The case of Carlo Gesualdo’s double homicide has been heard and reheard in various domains for over four centuries. In whichever way it is told, the story of how the Prince of Venosa (1556–1613) had his wife and her lover slaughtered – ‘Kill, kill that scoundrel along with this harlot! Shall a Gesualdo be made a cuckold?’ – has never ceased to send shivers down listeners’ spines (‘I do not believe she is dead yet’, Gesualdo is alleged to have muttered, as he hacked his wife’s lifeless body a second time).Footnote 1 To this day, pilgrimages are made by artists and scholars alike to the ‘scene of the crime’ in the centro storico of Naples and from there to the Castello di Gesualdo in the scenic Neapolitan countryside, with the hope of piecing together this troubled prince’s life and works. If one were to venture to reopen this case again, suspecting that some evidence had been missed, there is still just one relatively authoritative source to consult: a posthumous copy of the initial ‘investigative hearing’ (‘processo’) carried out by the Grand Court of the Viceroy (Gran Corte della Vicaria) in Naples.Footnote 2 Other than that, there are ‘scandalous chronicles’ (‘cronache scandalose’) – historical fabrications of the Gesualdo affair that differ from the processo. Footnote 3
First published in the nineteenth century, the processo has long frustrated scholars because the Grand Court appears to have omitted evidence on purpose.Footnote 4 The inner workings of the court might mystify musicologists in particular, as there is precious little for us to work with in an unfamiliar jurisdiction.Footnote 5 The court’s investigators wrote up, firstly, a thorough coroner’s report, which describes all the wounds, weapons and bloodied nightgowns in gruesome detail. After that, they took down the witness testimonies of both a maid- and a manservant in Gesualdo’s household, which turn out to be not wholly consistent with each other. That is all. The investigators did not interrogate Gesualdo himself because they had no need to record his version of the events. The prince (so the court was content to hear) was just about to embark on a hunting trip that night, when an unwelcome guest arrived upstairs (‘You will see the kind of hunting I am going to do’, Gesualdo retorted, when asked by his baffled servant why he wanted to go hunting late at night).Footnote 6 Judging from the processo, the investigators were charged only with determining the guilt of Gesualdo’s wife, Maria d’Avalos, and her lover, Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria, so as to spare the prince from criminal prosecution.
Implausible though it might strike us today, the lovers had committed a crime – adultery; Gesualdo was the victim. Gesualdo, as Annibale Cogliano has recently expounded, did not break the law of our time but followed the law that was in effect in his time: a neo-Roman ‘Julian’ law (lex Iulia).Footnote 7 To preserve his honour, Gesualdo was free to execute his cuckolders upon catching them spontaneously in the act (in flagrante delicto). It is therefore a historical error, Cogliano cautioned, for us to continue calling Gesualdo a ‘murderer’,Footnote 8 as if he were a criminal, for Gesualdo did not commit the crime of murder (delitto). He exercised his right (diritto) to perform an ‘honour killing’ (delitto d’onore).Footnote 9 As the Neapolitan jurisconsult Nuntio Tartaglia explained, ‘According to the law of our kingdom, a husband is permitted to kill both the adulterer and [his] wife when they are caught together in the act, without any distinction of persons’.Footnote 10
Case closed, the Grand Court declared: the law was on Gesualdo’s side. The Julian rights of men would even be upheld in print by one of the Gesualdo family’s own jurisconsults, Camillo Borrello (d. 1631), who discoursed at length on adultery (Appendix 1).Footnote 11 The d’Avalos and Carafa families, bearing the brunt of the law, dared not file a legal complaint (querela) against Gesualdo.Footnote 12 All of the parties involved in the affair recognised that the law was served, and they soon came to terms with the situation. ‘Evidently everyone’, as Glenn Watkins remarked in his foundational biography of Gesualdo, ‘wished to suppress the scandal as quickly as possible’.Footnote 13At the encouragement of the viceroy, the Gesualdo and Carafa families mopped the mess up without much fuss, while the prince fled to his castle. Save for a dispute (lite) that Gesualdo later instigated with Maria’s father (to recoup her dowry), there was no further legal action on this matter.Footnote 14
It would still be unwarranted, however, for scholars to cease the investigation against Gesualdo, because the said neo-Julian law had, in fact, long been repealed by another institution to which his family belonged: the Church. As the namesake of his illustrious maternal uncle, Charles Borromeo, former archbishop of Milan and soon-to-be saint (he was canonised in 1610), and the nephew of cardinal Alfonso Gesualdo, archbishop of Naples from 1596 to 1603, Carlo Gesualdo still had a higher authority to face (metaphysically speaking) than the Grand Court. In God’s sanctuary, Gesualdo’s civil right to kill the adulterers did not necessarily translate into a religious right to kill. The essential difference between criminal and canon law on the punishment for adultery was explained next by Tartaglia: ‘Regarding the canonical law in particular, it is illicit for either the father or the husband to kill the daughter, wife, or adulterer caught in adultery’.Footnote 15
Case not closed: if and how Gesualdo negotiated this conflict between his religion and the state is open to further enquiry. After all, before turning homicidal, he was raised by his family to become a pious prince, at the height of the Counter-Reformation.Footnote 16 Even though he never had to face the Grand Court or the ecclesiastical court (curia ecclesiastica) for killing,Footnote 17 Gesualdo still had to face his Creator and, until that time, His representatives in his own family. There was just one court the prince could not avoid. As Gregorio Carafa, future archbishop of nearby Salerno, would write in a moral-theological treatise against duelling for honour, ‘A husband cannot in the court of conscience be allowed to kill an adulterer caught in adultery’.Footnote 18
Innocent here, guilty there, and almost above it all as a prince, Gesualdo was bound to hit a fork in the road when he mapped out the course of his hunting trip. One way led towards the Grand Court and the other way towards the Church.Footnote 19 Warning signs were posted: ‘He who wishes to belong to the Church cannot rightly take advantage of the law which permits a man to kill his wife’, St Thomas Aquinas opined in his influential disputation against uxoricide.Footnote 20 The imminent challenge confronting Gesualdo was not how to get away with killing his wife and her noble lover – that was relatively easy – but, rather, how to get away with killing them as a Christian prince.
So that we might form a clearer picture of his path to and from homicide, this study reinvestigates Gesualdo’s honour killing in its religious contexts, drawing on some hitherto overlooked clues to this case in the Church that were outside the Grand Court’s jurisdiction. No previous study of the case has examined post-Tridentine liturgical books – yet we ought to consult these because it is important for us to know when this honour killing fell on the liturgical calendar, for several reasons. Naturally, we might expect that Gesualdo soon sought forgiveness for killing. On which occasion of the church year could he have confessed? Is that occasion marked in his volumes of sacred music? Logical though it may seem, this is one avenue of enquiry we have still not pursued.
Alternatively, there is a darker reason why we should determine when Gesualdo’s honour killing fell on the liturgical calendar. Even the Bible justifies homicide in certain circumstances, while forbidding it in general. Adultery was once grounds for justifiable homicide; as we shall see, the death penalty is prescribed for adultery in the Old Testament, but doubts about that penalty arise in the New Testament. At the time of his attack, Gesualdo might have wanted those Bible passages in his favour to be recited (as opposed to those that counted against him). We must consider the distinct possibility that Gesualdo coordinated his honour killing with the liturgy in the hope (vain or otherwise) of freeing himself from the burden of sin. Even before seeking forgiveness, Gesualdo could have sought vindication from the Church and argued the canon law.
