O vos omnes

In 1590, Gesualdo discovered his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto and murdered them. His resulting melancholia had a deep and lasting impact on his music, which can be seen in the very texts he set to music: his madrigals dominated by themes of suffering and death; his sacred works full of spiritual anguish, self-deprecation and repentance. O vos omnes (All ye that pass by)—from the Old Testament book of Lamentations—receives a profoundly personal setting, in which the words are enunciated in a slow, chordal manner, inflected with exquisitely painful chromatic (micro-shifting) harmonies, complete with searing dissonances. By repeating the second half, as Gesualdo often did in his vocal works, he emphasised the core message of the text: “if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow”. Published in his Sacrae Cantiones for five voices (1603), the motet anticipates his more grief-laden six-voice version included in the Responsories for Holy Saturday (1611).