Death for Five Voices//Carlo Gesualdo//Werner Herzog
1. Werner Herzog is a sick, sick, total-singularity kind of genius.
2. So was Prince Carlo Gesualdo, although Gesualdo was more flagrantly psychotic.
3. Death in Five Voices is Herzog’s movie about Carlo Gesualdo.
4. You should watch this movie.
5. You should go to Amazon and buy this movie if you’ve got the cash and would like to see it HD on a large screen.
6. For more details on Gesualdo, check out my notes below the playlist.
NOTES ON GESUALDO
-Rennaisance Italy’s version of billionaire playboy. Psycho killer. Demon. Alchemist.
-Obsessed with music. Greatest compositional innovator of his century.
-Composed madrigals which anticipated a musical movement that did not actually develop until 200 hundred years after his death: Expressionism. (See playlist here)
-Murders wife & lover (apparently the hottest woman & young nobleman in Italy respectively) when he discovers that she’s having an affair.
-Monk rapes Gesualdo’s wife’s corpse on the stairs.
-Gesualdo “as we know a demon and an alchemist” who conducted “experiments on the human body” injects the corpses with some kind of serum. They are still standing in some chapel in Italy.
-Flees to his castle, faraway from Naples.
-Cuts down the forest surrounding his castle by himself. Without help. Over a period of several months.
-Hires servants to whip him and generally abuse him.
-Eventually dies from excessive torture after having written a bunch of music that opened a door for later composers like Wagner to walk through.
-Today the castle is apparently a playground for various people who live in a nearby insane asylum.
Carlo Gesualdo totally murdered his way hot wife and her lover. Here are their bodies.
If you are at all into this kind of thing, JNR HIGHLY recommends that you check out the music of CJ Boyd whose music is (in our opinion) way more exciting & fun to listen to than classical Expressionism while playing in vaguely the same arena or at least the same hemisphere (RE: super experimental, involving an instrument used in orchestras etc.) If you’re not into expressionism or CJ Boyd, you should at least buy this awesome CJ Boyd Teen Wolf inspired t-shirt:
CJ BOYD//Teen Wolf T-Shirt