Ave, dulcissima Maria

Gesualdo composed almost exclusively for voices, publishing six books of madrigals and three volumes of sacred music between 1594 and 1611. He was obsessed with expressing the words of his texts as dramatically as possible. This encouraged him to develop a musical language of extremes, with graphic “painting” of textual images, sudden changes of style and an audacious harmonic vocabulary. In his madrigals this often led to mannered results, but in his sacred music he more often achieved a balance between his dramatic instincts and the traditional textures of church music (where voices imitate one another). Ave, dulcissima Maria (1603), which pleads with the Virgin Mary to intercede for the sinner, begins with some traditional imitation between voices, but as the Virgin is directly addressed (“O Maria”), Gesualdo suddenly shifts to chords with arresting harmonies and rhetorical pauses. Similarly, the plea “Ora pro nobis” (“Pray for us”) is underlined with drooping, haunting harmonies, balanced by optimistic, rising scales at the mention of Jesus’ name.