"ECCENTRIC AND A LITTLE BIT OUT-THERE"
Ahead of our 11 May Renaissance Modern's concert, Meurig Bowen gives his thoughts on Werner Herzog's idiosyncratic "documentary", Gesualdo: Death for Four Voices
Over several decades, German filmmaker Werner Herzog has tended to be drawn to extreme situations. Three of his five legendary collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski took in the stories of Büchner’s Woyzeck, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Nosferatu) and an attempt to establish both a rubber plantation and an opera house in the Peruvian jungle (Fitzcarraldo). He has made films about a plane crash survivor, tribes in the Sahara desert and extreme mountaineering in the Pakistani Himalaya. And in 2005, Herzog made a documentary on Timothy Treadwell, a man-gone-wild whose apparently close, benign relationship with grizzly bears ended with him being savaged and eaten by one.
So it is perhaps not surprising that in 1995, Herzog made a documentary for German television on Carlo Gesualdo, music history’s most notorious double, possibly even triple murderer.
A world away from other, more slick televisual presentations of classical music, Death For Five Voices is characteristically eccentric, a little bit out-there. Perhaps almost deliberately wayward and undisciplined, it seems to be trying to get inside the strangeness of Gesualdo’s life and music through its own intrinsic strangeness.
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Even the ‘normal’ bits of such a music documentary turn out to be a little bizarre. The Gesualdo Consort appear to be auditonees for The Addams Family: The Musical. And its director, Gerald Place, awkwardly reads his pieces to camera from a spiralbound notebook, like the under-prepared giver of a pre-concert talk.
And then there are the strange bits. Like the severely disabled Italian child being ridden on a horse by his carers in an indoor paddock. Or the scene in Gesualdo’s ruined castle, where a deranged, generously-endowed redhead claims to be the reincarnation of his wife and sings along to a ghetto-blaster.
Equally zany, but much more successful, is a delightfully mad exchange between two ageing cooks, man and wife, ruefully discussing the 125 course menu Gesualdo concocted for his wedding. ‘He was the devil incarnate,’ the woman barks repeatedly as she stirs one of the banquet’s exotic, re-created ragú.
“a delightfully mad exchange between two ageing cooks, man and wife, ruefully discussing the 125-course menu Gesualdo concocted for his wedding”
Herzog seems as much interested in what might be termed "folk-musicology" as any conventional musicological correctness from Il Complesso Barocco’s Alan Curtis or Gerald Place. The stories we get from his cast of real-life locals are doubtless in some cases no more than that – embellished tales, Gesualdo folklore. Did the guilt-ridden Prince really spend three months deforesting an entire valley singlehandedly? Did he really kill his second child, thinking he was not the father, by swinging it to death over three days and three nights, accompanied by a choir? But these time-shifted testimonies are rich and real, as present now as the 400 year old uxoricidal bed, proudly owned by an ancestor, or the preserved skeletal-corpses of wife and lover in a Neopolitan church.
A black cat skulks down the back of a beaten-up VW Beetle as the janitor of Gesualdo’s Naples palazzo recounts, in the foreground and with a little too much relish, how a passing monk raped the discarded, 28-times stabbed corpse of the composer’s wife. A moment as strange and startling as any Gesualdo chord shift.
© Meurig Bowen