Caminhos para uma estética da inquietude na música de Gesualdo

Abstract

The intensification of chromaticism and dissonance in Gesualdo’s late style, its frequent discontinuity and the overloading of detail are founded on an aesthetic which continues to develop the traditional modal and contrapuntal systems, submitting them to a distortion, the excess of which reflects spiritual and expressive changes in a new artistic conscience. The ‘disquietness of form’ raised by Gesualdo’s musical Mannerism shapes aesthetic values which deviate from models of classical beauty, without breaking totally with them. This ‘off-centredness’ projects a poïetic emerging from a new interpretation of reality. In the first part of this essay, John Donne’s metaphor ‘The sun is lost’ is taken as a starting point for a reflection on certain artistic manifestations of this problematical awareness, rooted in a world of doubt about self and forms’. The second part focuses on musical manifestations of Gesualdo’s ‘loss of centre’, illuminating his fascination for mobility and metamorphosis, ambiguity and evanescence, disjunction and tension.