I raise the question ‘Was Gesualdo’s honour killing liturgical?’ in view of a coincidence between his actions and the daily lessons read from the Bible.Footnote 21 As I will exhibit, Gesualdo struck the night after the Church recited one of the select Bible readings that, arguably, condones vendetta killing (I Maccabees 9. 37–40, quoted below). In his pursuit to kill the lovers, Gesualdo followed right on the heels of those before him in the biblical era who had killed a royal bride and groom and were saved from sin. This circumstance leads me to suspect, as an inference,Footnote 22 that he sought to reconcile Christian law with criminal law, so as to justify his attack. Even though he left no testimony (without which there can be no conclusive answer to this question), the Breviary could encapsulate his timeline. Judging from the Breviary, Gesualdo’s attack was not truly a ‘crime of passion’ (delitto passionale), as the processo would lead us to believe; it was premeditated.Footnote 23
If scholars have previously neglected to consider the possibility that the church liturgy, in part, led Gesualdo to kill, when he killed, it is likely because of a long tacit assumption that Gesualdo must have defied church doctrine, as we understand it – and not followed church doctrine, as he (mis-)understood it. Just as we had once assumed that Gesualdo broke criminal law, we assumed that he broke the fifth commandment, and we left it at that. Although this assumption seems more secure, it still proves anachronistic and cannot sufficiently explain the complexities of this case. Recent research on homicide in Renaissance Italy, as I shall elaborate, evinces an at times bewildering correlation between homicides and church doctrine. Most pertinent to Gesualdo’s case, there were heated debates inside the Church for and against capital punishment for adultery. A few prelates (notably the pope at the time of the Gesualdo affair) lobbied for restoring the death penalty, but others were more forgiving. Both Gesualdo and Carafa prelates became entangled in the debates, and both families apparently had one male member who reckoned that Christianity sanctioned the execution of their wives.
Even to this day (to draw a comparative inference), honour killings against adulterers (especially alleged adulteresses) are carried out – and censured – in the name of religion, as is all too often reported in the news. In a study on modern-day honour killing, the sociologist Aisha Gill implores us to set aside biased assumptions that this problem persists essentially because of a given religion, patriarchy or nationality alone (stereotypically other than one’s own) and to see it as a collective problem with multiple roots.Footnote 24 And so it is with Gesualdo: honour, male ego, law and religion all motivated him to kill. We cannot emphasise Gesualdo’s honour and ‘Julian’ rights in this equation but understate his Christianity; perhaps our assumption should be that Gesualdo would have killed if and only if he believed it to be a demonstrably Christian act.
To return to the scene of Gesualdo’s honour killing with liturgical books in hand will hardly lead us far afield from tried-and-true musicological methodology. Just as we work to identify the liturgical contexts for Gesualdo’s Sacrae cantiones (1603) and situate his final musical testament, Tenebrae responsoria (1611), in the liturgy for Holy Week,Footnote 25 so too ought we to test the liturgical placement of his delitto d’onore. Once this is done, another enigma will appear at the scene. The Bible lesson on that day turns out to be peculiarly musical in its contents. While this lends credence to the hypothesis that Gesualdo’s honour killing was liturgical, it also raises a follow-up question: was Gesualdo’s honour killing liturgical music?
Until the ecclesiastical evidence is heard, the ‘Gesualdo case’ cannot be considered closed.
Why a ‘liturgical’ honour killing?
Why Christians commit homicides is a question that historical criminologists have raised again in Renaissance studies in recent years. It seems paradoxical, as Trevor Dean and Kate Lowe introduce the general problem, that people who prided themselves as Christians should have failed to obey the fifth commandment (generically understood, then and now, as ‘Thou shalt not kill’) and have even accepted killing as ‘part of “normal” life’.Footnote 26 Although homicide cases might be aberrations in the scheme of early music history, musicologists are not wholly exempt from this question. Any lingering romanticised notions that we have about Gesualdo being abnormal as a ‘musician and murderer’ must be checked in context. As Laurie Stras’s study of female musicians in Ferrara evinces, Gesualdo remarried into a court where male violence against women ran rampant.Footnote 27 After Gesualdo, the next nobleman and madrigalist of note to attack his cuckolders would be Alfonso Fontanelli (1557–1622).Footnote 28 How could they, as Christians, have honestly believed in so-called ‘honour killing’?
Considering his family’s stature within the Church, this question is pressing in Gesualdo’s case. He seems to have harboured doubts about honour killing, because he performed multiple penitential acts late in his life to atone for his sins, homicide possibly counted among them. As depicted in his altarpiece, ‘The Pardoning of Gesualdo’ (Il perdono di Gesualdo [1609]), the God-fearing prince prayed for the intercession of his uncle, St Carlo Borromeo, so that he might enter heaven.Footnote 29 It is not implausible that Gesualdo also conceived of his Tenebrae responsoria as securing his pardoning, given the fact that convicted perpetrators of illegal honour killings tended (as Scott Taylor has found) to receive Good Friday pardons, if ever.Footnote 30 As a Christian, Gesualdo might not have been as confident about his final judgement as he was, as a prince, about the court’s secular processo. Maintaining his honour in life could have trapped Gesualdo in purgatory (as depicted in the altarpiece) in the afterlife. It is this confliction – or, more accurately, the inquietude instilled by itFootnote 31 – that, I suggest, motivated Gesualdo to mount a biblical justification of his honour killing, in advance of carrying out that killing.Footnote 32 There is sufficient reason to believe that Gesualdo did not simply decide in the heat of the moment to ‘sin now, repent later’. Without pretending to speak for the prince, I shall endeavour to explain why and how this justification process could have unfolded.
Cogliano began to describe what such a justification entailed when he pointed out that some theologians did not, in fact, treat honour killing as a sin. As evidence that this was still current thinking in Gesualdo’s time, Cogliano cited the Spanish theologian Martín de Azpilcueta (1491–1586), whose Manual de confesores y penitentes (1549) was reprinted in Italian translation a few years before Gesualdo’s honour killing. In a chapter on the fifth commandment, rendered as ‘Thou shalt not kill’ (‘non ucciderai’), Azpilcueta presented certain exceptions that could be made ‘for the defence of one’s own life’ (‘per difesa della propria vita’): ‘Whoever kills justly’, as Cogliano quoted Azpilcueta, ‘for the just defence of their neighbour or their honour and their belongings, and also so that they otherwise might defend their own life, does not sin, although it incurs irregularity’.Footnote 33 As Gesualdo’s honour was at stake, he could (Cogliano assures us) kill to defend himself. For Cogliano, Azpilcueta’s authority alone was sufficient to prove that Gesualdo was free from sin. It seems Gesualdo had no need to fear.
Although Cogliano had the right inclination, his case for Gesualdo, in this instance, falls short of the mark. Theologians were not all in agreement that honour killing constituted self-defence and was therefore exculpable.Footnote 34 To represent the opposite opinion, let us hear again from Gregorio Carafa: ‘If, for example, [a man] was caught in adultery, then, even though he was killed by the husband of the adulteress with impunity in the external court, such a killing was nevertheless not free from mortal sin’.Footnote 35 Since Gesualdo was surrounded by a larger debate about this issue, we should not claim a priori that he was sinless when he killed (or even when he ordered his servants to kill on his behalf).Footnote 36 Instead, let us consider Gesualdo caught in the middle of that debate.
