From Carlo Gesualdo, posterity will have above all retained the character, sometimes very awkwardly summarized in his only nickname of "assassin composer". Did not the irascible and impossible artist, suffering from a sickly jealousy, coldly kill, at the end of a 16th century obscurantist, his first wife in her lover's bed? But what to think, then, of the magnificent tenderness of the madrigals who followed this desperate and savage act. Some people do not hesitate to see it as a quest for redemption in the light of a sublimated vocal polyphony as rarely before.
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Others, on the contrary, put forward the disturbing capacity of the artist to absolve himself, and to disregard his act, to better devote himself to his art. Whatever the real reason, one thing is certain: the six books of 125 madrigals by the Italian master, in spite of the relative ignorance that one can have of them today, have marked by their modernity and their ability to condense in music all the complexity of human passions, the history of Western music.
The list of composers that this corpus inspired would no doubt be too long to be detailed here. After his integral of Monteverdi's madrigals, the chief and singer Paul Agnew therefore tackled, with Les Arts Florissants, this other monumental sum of Italian vocal art. This week they read the 4th Book, composed only five years after the murder of his wife.
"Gesualdo madrigal, the Philharmonie de Paris, 224, avenue Jean-Jaurès (Paris 19th). Tel: 01 44 84 44 84. Dates: February 10 at 8:30 p.m. D 14 to 32 euros.
