Gesualdo: The Man and His Music

Glenn Watkins

Clarendon Press, 1991 - Biography & Autobiography - 414 pages

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, is equally celebrated as the composer of madrigals of great power and tortured complexity and as the murderer of his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto. His life and compositions are not unconnected. His neurotic sensibility found an ideal outlet in the mannerist tendencies of late Renaissance music, and his works are the most extreme examples of those tendencies. Watkins's extended study of Gesualdo's life and works was originally published in 1973. Alongside detailed analysis of Gesualdo's remarkable madrigals and of the few works in other genres, it contained much new biographical material, particularly on the latter part of the composer's life. This new edition has been extensively updated, and contains a new chapter covering the research of recent years. The preface to the first edition, by Igor Stravinsky is reprinted.

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Review: Gesualdo: The Man and His Music

User Review  - Carol - Goodreads

This book on 16th century composer Carlo Gesualdo is set up very much like David Fallows' biographies - a short section covering Gesualdo's biography, and then a longer, more detailed section ...

About the author

Glenn Watkins is Earl V. Moore Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and author of "Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists "(1994), "Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century "(1988), and "Gesualdo: The Man and His Music "(1991).

Bibliographic information

• Title: Gesualdo: The Man and His Music; Clarendon Paperbacks
• Author: Glenn Watkins
• Edition: 2, illustrated
• Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1991
• ISBN: 0198161972, 9780198161974
• Length: 414 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Composers & Musicians; Music / Genres & Styles / Ballet; Music / Genres & Styles / Classical; Music / History & Criticism