Rather than ‘self-defence’, our reconstruction of a scriptural justification for Gesualdo’s honour killing should depart from another exception to the commandment. There are certain lessons in the Old Testament that prescribe capital punishment for adultery:
If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. (Leviticus 20.10)
If a man is caught lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman as well as the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel. (Deuteronomy 22.22)Footnote 37
These are the Bible verses in Gesualdo’s favour and, presumably, he knew them well. In addition to the aforementioned collected decisions by Camillo Borrello,Footnote 38 there is at least one other source on this exception to the commandment directly connected to Gesualdo. Some years after the honour killing, Gesualdo’s own segretario, Tiberio Putignano (dates unknown), published a translation of a treatise by Francesco Arias (1533–1605), Libro de la imitacion de Christo (1599), with a dedication to the wife of Emmanuele Gesualdo, the firstborn son of Carlo and Maria d’Avalos.Footnote 39 Perhaps Carlo had, in some part, inspired this publication; was it another one of his late penitential acts? Whatever Putignano’s motivations were, here Gesualdo is praised in a treatise that (among other subjects) includes a discourse on capital punishment for adultery. Arias’s first commentary is on Leviticus 20.10. ‘It is evident’, Arias observed, ‘that adultery, which is committed with a married woman, and incest, which is committed with a female relative, are most grave sins and condemned by the laws of God, not only with the pain of death and eternal damnation, but also with the pain of temporal death’.Footnote 40 There is, Arias promised, no escape for adulterers from these certain deaths. Should the mortal person (i.e. the husband) responsible for executing the temporal death sentence be absent, God will deliver it Himself. Citing the outcome of King David’s adultery (II Samuel 11), Arias wrote: ‘God so wanted to reveal the gravity of these sins and His hatred for them that this pain of corporeal death would be carried out with much righteous justice when, through the authority of the person who committed the sin, whoever ought to have carried out this pain would be missing; He would supply the justice, which was provided from heaven towards this end’.Footnote 41 That is to say, not only should Gesualdo have punished the lovers but God would have done so Himself if he were incapacitated (murdered by the Duke of Andria, hypothetically speaking). With these comments, Arias was not necessarily inciting cuckolds to kill (as we shall pick up shortly) but demonstrating the severity of the sin of adultery to deter it from happening. Adulterers, Arias warned, put their lives at risk, as the Bible shows.
All this, however, was by then scholastic theology (and a select chapter of it at that). Gesualdo could not justify his honour killing simply by finding the single best exception made to the commandment, when there are many other Bible verses, church authorities and historical precedents against killing adulterers.Footnote 42 The arguments not in Gesualdo’s favour are formidable (as the above quotation from Aquinas alludes) and they were gaining traction during the Counter-Reformation. At no session of the Council of Trent was the death penalty for adultery ever officially sanctioned by the Church.Footnote 43 On the contrary, Tridentine and post-Tridentine doctrine erred on the side of life for adulterers, in accordance with the New Testament (and at odds with Lutheran inclinations towards the Old Testament).Footnote 44 In particular, the story of ‘Jesus and the woman taken in adultery’, as told in John 7. 53–8. 11, casts doubt upon capital punishment for adultery.Footnote 45 When tested by the Pharisees to see if he would put an adulteress to death according to the law (still current at that time), Jesus replied:
Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her (John 8. 7).Footnote 46
Thus, the Old Testament was in conflict with the New Testament, as the neo-Julian civil law was in conflict with canon law. Gesualdo was presented with a clear-cut choice to make.
After the Council of Trent declared the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery to be authentic (i.e. part of the biblical canon),Footnote 47 the lesson was disseminated through several media that would have reached Gesualdo, among the masses. It is most strange that John 8 has yet to make an appearance in studies of Gesualdo. Indeed, we can only wonder how Carlo responded to this lesson, as it was recited in church on an annual basis. In the Tridentine Roman Breviary, John 8 was scheduled on Saturday in the fourth week of Lent (or elsewhere in the third week for certain mendicant orders, following pre-Tridentine practice). At the same time, preachers sermonised on the lesson in more depth. Adultery of course was a common topic in sacred oratory and Gesualdo (it is safe to assume) had surely heard sermons praising Jesus for saving the adulteress; indeed, a sermon on the topic has come down to us in print from one of the central Neapolitan churches where some of Gesualdo’s musicians served, the Basilica dell’Annunziata Maggiore. There Marcello Ferdinandi da Bari expounded the various laws against adultery, in their ‘Mosaic’ (Leviticus 20), ‘evangelical’ (Matthew 19), ‘canonical’ (Hebrews 13) and ‘civil’ (no scriptural citation) renditions. Ferdinandi even drew an imaginary line between life and death in his interpretations of Mosaic and civil law, tempering the severity of the latter. According to Ferdinandi’s rendition of civil law, an adulteress should have only lost her dowry and her honour (‘[Adulterio] è detestato dalla legge civile, la qual vuole, che l’adultera perda la dote, e l’honore insieme’) – not her life.Footnote 48 Even if only in sacred rhetoric, civil law could be bent towards the New Testament and away from the Old. After hearing such sermons year in and year out, Gesualdo might have come to loathe this stretch of Lent.Footnote 49
In theological treatises (if not legal ones),Footnote 50 too, Leviticus 20 and Deuteronomy 22 were counteracted by John 8. In the next instalment of Putignano’s translation of Arias’s Libro de la imitacion de Christo (not dedicated to a member of the Gesualdo family), Arias praised Jesus’s absolution of the adulteress: ‘This was the compassion that the Lord was accustomed to use with this sinful woman (and a great a sinner at that, as she is an adulteress), who, for the crime of adultery merited not only the pain of eternal fire in the other life, but in this one also merited the pain of temporal death. With this compassion he brought the hope of a cure to all sinners’.Footnote 51 Rather than bringing death to a couple, Gesualdo could have brought hope to all sinners. If he had truly wanted to imitate Jesus’s virtues, then Carlo too ought to have questioned the Julian law and let his wife (and even her lover) live.
John 8 was, moreover, widely depicted in sacred art. One cannot now count how many examples Gesualdo could have seen in Naples, but there was in his lifetime at least one accomplished version of Cristo e l’adultera that has come down to us, a bas-relief from the workshop of Giovanni da Nola (1488–1558) that is displayed in the Annunziata. Later, the imposing fresco in the Chiesa di San Martino by Bellisario Corenzio (c. 1557–1643) would appear. Outside of Naples, Gesualdo’s maternal relative (and close correspondent) Federico Borromeo (1564–1631), archbishop of Milan, would acquire the widely admired (and copied) ‘Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565).Footnote 52 Only in his own confines could Gesualdo have avoided the sight of Jesus and the adulteress.Footnote 53 Elsewhere, Gesualdo risked encountering them – the adulteress staring back at him (so to speak) and Jesus looking down and away from him for having asked yet again to stone her. We can imagine Gesualdo standing before that painting, with the horns of a cuckold on his head.Footnote 54
In short, Gesualdo could not have been untroubled by John 8. Few, if any, Christians, we might expect, would have sided with the Pharisees over Jesus. Fortunately for Gesualdo, however, the pope at the time of his wife’s affair in fact favoured the Mosaic law. Sixtus V reimplemented the death penalty for adultery in Rome in 1586 as part of his crackdown on crime.Footnote 55 In the salone sistino in the Vatican library there is a telling impresa (a heraldic device) that marks Sixtus’s bull. Titled ‘On the Punishment of Adulterers’ (‘Del castigo degl’adulteri’), it reads: ‘The virgin remains untouched, but the adulterous wife lives not, and Rome, which was once salacious, is now chaste’.Footnote 56
Sixtus’s bull ultimately failed to garner the cardinals’ total support, but that did not stop him from executing adulterers at his will. Even far from Rome, the Gesualdo prelates were not exempt from carrying out Sixtus’s purge. Sixtus was irked by Alfonso Gesualdo, who was reluctant to carry out his capital punishments. Only under duress did Alfonso relent and dispatch the heads of two dozen bandits to Rome, in the hope of placating the pope.Footnote 57 Given this dispute, we ought to doubt that Alfonso was wholly complacent regarding his nephew’s honour killing (but we do not have any testimony that he either opposed or accepted it).Footnote 58 The Old-versus-New Testament debate stood to divide the Gesualdo family in this instance. In whatever way the uncle and nephew settled this potential disagreement amongst themselves (I shall propose Carlo’s solution later),Footnote 59 the pope was leaning towards Carlo’s side. The papal bull did not (as in civil law) empower husbands to carry out the penalty for adultery themselves (the accused still faced trial before the curia ecclesiastica), but, at a basic level, Sixtus and Carlo were in agreement about the Christianity of this capital punishment.
