Here is
the introduction to the libretto O
Vos Omnes:
In 2003 I made composers aware,
via the newsletter of the Australian Music Centre in Sydney,
that I had published a book of librettos (Love in the Age of Wings). There
were a number of inquiries, and I felt encouraged. One
respondent said he was keen to set a certain libretto, and
we began to discuss this project, but then he took me by surprise:
what he really wanted was a libretto based on the
life of the Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo, 1561 (4?) – 1613.
I
had come across Gesualdo in the writings of Aldous Huxley (as
I recall), I had heard a few pieces of his music, and the folkloric
aspect of his life had reached me by some means because I was
aware that in a fit of jealous rage he had killed his wife
and her lover. Beyond that I knew virtually nothing.
Off
to the library then, the Borchardt at Latrobe and the Baillieu
at Melbourne. I love these libraries but I never enter
them, these days, without seeing myself as a crossover man,
swinging between the electronic age (the computer I’m
working on) and the wonderfully rich world of bound books,
and pamphlets in boxes …
There wasn’t a great deal
about Gesualdo in English; heaps in Italian, but books in that
language are beyond me. I
read Denis Arnold (1984) and also Cecil Gray & Philip Heseltine,
(1926). I went to Grove’s
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, another favorite,
and then I found Glenn Watkins’ Gesualdo:
the man and his music. I
read it carefully, then discovered that he had produced a revised
edition. More reading, more photo-copying and more notes.
I
was searching for information, of course, but more importantly
for a way to approach my task. I could have put it aside
but I felt that since I had started writing librettos then
I must follow the passions, interests, and quirks of composers
who might ask me to write. The quirks of Carlo Gesualdo
would be something else!
I was interested in him straight away,
and I saw at the same time that he would be a difficult subject
because it would be almost impossible to enlist the sympathies
of an audience on his behalf. When still quite young
he committed the murders for which he’s better remembered
than for his music, the music is difficult for modern audiences
to approach (and it hardly approaches them), and,
although he did marry a second time, he was no less difficult
than he’d
been before. Oh dear oh dear!
There was also the matter
of his whippings. His flagellation,
three times a day if what has come down to us is true. Flagellation! It’s
the extremity of self-hatred and how can you create an opera,
with all the appeal, the eloquence and lyricism of that form,
out of someone who hated himself so much that he had himself
whipped?
He wished to imitate Christ, I told myself. Come
in via that resplendent portal. I tried. I wasn’t
convinced by any of the notes and possibilities I scribbled.
He’s
a man with layers and levels in his personality, I told myself. Show
him on top of his castle (well, large house, primitive by the
standards of our time and not so wonderful in his own), listening
to his peasants singing. Show
him also on a middle floor, where he’s the centre of
the various responsibilities, dignities and diplomacies of
his position and his region. Then let there be a bottom
layer, a pit, where the whippings take place, a level we won’t
visit, as spectators, but will hear as we try to concentrate
on the doings and personalities of the middle.
It wouldn’t
work. It made Carlo Gesualdo too central. I
refused to make him as representative of his time as this type
of setting implied. I was myself a post-Renaissance man
and my sympathies refused to engage with someone who wouldn’t
come along with me. I was rejecting him, as a man who
had his place in history, but whose energies had resisted the
energies that my place in history demanded be accepted.
What
to do now?
Opera is drama and drama is conflict. Back
to the library. What
were the conflicts of his time, what were the conflicts he
caused in the modern mind, when we bothered to think about
him? The first question was easy. The Church was
holding people in eternal subjection and there were forces,
active in the north of Italy (Gesualdo was in the south), that
seemed liberating to those engaged with them. As for
Gesualdo and the modern mind, he’d killed his wife and
he’d never been brought to what we, in a modern state,
would call justice. He got away with it. People
of his class did, and no doubt many men of lower classes did
the same. Women were subject to their lords and masters. I’m
not sure if the church of his day had forgiven him because
I’m not sure if he confessed to what he’d done,
but it seemed to me that I had to make a modern audience forgive
him, in some way at least, and there was only one way to do
that, and that was to put everything on the level of a story,
and in the story to make it clear what he’d done, so
that we were at one and the same time aware of our condemnation
and curious as to the nature of the beast that had killed the
errant wife. That meant, I saw, bringing the male double
standard into clear relief. I was fairly close to the
answer I needed.
The death of Donna Maria D’Avalos would
become folklore, the libretto would be divided between the
Renaissance north and the Catholic south, and Carlo Gesualdo,
wretched man, would be shown with all his yearnings for a love
and tenderness that he couldn’t regularly and consistently
provide for a woman of his class. Like many men in many
corners of human history, he could only be decent when he was
out of his allotted social space.
My libretto was done. I was proud
of it. My composer
withdrew without explanation, so here, dear readers, is the
work I laboured over for someone else. I hope you enjoy
it and I hope that in your mind’s ears you can hear a
worthy music!
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