fourth River, PANK, After the Art, Massachusetts Review, TriQuarterly, as a chapbook from Bellepoint Press, and elsewhere. She grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, and lives in Western Massachusetts. She has an MFA in fiction from UMass Amherst where she now teaches part-time. @innergothic.bsky.social and @innergothic.
After the Art 