Still, Gesualdo was evidently not satisfied to just point to the pope and to the Old Testament for justification. There is an additional layer of complexity to this case. As will be outlined in the next section of this study, Gesualdo’s attack occurred at a time when he – and essentially everybody – could hear a justifiable homicide case read from the Bible in church, right before he killed. Nobody would hear John 8 in church around that time. That is to say, this case leads us to engage not only biblical and canonical law but also (what we might now call) ‘liturgical law’: the order and rules of celebration in church.Footnote 60 It is one act when a penitent reads a Bible lesson by and for themself and another act when all of Roman Christianity reads it together at a prescribed time. That latter judgement would sound unanimous.
I cannot yet say if Gesualdo would be unique in this regard. An exhaustive enquiry into the precedents (both direct and indirect) for Gesualdo’s double homicide still needs to be conducted in the archives.Footnote 61 To time an honour killing to the reading of a particular Bible lesson in the liturgy might prove to be an extraordinary but not impossible feat. More generally, however, it was not out of the ordinary to set a symbolic time to kill during the liturgy. Although there has yet to be a comprehensive study of the relationship between homicide and liturgy (and to embark on one here would take us outside the scope of musicology), we may nevertheless assemble from the literature a short catalogue of homicides that fit this bill. Not all of those I shall name here are honour killings; other than adultery, there were many motivations for tying homicides to church. The liturgy to be proposed for Gesualdo’s honour killing is part of a wider phenomenon.
Under the rubric of ‘liturgical’ (for want of a more established term from criminology), I broadly include those homicides that were scheduled according to the church liturgy in any way; the homicides could have taken place either inside or outside church, so long as the occasion was marked by liturgical time.Footnote 62 One quintessential case has been described by Carlo Baja Guarienti, who, uniquely, devoted a study not to a homicide per se but to the ‘liturgy of a homicide’ (‘liturgia di un omicidio’). Guarienti detailed how the assassins of Giovanni Gozzadini (d. 1517), governor of Reggio Emilia, waited for the elevation of the host at mass on the vigil of the feast of St Peter; then they struck (sadly, the Ferrarese maestro di cappella Girolamo Gobbi also perished in the ensuing chaos).Footnote 63 Guarienti’s study demonstrates perfectly why mass became a prime opportunity to stage a homicide: the target was practically guaranteed to be there, with their every move limited by the liturgy.
Obviously, we are not dealing with another ‘Murder in the Cathedral’ story here. A liturgy for Gesualdo’s homicide would begin at church and culminate with an armed procession to his wife’s bedchamber. Gesualdo needed a fitting day of the church year – not an actual church. There were precedents for liturgical homicides outside of church as well. Politically motivated killings sometimes took place on Epiphany because the feast symbolises renewal. Dissenting humanists conspired to murder pope Nicholas V on Epiphany in 1453,Footnote 64 and Duke Alessandro de’ Medici was murdered on the same occasion in 1537.Footnote 65 Among adulteresses, Vittoria Accoramboni (who allowed her husband, a nephew of Sixtus V, to be murdered by her wealthier adulator, Paolo Giordano Orsini) was assassinated the day before the feast of St Victoria herself (22 December 1585).Footnote 66 Gesualdo, despite his wife’s name, did not despoil a day of Marian devotion (and he later composed a dozen Marian sacrae cantiones).
We need not rattle off here a longer list of liturgical homicides.Footnote 67 Such a list, in any case, would not prove that all homicides among nobility were necessarily liturgical, following some unwritten rule of noble decorum.Footnote 68 They were not. Among other prominent honour killings that musicians were involved in, one could cite that of Eleonora di Garzia di Toledo, wife of Pietro de’ Medici. Giulio Caccini (1551–1618) had apparently learned of her affair and alerted Pietro, who strangled his wife soon thereafter (in 1576).Footnote 69
Other times, killers contradicted the liturgy. The last time the extended Carafa family was embroiled in an adultery scandal, the accused wife was killed on a major feast day. In a case of greater consequence to the family than the Gesualdo affair, Giovanni Carafa, nephew of Pope Paul IV (Giovanni Pietro Carafa), had his wife, Violante, murdered on the feast of St Augustine (28 August 1559).Footnote 70 The saint himself would hardly have approved. In his epistles, Augustine admonished those who might try to justify the death penalty for adultery on Old Testament grounds to remember John 8. Imagine, Augustine instructed, that the adulteress’s husband had also appeared before Jesus. The husband would have been ‘filled with fear and [have] turned his mind away from the desire for vengeance to the will to pardon’.Footnote 71 Obviously, Giovanni Carafa was in no mood to listen to St Augustine that day. He was later charged with Violante’s murder under the next pope.
Gesualdo was not so haphazard in his timing. After placing his honour killing in liturgical context, we might take another look at ‘The Pardoning of Gesualdo’, this time in light of St Augustine’s epistle. Perhaps the penitent prince seen in the painting had long before turned his mind away from the desire for vengeance to the will to pardon – to pardon himself, that is.
Gesualdo’s honour killing in liturgical context
To conduct a liturgical analysis of Gesualdo’s honour killing, we must first be certain of its date, an aspect that has often been regarded as inconsequential. There are discrepancies between the dates found in the standard English account of Watkins and the new Italian account by Cogliano (and elsewhere in the literature). These must be resolved before we can find the matching day on the church calendar.
In Watkins, the processo is dated 27 October 1590 and, according to the servants, the killing took place on ‘Tuesday, which was the 26th of the present month, which is a week ago today’ [sic].Footnote 72 This leaves readers confused about why the investigators arrived a week after the event and guessing that the date of the 26th is mistaken. In Cogliano, the processo is dated 17 October. A week later, on 23 October, the investigators returned to interview the servants. At that time, the investigators took down Tuesday 16 October as the day in question.Footnote 73 As this is corroborated by the Venetian ambassador’s correspondence from Naples (dated 19 October, with reference to the killing on the prior Tuesday),Footnote 74 16 October is the accepted date of Gesualdo’s honour killing. That Tuesday, however, is not quite the day we recognise now. As Alfonso Cuoppolo has explained, our method of counting the days was not adopted in Naples until the Napoleonic era.Footnote 75 In Gesualdo’s time, the day changed not at midnight but at sunset. This is significant to our investigation because Gesualdo attacked (according to his servant) at around ‘6 hours of the night’ (i.e. around six hours after sunset or approximately midnight).Footnote 76 Therefore, the ‘Tuesday’ night described in the processo began on what we would now call ‘Monday’ night because ‘Tuesday’ started immediately after sunset on Monday. Thus, Gesualdo’s honour killing took place after the turn of the calendar page from Monday 15 October to Tuesday 16 October (rather than from Tuesday 16 October to Wednesday 17 October).Footnote 77 Accordingly, we must turn to the pages in liturgical books for those days, with a view to that whole week.
There is no reference to the liturgical calendar in the processo. Footnote 78 We must be careful when we position 16 October 1590 on the liturgical calendar of that church year because historiographers have on occasion been tempted to nudge the days a bit earlier or later. (After all, a homicide that coincided with a significant occasion in the church year makes for a best-selling detective novel, then and now.) Stefano Dall’Aglio exposes this problem in his source-study of the murder of Alessandro de’ Medici.Footnote 79 Dall’Aglio found that the sixteenth-century historian Benedetto Varchi might have deliberately moved the murder to the night before Epiphany from the night after. Despite the contradiction between Varchi’s date and that found in more authoritative sources, subsequent historians followed Varchi. It was fate, Varchi and his followers fibbed, that anti-Mediceans woke up in Florence and saw a bright future on Epiphany. A comparable revelation about Gesualdo’s honour killing might sell as well.
