1
The library at Gesualdo
Encased a cardinal’s cavilling Greek,
Which traced the first states, took issue with Mill
In defining tyranny, where tyrants go,
And who put them there – not vultures, but meek
Citizenry, the championed, men who aspired
To grow behind trellises, happily hired –
Splicing freedom and aphids in one freshened kill
They blooded their soil, to water their dill.
And their champ looks on from his window-ledge.
He’s aware, with a shiver, of that wafer wedge.
2
The prince makes his next choice:
Shopping at Venosa, relishing the line
That was led out to meet him, straightforwardly, twelve,
And of them eight tall, but three fair.
He wears out a man in livery’s high voice,
Separating from men boys, from their kin kine,
Whose task lies beyond barks to stack and to shelve –
They will reign in his country, once shod –
Who champions tyrants? The hand at the rod.
Four will stand, staged, gradated, deployed on the stair,
Oubliette’s lock fastened to a pair,
And that Dolomite club, brackish prevalent tool,
Becomes (vide Starkey) the Groom of the Stole.
3
His confessor froze in alarm
At how little the melody succumbed to calm.
A change was expected – a requiem mass
Nearly paid for, by proxy, at least, come to pass…
But those seculars only got longer and lusher,
Just as whores, branded, will step up their blusher.
Changed in other ways,
The prince keeps far from
Where he’ll become stone when he dies,
His long handbones crossed at groin, girt.
Nervy credit consents to cut out court farce;
Newly when stained with new panels, he pays.
Guilt fired the fools lodestars crave,
The crucifix slides and the devil’s dam fries,
Though not via hairshirt.
4
The thoughts of defenders, laid on:
What sort of a despot keeps quite a wide farm,
Confines dealings to quavers not caused by decrees,
But by spinets and lutes?
We could personalise fantasy on his tongue:
If a prince and a count is born free,
How can his mane suffer such bourgeois rom-com
As a wife after ‘fulfilment’, a ‘lonely’ rival?
Is this music a great man’s mind’s pelted muck?
Donna Maria, we posit, broke rules
Of Christian wife’s place, of high merit’s desert
With her flirty yoke. Cleave down, recur, blade,
Cleave to repetitiousness of true republics,
Reflower tyrant woman in that mortal hymen,
And wrap duke in juicy democratised princess.
5
Strokes are naïve as brutal:
And people like you always love a red story;
Attracted by horror, you yet spray it white,
‘Till Josef’s a raconteur, Cromwell a card.
But Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa,
And Count of Conza, is pungent for a poet;
His power so petty, his title so pure,
His sphere of action puts fat Harry to shame:
And sensitive too: his use of chromatics
Unknown ‘till his famous admirer, Igor.
Soaring art from repentance bought through little blood,
By Renaissance standards, you’ll aver. But would
You have heard of Gesualdo, were he twice as good
If he’d not sliced Maria and Fabrice so sure?
The artists have fêted the voice for the act,
We’re inclined to suspect. So let’s hear from three.
“This great, if disequilibrated, composer”,
Said Igor; and Aldous afterwards perceived
“That fantastic character out of a Webster
Melodrama” – at least he was honestly in it
For gore.
6
I saw Gesualdo weep,
One night at Ferarra, his new princess
Still, readied for his leap,
Her face too cautious for distress.
Believe me, the damned man wept from his heart,
And I knew now that princes could stab their own art.
The unmoved donna shone,
With such beauty as passion could only distort,
The unruptured mask more befitting the don,
Stern disregard, of a tyrant’s sort.
But when he fell silent and drew himself high
She arranged her young mouth in a sought after sigh.
They say he slew his child,
Testing its lineage on Gesualdo’s stone.
Don’t accuse me of delight in rumour so wild –
This is true reportage in a madrigal’s tone.
Four years ago Carlo killed wife, rival, son,
And so swears your true English lutenist, John.
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