Though both the Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza, he is better known for writing madrigals and pieces of sacred music that use a chromatic language not heard again until the late 19th century.

[citation needed] "His mother died when he was only seven, and at the request of his uncle Carlo Borromeo, for whom he was named, he was sent to Rome to be set on the path of an ecclesiastical career.

There he was placed under the protection of his uncle Alfonso (d. 1603), then dean of the College of Cardinals, later unsuccessful pretender to the papacy, and ultimately Archbishop of Naples.

[4] Some years into her marriage with Gesualdo, Donna Maria began an affair with Fabrizio Carafa, third Duke of Andria and seventh Count of Ruovo.

[2] On the night of October 16, 1590,[5] at the Palazzo San Severo in Naples, the two lovers were caught in flagrante by Gesualdo, who killed them both on the spot.

The delegation's report did not lack in gruesome details, including the mutilation of the corpses and, according to the witnesses, Gesualdo going into the bedroom a second time "because he wasn't certain yet they were dead".

[8] About a year after the gruesome end of his first marriage,[citation needed] Gesualdo's father died and he thus became the third Prince of Venosa and eighth Count of Conza.

[9] In the meantime, he engaged in more than two years of creative activity in the innovative environment of Ferrara, surrounded by some of the finest musicians in Italy.

[9] He also worked with the concerto delle donne, the three virtuoso female singers who were among the most renowned performers in the country, and for whom many other composers wrote music.

[citation needed] The relationship between Gesualdo and his new wife was not good; she accused him of abuse, and the Este family attempted to obtain a divorce.

[citation needed] According to Campanella, writing in Lyon in 1635, Gesualdo had himself beaten daily by his servants, keeping a special servant whose duty it was to beat him "at stool",[14] and he engaged in a relentless, and fruitless, correspondence with Cardinal Federico Borromeo to obtain relics, i.e., skeletal remains, of recently canonized uncle Carlo Borromeo, with which he hoped to obtain healing for his mental disorder and possibly absolution for his crimes.

[citation needed] Gesualdo's late setting of Psalm 51, the Miserere, is distinguished by its insistent and imploring musical repetitions, alternating lines of monophonic chant with pungently chromatic polyphony in a low vocal tessitura.

As in the later books of secular madrigals, he uses particularly sharp dissonance and shocking chromatic juxtapositions, especially in the parts highlighting text passages having to do with Christ's suffering, or the guilt of St. Peter in having betrayed him.

Some of these were products of the years he spent in Ferrara, and some were specifically written for the virtuoso singers there, the three women of the concerto di donne., July 2020 {{citation}}: Missing or empty |title= (help) Characteristic of the Gesualdo style is a sectional format in which relatively slow-tempo passages of wild, occasionally shocking chromaticism alternate with quick-tempo diatonic passages.

In 2011 Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker:[7]If Gesualdo had not committed such shocking acts, we might not pay such close attention to his music.

[7] Until the 1620s his music was imitated by Neapolitan composers of polyphonic madrigals such as Antonio Cifra, Michelangelo Rossi, Giovanni de Macque, Scipione Dentice, Girolamo Frescobaldi and Sigismondo d'India.

[7][21] The life of Gesualdo provided inspiration for numerous works of fiction and musical drama, including a novel by Anatole France[citation needed] and a short story by Julio Cortázar.

In Gesualdo, that fantastic character out of a Webster melodrama, psychological disintegration had exaggerated, had pushed to the extreme limit, a tendency inherent in modal as opposed to fully tonal music.

'And yet,' I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to these strange products of a Counter-reformation psychosis working upon a late medieval art form, 'and yet it does not matter that he's all in bits.

Suppose you couldn't get back, out of the chaos...' David Pownall's play Music to Murder By (1976) juxtaposes the life of Gesualdo with that of twentieth-century composer Peter Warlock.

[28] In 1985 the French writer Michel Breitman published the novel Le Témoin de poussière [fr] based on the latter part of the life of Gesualdo.

It wasn't until centuries later that he was rediscovered, and his work is a huge inspiration to me.Gesualdo's name is used by The Gesualdo Six, a British vocal consort, directed by Owain Park.