This potential pitfall acknowledged, let us proceed to locate Tuesday 16 October 1590 on the liturgical calendar for that month (Table 1).Footnote 80 As the liturgical calendar varies year by year, we cannot simply look up ‘16 October’ in liturgical books. There are two ways in which we must be able to convert this date: first, where it fell with respect to the Sundays of October and, second, with respect to Pentecost. In the church year of 1590, 1 October fell on a Monday and, therefore, the first Sunday of October fell on 30 September (the first Sunday of the month in the Breviary is that which is closest in the week to the first calendar day of the month; that is, Sunday 30 September is closer to Monday 1 October than is Sunday 7 October). Therefore, 16 October was the third day (feria 3 or F3) of the week of the third Sunday (Domenica 3 or Dom3). Moreover, 16 October was the third day of the week of the 19th Sunday after Pentecost (which fell on 7 June in 1590). Under these two headings we will find the liturgy for the day of Gesualdo’s honour killing.
Table 1 Carlo Gesualdo’s honour killing in the context of the lessons from I and II Maccabees in October 1590, as found in the Tridentine Roman Breviary (Breviarium romanum, fols 270R–283R, [276R]). feast days (in the roman breviary only, for which lessons from i and ii maccabees are here in brackets) are marked with an ‘f’ and gesualdo family birthdays with a ‘bd’. carlo performed his honour killing on the night of 15–16 october (in bold with a †), after i maccabees 9. 28–40 and before i maccabees 12. 1–11 was read. in i maccabees 9. 37–42, the maccabees sabotaged an enemy princess’s wedding (‘the wedding was turned into mourning, and the sound of their music into lamentation’)
| OCTOBER 1590 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sunday (Dom) | Monday (F2) | Tuesday (F3) | Wednesday (F4) | Thursday (F5) | Friday (F6) | Saturday (S) |
| 30 | 1 F | 2 BD | 3 | 4 F | 5 | 6 |
| I Macc. 1:1–16 Ambr. Offic. 1/40: 205–7 |
[I Macc. 1:17–29] Remigius |
I Macc. 2:1–14 C. Borromeo |
I Macc. 2:19–30 |
[I Macc. 2:49–69] Francis |
I Macc. 2:70–3:12, 25–28 |
I Macc. 3:42–60 |
| 7 F | 8 | 9 F | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 |
| [I Macc. 4:36–51 Aug. De civ. 18:45] Pope Mark (et al.) |
I Macc. 4:52–61 | [I Macc. 5:1–13] Dionysius (et al.) |
I Macc. 5:55–67 | I Macc. 6:1–13 | I Macc. 7:1–17 | I Macc. 8:1–4, 17–27 |
| 14 F | 15 | 16 † | 17 | 18 F | 19 | 20 BD |
| [I Macc. 9:1–20 Ambr. Offic. 1/41: 209–11] Calixtus |
I Macc. 9:28–40
|
I Macc. 12:1–11
|
I Macc. 12:39–52 | [I Macc. 13:1–19] Luke |
I Macc. 14:16–26 | I Macc. 16:14–24 A. Gesualdo |
| 21 F | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 F | 26 F | 27 |
| [II Macc. 1:1–6, 18–22 J. Chrys. Ps. 43] Hilarion & Ursula |
II Macc. 2:1–9 | II Macc. 3:1–12 | II Macc. 3:23–34 | [II Macc. 4:1–11] Chrysanthus & Daria |
[II Macc. 5:1–10] Evaristus |
II Macc. 6:1–12 |
| 28 F | 29 | 30 | 31 F | |||
| [II Macc. 6:18–7.5 G. Nazianzen Orat. 20] Simon & Jude |
II Macc. 7:7–23 | II Macc. 7:24–41 | [II Macc. 8:10–28] Vigil of All Saints |
|||
We do not know when precisely before 16 October Gesualdo had learned of his wife’s affair. Surely, he did not delay for long before his attack.Footnote 81 Yet, to coordinate his honour killing with the liturgical calendar must have required some time for Bible study and, potentially, patience for the proper day to come. I suggest, then, that Carlo, lest his patience expire (and he kill them irrespective of the liturgy), had learned of the affair not more than, say, a month or two prior to 16 October.
Coincidentally, the papacy was often vacant during that timeframe. Sixtus V, the aforementioned champion of capital punishment, died on 27 August 1590, without seeing what became of this marriage that he himself had reluctantly approved in 1586 under special circumstances.Footnote 82 Sixtus was succeeded by Urban VII, who lasted only twelve days after his election (until 27 September). The next pope, Gregory XIV, was not installed until 5 December. During an interregnum (sede vacante), violence often spread in the Papal States because the Vatican (so it was thought) was too preoccupied with a conclave to devote attention to criminal activity outside.Footnote 83 Without a pope in place, Gesualdo’s honour killing had less chance of attracting immediate notice from Rome. He did not necessarily have to wait for the pope to die, but he also did not have too much time to lose, if he were to seize an opportunity. His uncle Alfonso was out of town, busy serving as the sub-dean of the conclave. Better, perhaps, for Carlo to kill and let Alfonso (assuming he would not press for the death penalty) find out later. The papal succession would come into alignment with the liturgical calendar, presenting Carlo with an opportune time to strike.
During his preparations, Gesualdo might have either studied the upcoming liturgical days and weeks himself or consulted with a cleric to determine the appropriate (and inappropriate) possibilities. We ought not deny him the capacity to undertake this study independently (Gesualdo’s own breviary and other religious books have not come down to us),Footnote 84 but the processo implies that Gesualdo had some help. According to his servant, Gesualdo was served supper that evening by his servants and ‘a young priest who is a musician’.Footnote 85 Just who this musical priest was is a mystery,Footnote 86 and this evidence alone is insufficient to charge him with aiding an honour killing.Footnote 87 Gesualdo, however, certainly had such people in his employment, in whom he could confide. A priest-musician, moreover, could sooner point Gesualdo to a fitting Bible lesson with a musical aspect.
In whichever way he arrived at 16 October, Gesualdo managed to work around several occasions on the liturgical calendar that would not suit him. These were feast and ferial days with lessons that would undermine his honour killing instead of supporting it (i.e. the aforementioned Lenten period in which John 8 was read); even family birthdays had to be avoided (Carlo Borromeo on 2 October and Alfonso Gesualdo on 20 October). To kill on 4 October would mar the feast of St Francis (for which Gesualdo later composed his sacra cantio, ‘Franciscus humilis et pauper’). To kill on 18 October would do likewise to the feast of St Luke. 14 October, the feast of St Calixtus, would also not serve Gesualdo because pope Calixtus I (as opposed to Sixtus V) preached leniency for those adulterers who repented.Footnote 88 21 October, the feast of St Ursula, would be all the more self-defeating for Gesualdo; even if his princess was not a virgin like St Ursula,Footnote 89 Carlo was not about to risk making a pseudo-martyr out of Maria (and a savage out of himself), by killing her on a day that remembers innocent women suffering at the hands of brutal men.Footnote 90
As for feasts between 15 and 17 October, there were none in the Tridentine Roman Breviary, and those described in the Roman Martyrology are hardly relevant to the Gesualdo case, in both place and content.Footnote 91 Feasts celebrated elsewhere in various locales (i.e. St Flavia and St Fortunatus of Rome on 15 October) were not necessarily observed in Naples. In the Neapolitan liturgy, there was no other cause for celebration or solemnity on these three days.Footnote 92 This short stretch in the calendar of saints was relatively clear for Gesualdo to strike.Footnote 93
Gesualdo would not be so fortunate as to find one of the Bible lessons on executing adulterers scheduled in October (or anywhere in the Tridentine Roman Breviary).Footnote 94 The lessons for October were taken from I and II Maccabees, with additional Sunday readings from the commentaries on Maccabees by St Ambrose (On the Duties of the Clergy), St Augustine (The City of God) and St John Chrysostom (Commentaries on the Psalms). A record of the epic warfare between the Jews and their Hellenist oppressors,Footnote 95 the books of Maccabees memorialise those who fought to defend their religion, whether with arms or faith alone. Matthias, the father of the hero, Judas Maccabeus, killed any of his men who disgraced themselves by converting to Hellenism (I Maccabees 2. 23–28). For the same cause, a mother sacrificed herself and her seven sons without a fight (II Maccabees 7).Footnote 96 Through such tales of valour, the two books of Maccabees (as Gabriela Signori has remarked) served Christians as both ‘an arsenal and a practical text’.Footnote 97 Here the Maccabees were a call to arms, there an exercise in Marian devotion. Judas Maccabeus was even presented as a model of inspiration for Christian princes in the post-Machiavellian era.Footnote 98 As such a prince, Gesualdo needed all he could muster from the Maccabees;Footnote 99 they were a convenient biblical ally for his attack.Footnote 100
Although there are not any executions of adulterers in I and II Maccabees, Gesualdo could search for some other next-best options. There are, nonetheless, many more chapters in those books that would not support Gesualdo’s honour killing. These include: Antiochus invades Jerusalem and boasts about murdering the Jews (read on 1 October), the death of Matthias (4 October), the killing of Jonathan Maccabeus (17–19 October) and, lastly, the martyrdom of the mother and her seven sons (29–30 October). Even killing on a day where the Maccabees won a battle does not fit Gesualdo’s scenario. The odds were that Gesualdo’s honour killing would fall on a day where somebody was killed in the books of Maccabees, given how violent the history is. But the departed could not be just anybody. Gesualdo was not embroiled, after all, in religious warfare. He needed a lesson that condoned male violence against a not-so-innocent woman. Finding that next-best lesson would prove to be a small challenge.
