Quick Overview

An aristocrat who forged an idiosyncratic style of musical expression, Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa was the creator of a bold, new harmonic language, and a composer truly ahead of his time. A founder of his own academy, to which many leading madrigalists of the 16th and early 17th centuries belonged, Gesualdo (1560 - 1613) was a highly expressive composer, as well as a virtuoso performer on the bass lute.