Carlo Gesualdo, principe di Venosa, conte di Conza (born March 30, 1566, Venosa [Italy]—died September 8, 1613, Gesualdo) was an Italian composer and lutenist. Until the late 20th century his fame rested chiefly on his dramatic, unhappy, and often bizarre life. Since the late 20th century, however, his reputation as a musician has grown, based on his highly individual and richly chromatic madrigals. He is especially noted for what music scholar Glenn Watkins called the “dazzling harmonic style” of his last two books of madrigals.

In 1586 he married his first cousin, the twice-widowed Maria d’Avalos, who was several years older than he. She bore a son and not long thereafter embarked on an affair with Fabrizio Carafa, duca d’Andria. Informed of her infidelity, Gesualdo laid a trap and, with the help of others, murdered his wife and her lover in bed. The double murder caused a great scandal, and what came to be seen as a tragic outcome of the affair became the subject matter of a number of writers, including Giambattista Marino and Torquato Tasso. Because such revenge was in keeping with the social code of the day, however, Gesualdo was not charged with murder. When his father died in 1591, he assumed the title of prince of Venosa.

Gesualdo’s last two books of madrigals (as well as a Holy Week Responsoria) were published in 1611. Although these last two books of madrigals were long considered “late” works because of their dramatic exclamations, linearly driven chromaticism, discontinuous texture, and harmonic license—that is, their generally unusual and experimental nature—Gesualdo himself claimed that they had in fact been written in the mid-to-late 1590s, near the time of his other published madrigals, and that he had been forced to publish accurate copies because inaccurate copies had been printed and some work plagiarized.

(Britannica)

Despite the dazzling harmonic shifts in Gesualdo's fifth and sixth books of madrigals, his music was so extreme that some 20th-century critics and composers believed him to be a proto-serialist, going further than any composer before Schoenberg in mining the expressive potential of saturated dissonance. Watkins goes on, fascinatingly, to chart how the story of Gesualdo and his music has enthralled and inspired 20th- and 21st-century creatives, from Stravinsky to Boulez, Andriessen to Brett Dean, Werner Herzog to Ian Rankin.

(The Guardian)