There is, in my reading (as informed by Gesualdo’s timing), only one passage in October that could fit that description: I Maccabees 9. 37–40 (F2 after Dom3 on that 15 October). In I Maccabees 9, Judas Maccabeus has fallen and his brother Jonathan has assumed command. Their brother, John, would soon be the next of the Maccabees to fall, in a raid carried out by the tribe of Jambri. The third lesson on that day describes Jonathan’s reprisal attack on the Jambri. A princess’s wedding is about to be sabotaged. Perhaps much to Gesualdo’s delight, the Maccabees’ attack was accompanied by music:
37After this [the death of John], word was brought to Jonathan and his brother Simon: ‘The tribe of Jambri are celebrating a great wedding, and with a large escort they are bringing the bride, the daughter of one of the great princes of Canaan, from Nadabath’. 38Remembering the blood of John their brother, they went up and hid themselves under cover of the mountain. 39As they watched there appeared a noisy throng with much baggage; then the bridegroom and his friends and kinsmen had come out to meet them with tambourines and musicians with their instruments. 40Jonathan and his party rose up against them from their ambush and killed them. Many fell wounded; the rest fled toward the mountain; all their spoils were taken. [41Thus the wedding was turned into mourning, and the sound of their music into lamentation. 42Having taken their revenge for the blood of their brother, they returned to the marshes of the Jordan.]Footnote 101
Here ended the lesson for that Monday 15 October. Before the readings resumed on Tuesday, the lovers were dead, and Gesualdo was en route to his castle. Of course, one cannot just plug the actors and actresses in the Gesualdo affair into this Bible lesson and still arrive at the exact same moral of the story. Gesualdo was not sabotaging a wedding to avenge another Gesualdo; he was killing them because d’Avalos had broken her wedding vows to him. On the one hand, we should resist the temptation to conflate these two episodes. The former was a vendetta killing, the latter an honour killing. Taken in isolation, I Maccabees 9. 37–42 by itself would not be entertained as a scriptural justification for Gesualdo’s honour killing. On the other hand, the temporal coincidence suggests that there was a causal link between the two. Given that timeframe, we should scan this Bible lesson for intertextual connections to the lesson Gesualdo taught the lovers. We find not one but two dead noblewomen, two dead noblemen, and multiple musicians and Judeo-Christian warriors at the scene of Gesualdo’s honour killing. One set seems to have led to the next.Footnote 102 When seen in this light, the difference between this honour killing and that vendetta killing turns out to be not so stark as that between honour killing and (criminal) murder. Honour killing is a form of revenge in the Old Testament: ‘He who commits adultery … will get wounds and dishonour … for jealousy arouses a husband’s fury, and he shows no restraint when he takes revenge’ (Proverbs 6. 32–34).Footnote 103 Even though Gesualdo’s attack was not characterised as a vendetta in the processo, it was elsewhere: the Venetian ambassador to Naples spoke of Gesualdo ‘avenging [his] injury’ (‘vendicando l’ingiuria ricevuta’).Footnote 104 It would therefore not be a historical error to characterise Gesualdo’s honour killing as a form of vendetta. In his own way, Gesualdo put that day’s Bible lesson straight into practice.
The exegetical literature on the Maccabees in the Breviary lent further support to Gesualdo’s cause. On the third Sunday of October, additional lessons from St Ambrose’s On the Duties of the Clergy (Officiorum) were ordinarily scheduled. There Ambrose praised Jonathan as another example of the outnumbered Maccabees fighting against the odds. ‘Why need I further mention [Judas’s] brother Jonathan’, Ambrose asked rhetorically, ‘who fought against the king’s force, with but a small troop?’Footnote 105 While Ambrose was referring in particular to I Maccabees 11. 68, his commentary was scheduled the day before I Maccabees 9. 28–40 (on Dom3). As presented in the Breviary, Ambrose approved of Jonathan’s vendetta killing. The saint’s applause would have pleased Gesualdo. His uncle Carlo Borromeo was the archbishop of Milan, which uniquely celebrated the Ambrosian Rite of its patron saint.Footnote 106 Gesualdo, who revered his namesake, would have desired his maternal relatives’ acceptance as much as that of his paternal relatives (Federico Borromeo was at the 1590 papal conclave with Alfonso Gesualdo). If St Ambrose himself had approved of Jonathan Maccabeus’s vendetta killing, then Carlo Borromeo might have followed suit and approved of his nephew’s honour killing.Footnote 107
Almost everything had fallen into place for Gesualdo. The prince’s exact whereabouts during the day of Monday 15 October remain unknown; we know where he was only on the evening right before the attack. As previously mentioned, Gesualdo was not afraid to dine alone in his own home on that night.Footnote 108 We do not have evidence that Gesualdo attended church on that Monday. He might have timed his honour killing to the liturgy, but uncertainty remains about him partaking in that liturgy.Footnote 109 Gesualdo could have killed without having gone to church first.
As opposed to the liturgy that preceded Gesualdo’s honour killing, that which followed it is better documented in the processo. After the investigators inspected the bodies, another set of Christian rituals began. The Gesualdo family dispatched their most pious female elder, who shared the Christian name of Gesualdo’s wife, to the scene. Carlo’s paternal aunt, Maria Gesualdo, Marchioness of Vico, dressed Maria d’Avalos in her funeral gown and accompanied her to the Chiesa di San Domenico Maggiore. Meanwhile, the Jesuit Carlo Mastrilli (b. 1551) arrived to collect the Duke of Andria’s corpse.Footnote 110 With these two symbolic figures in place, a liturgy of reconciliation began in tandem with the funerary rites.
It is telling that a Jesuit appeared on behalf of the Carafa family. The Jesuits, as Jennifer Selwyn has shown, were dispatched to Naples with the express mission of quelling the spread of honour-based violence. There they commended the merits of ‘maintaining one’s honour while still pardoning an enemy’. In the words of one renowned preacher: ‘God is so great, and so potent, that He commands you not to hate your enemy, which means, do not plot his death’.Footnote 111 Clearly, in this case, the Jesuit order had failed in its plot by the same measure that Gesualdo had succeeded in his. Yet, even though Mastrilli was too late to reconcile Gesualdo to the Duke of Andria, he still had a chance to reach a reconciliation between their families.Footnote 112
As it would turn out, one homicide did not lead to another, liturgical or not.
Gesualdo’s honour killing in liturgical-musical context
This honour killing was evidently the work of a melomaniac. Judging from I Maccabees 9. 39–41, Gesualdo had already begun composing a funeral dirge for the lovers before they were even dead.Footnote 113 While all of the legal and ecclesiastical matters we have thus far raised can be (best) treated by historical criminologists and historians of Christianity, musicologists must at some point take over the investigation of Gesualdo. The timing between his honour killing and this musical Bible lesson seems too brilliant to be a fluke. Even though it is common knowledge that Gesualdo had a noble predilection for music,Footnote 114 nobody has yet advanced the theory that this predilection played a part in the staging of his honour killing. Our investigation might advance such a theory. The sonic traces of that fateful night extend further back in time than his much-studied melancholic madrigals (e.g. ‘Moro, lasso, al mio duolo’) and penitential sacred music. Put another way, Gesualdo’s ‘late’ spiritual turn in music (as we have generally known it through his Tenebrae responsoria) had begun even before he killed.Footnote 115 Having placed Gesualdo’s honour killing in liturgical context, our next task is to find any liturgical music for that occasion.
It might be said that all of the shouting, slashing and shrieking in the bedchamber, followed by Gesualdo’s melancholic music-making in his castle, was a crude form of paraliturgical music. Even with a different cast and change of scenery, Gesualdo’s honour killing could be viewed and heard as a performative reenactment of the Bible lesson, with modern music. Strictly speaking, however, some actual liturgical music for this occasion should be found. The basic tasks at hand are to seek out (a) the plainchant for that liturgy, (b) polyphonic settings of these liturgical texts by contemporaneous composers, and (c) Gesualdo’s own settings, if any. In all likelihood, the last of these three is doubtful. After all, for Gesualdo to have printed music for this occasion (even under the transparent cover of noble anonymity) would have only broadcasted his delitto d’onore further instead of burying it. Otherwise, sacred music was surely sung in October 1590 in Naples and in the Roman Church. We need to make informed choices about which music to discuss and perform when we tell Gesualdo’s story.
I Maccabees 9. 41 was not (so far as I am aware) incorporated into any motets by Gesualdo or other composers. The most logical step to take next in our search should be to analyse the responsories for the lessons of October. These responsories, as listed in Table 2, might soon surface in Gesualdo’s oeuvre if he had composed music on the occasion of his honour killing (his Tenebrae responsoria consists of the responsories for the lessons of Holy Week).Footnote 116 The responsories are kept constant in each week of October, with the cycle partially repeated on Wednesday to Saturday (beginning with ‘Refulsit sol’). Of these fourteen responsories, ‘In hymnis & confessionibus’ follows I Maccabees 9. 37–40 (the third reading on F2):
℞. In hymnis & confessionibus benedicebant Dominum: Qui magna fecit in Israel, & victoriam dedit illis Dominus omnipotens. V. Ornaverunt faciem templi coronis aureis, & dedicaverunt altare Domino. (II Maccabees 10. 38)Footnote 117
Table 2 Responsories for the Bible lessons in October (Breviarium romanum fols 270r–283r). The cycle partially repeats starting on Wednesday. The responsory read after I Maccabees 9. 37–40 on Monday 15 October 1590 was ‘In hymnis & confessionibus benedicebant’
| Day | Responsories (Bible verses) |
|---|---|
| Sunday (Dom.) | Adaperiat Deus cor vestrum (II Maccabees 1. 4–5) Exaudiat Dominus orationes vestras (II Maccabees 1. 5) Congregati sunt inimici nostri (Psalm 58. 12) Impetum inimicorum ne timueritis (I Maccabees 4. 8–10) Congregatae sunt gentes (I Maccabees 3. 52–53) Tua est potentia (I Chronicles 29. 11; II Maccabees 1. 24) Refulsit sol in clypeos aureos (I Maccabees 6. 39, 41–42) Duo seraphim clamabant (Isaiah 6. 2–3) |
| Monday (F2) | Dixit Iudas Simoni fratri suo (I Maccabees 5. 17) Ornaverunt faciem templi coronis aureis (I Maccabees 4. 56–57) In hymnis & confessionibus benedicebant (II Maccabees 10. 38) |
| Tuesday (F3) | Hic est fratrum amator (II Maccabees 15. 14) Tu Domine universorum (II Maccabees 14. 35–36) Aperi oculos tuos Domine (Daniel 9. 18) |
| Wednesday (F4) | Refulsit sol Ornaverunt faciem In hymnis |
| Thursday (F5) | Adaperiat Deus Exaudiat Dominus Congregati sunt inimici |
| Friday (F6) | Impetum inimicorum Congregatae sunt gentes Tua est potentia |
| Saturday (S) | Refulsit sol Ornaverunt faciem In hymnis |
In its proper liturgical context, this responsory describes the Maccabees’ restoration of the temple of Jerusalem and their songs of praise to God who brought them victory. In the context of Gesualdo’s honour killing, however, the responsory acquires a different meaning. Imagine Gesualdo listening to it – whether in a state of frenzy or calm and composed.Footnote 118 Perhaps the responsory mutates into a Maccabean battle hymn – a prayer for victory before the imminent attack.Footnote 119 Gesualdo’s cause to give thanks at church afterwards would be more penitential than celebratory. In this regard, it is remarkable that the versus (V.), ‘Ornaverunt faciem templi coronis aureis’, was also part of the liturgy for the the dedication of a church (‘In dedicatione ecclesiae’). Every time Gesualdo erected a church,Footnote 120 a snippet of the liturgy from that 15 October 1590 would be performed.
The precise chant melodies sung in Gesualdo’s Naples are wanting, as there is not a Neapolitan plainchant manuscript from c. 1590 that we can connect to him (or to Alfonso).Footnote 121 Nonetheless, we can draw from other chant books to recreate the music for the liturgy of that October (while remembering that the standardisation of chant melodies was then but a post-Tridentine ideal).Footnote 122 Our search for these chant melodies in Gesualdo’s and others’ polyphonic music will have to depart from these books as well.
Polyphonic settings of the responsories for October are rare (and, as such, have not been the subject of a comprehensive study). Those that are relatively proximate in time and place to Gesualdo are listed in Table 3. Not one of the composers is Neapolitan (or Ferrarese), and few if any are even remotely related to Gesualdo in style. What is more, most of these settings were for liturgical occasions other than the lessons of October and must be excluded from the given context. Settings of ‘Duo seraphim’ (the eighth and final responsory on Sunday) can be excluded first, as it functioned as a responsory from Trinity Sunday to the beginning of Advent and, elsewhere, as a motet text (as in Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine). The next most popular responsory for polyphonic treatment was ‘Ornaverunt faciem templi coronis aureis’, and its many settings were most certainly for dedications of churches.Footnote 123 The handful of settings of ‘Congregati sunt inimici nostri’ and ‘Impetum inimicorum ne timueritis’ lead us still further astray from the October lessons, as these served as religious propaganda at the warfronts in Venice and further north. The settings of ‘Aperi oculos tuos domine’ by two Mantuan composers might somehow pertain to the noted Jewish community in Mantua (where Salomone Rossi served).Footnote 124 Lastly, we are left with a few settings by the Franciscan Costanzo Porta, who may be the only composer whose polyphony for the feast of the Maccabees (1 August) survives in print. If so, the prints form but an incomplete cycle for that occasion. Few, if any, composers it seems, wrote polyphony for the lessons of October.
Table 3 Polyphonic settings (c. 1570–1620) of the responsories for the lessons in October. None are yet known from Gesualdo’s Naples and Ferrara
| Responsory | Composer | Book |
|---|---|---|
| Adaperiat Deus cor vestrum | None (?) | |
| Exaudiat Dominus orationes vestras |
None (?) | |
| Congregati sunt inimici nostri |
Andrea Rota Raffaella Aleotti Orlando di Lasso Giulio Belli |
Motectorum liber primus (Venice, 1584) Sacrae cantiones (Venice, 1593) Cantiones quinque vocum (Munich, 1597) Sacrarum cantionum (Venice, 1600) |
| Impetum inimicorum ne timueritis |
Tiburtio Massaino Silvio Marazzi |
Sacrarum symphoniarum continuatio (Nuremberg, 1600) Promptuarii musici (Strasbourg, 1622) |
| Congregatae sunt gentes | None (?) | |
| Tua est potentia | Costanzo Porta | Liber quinquaginta duorum motectorum (Venice, 1580) |
| Refulsit sol in clypeos aureos | None (?) | |
| Duo seraphim (selected) |
Tomás Luis de Victoria Claudio Monteverdi et al. |
Motecta festorum (Rome, 1585) Vespro della Beata Vergine (Venice, 1610) |
| Dixit Iudas Simoni fratri suo | None (?) | |
| Ornaverunt faciem templi | Costanzo Porta Giovanni Croce Giovanni P. Cima et al. |
Liber quinquaginta duorum motectorum (Venice, 1580) Motetti libro primo (Venice, 1594) Concerti ecclesiastici (Milan, 1610) |
| In hymnis & confessionibus | None (?) | |
| Hic est fratrum amator | None (?) | |
| Tu Domine universorum | Costanzo Porta | Liber quinquaginta duorum motectorum (Venice, 1580) |
| Aperi oculos tuos Domine | Amante Franzoni Anselmo Rossi |
Concerti ecclesiastici libro primo (Venice, 1611) Motetti … servitori del … duca di Mantova (Venice, 1618) |
Neither did Gesualdo, as it stands now – the Maccabean texts do not figure in his two surviving books of sacrae cantiones. Footnote 125 And the analytical search for contrafacta and borrowings from these chant melodies in his sacred and secular music would only make the hypothesis more contentious. Any music Gesualdo composed for or about that liturgical day remains unknown.
***
The search for liturgical music by Gesualdo about his honour killing may have hit a dead-end here, but it will go on. For now, let us step back from our liturgical-musical analysis and return to the fork in the road at which we joined Gesualdo. Although his track is faint, our investigation thus far indicates that Gesualdo tried to head towards the Grand Court without veering off course from the Church. Thanks to Sixtus V’s bull, that was almost possible. Nevertheless, Gesualdo’s hunting carriage must have broken down when it could no longer straddle two diverging paths. One institution granted him the authority to take the law into his own hand and kill his wife and the Duke of Andria; the other plainly did not. In the end, Gesualdo went to church first (or just read the daily Bible lesson), then he went hunting, and then he left his catch for the Grand Court to come and collect, while he fled to his castle.
If that was indeed Gesualdo’s chosen path to and from homicide, even in the rough, then it remains to be seen how pioneering this prince was. Despite my best efforts as a musicologist digging through the annals of historical homicides, I have not yet been able to identify other Christian noblemen who killed their adulterous wives with such liturgical (nevertheless musical-liturgical) precision. Further studies of the interrelationship between homicide and the liturgy in the long sixteenth century (especially in the archives of Naples) will be necessary to assess the (ir-)regularity of this scheme. Perhaps Gesualdo was not the only one who hit that fork.
Granted, any such scriptural justification for honour killing as this will not hold up well under our scrutiny today. The Bible, as found here, is dangling like a red herring in Gesualdo’s hunting grounds: I Maccabees 9, while provocative, should be unconvincing to us in the face of canon law. Just because the Maccabees killed the enemy bride does not necessarily mean that Gesualdo could kill his wife. We should investigate but not chase the Maccabees, misbelieving that Gesualdo somehow followed their lead into heaven. Obviously, this study should not be mistaken as an apologia pro Gesualdo. His double homicide, in this liturgical context, seems more sacrilegious than righteous. The mere thought of attempting to Christianise an ‘honour killing’ is revolting (whatever our own religious persuasions may be, who among us would choose to side with the Pharisees against Jesus in John 8?). But Gesualdo lived in a different era of Christianity from ours, and he had himself to convince (not us). It is not our place to pass the final judgement on Gesualdo. The processo against Maria and Fabrizio is one matter; Carlo’s perdono is another.
For want of more hard evidence that Gesualdo’s honour killing was liturgical, I must now rest my case on the evidence afforded us by the Roman Breviary. Recognising that this evidence alone may be deemed insufficient, I will leave it to the reader to rule on the question posed at the outset of this study. By contextualising Gesualdo’s honour killing in the liturgy, have we arrived at the facts of the case, or have I inadvertently concocted another myth (befitting of a ‘cronaca scandalosa’)?
Whatever the decision, the case of Gesualdo’s honour killing remains open and will continue to be reheard in the future. Through this study, I intend to have shown why the Grand Court’s processo, for all its shortcomings, should not obstruct our own proceedings from advancing any further. We must read between the lines of the fundamentally secular processo, while recognising that our contextualisations and speculations could only be confirmed by Gesualdo’s own testimony. Lacking that, we must use any remaining clues we can find to try to understand the mindset of the killer. If Gesualdo had indeed bookmarked some pages in the Bible and the Roman Breviary, then we might already have begun to retell this ever-popular story slightly differently, by incorporating the liturgy more into our scholarly and creative works about Gesualdo and his double homicide.Footnote 126 Whether we tell the story from the perspective of the prince or the archbishop, Gesualdo’s honour killing is a liturgical drama in the making.
APPENDIX 1
The Julian law on the punishment of adultery in ancient Rome and early modern Naples according to Camillo Borrello, a jurisconsult who dedicated books to both Alfonso and Carlo Gesualdo. The excerpts are taken from Camillo Borrello, Decisionum universarum, et totius christiani orbis rerum omnium iudicatarum, summae (Venice: Giunti, 1627), III, pp. 172–93 (p. 179). Borrello’s discourse exhibits that the customary law of Naples (consuetudinem neapolitanam) was relatively loose compared to that of ancient Rome.
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62 OCCIDENDI Adulteros ob criminis obscenitatem potestas concessa est patri … l. Nihil 32 ff. Ad leg. Iul. de Adulter. Ut patet illam inventam in actu turpi, in domo sua, vel generi, uno impetu, tamquam in sua potestate illos occidat.
The authority to kill adulterers was granted to the father on account of the lewdness of the offence … (see ‘Nihil’ at 32 ff., According to the Julian law ‘Concerning Adultery’). As is evident, he might in his authority kill them in one attack, as it were, upon having found [them] in the shameful act, in his or his son-in-law’s house.
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64 Marito itidem adulterum uxoris suae occidere permissum, sed non quemlibet, ut patri.
Permission was likewise granted to the husband to kill the adulterer of his wife but not both, like the father.
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68 NEAPOLITANI REGNI iure, Marito permittitur deprehendenti in actu adulterum, & uxorem nulla mora protracta, occidere …
Regarding the law of the Neapolitan kingdom: the husband is permitted to kill the adulterer and the wife caught in the act without a prolonged delay …
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69 Alexander Severus Imperator, in dicta l. Gracchus. C. de Adulter. permittebat id fieri licere in persona vili, & humili … Et hoc erat difficile scire, maxime noctis tempore.
Emperor Severus Alexander granted that could be permitted on a base and lowly person (see the said chapter ‘Concerning Adultery’ by Gracchus) … And this was difficult to know, especially at night time.
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70 Sed in hoc regno habet ampliorem occidendi potestatem maritus, quam per dispositionem iuris communis, cum occidere permittatur adulterum cuiuscunque conditionis ille fuerit, & in omni loco, cum illum non distinguat …
But in this kingdom, the husband has a greater authority to kill than by the arrangement of customary law, since he is permitted to kill an adulterer of whatever status that he may have been, and in every place, when he [i.e. the husband] does not distinguish him [i.e. the adulterer] …
