Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices (1995)

The Worst Film Ever

Don't Believe the Hype

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

"Gesualdo" or "Tod für fünf Stimmen"/"Death for Five Voices" is a German television documentary from over 20 years ago. It deals with an Italian composer who was a murderer at the same time. And this is also what interested me the most about this little film we have here. Sadly the murder was so long ago that it is tough to put the focus on it and still keep it close to how it happened. Admittedly, the music in here is far from my genre of preference, but people who like church music more than I do will certainly appreciate it. Other than that, my main motivation to watch this one was that it was made by Werner Herzog and I am a huge fan of the director. I saw there are version where he narrates in German and other ones where he narrates in English, so people outside of Germany can also watch and understand this film. Unfortunately, he decided to give the word to the people at the church here and as a consequence his narration is not half as frequent as I would have liked it to be. It only runs for slightly under an hour, but at this runtime it stays fairly essential. Not one of Herzog's best, but I still recommend the watch.

Oh my, this documentary has a lingering fascination with the colourful life of one helluva kinky dude! From masochism to homo eroticism, from murder to insanity, nothing ordinary inhabits the skin of this castle dwelling Prince/ "amateur musician". And yes, I friggin' loved it!! For all the wrong reasons, of course...Like the disparate five voices performing Gesualdo's Midralgo masterpieces, this extremely off-kilter documentary is brimming with schizo discordance worthy of a Herzog stamp. At times godawfully serious, at others offbeat deadpan. Eventually, the film veered off the edge and into LOL looney territory. This straight talking heads docu meet Spinal Tap-like hi-jinks is so generously sprinkled with Pythonite dust, it has become a monster hybrid which only Herzog is capable of making. Yes, once again, we were all fooled by the solemn music and the narrator's earnest German accented voice. And ladies and germs, that ending? Priceless. OK, my quips on this flick so far cannot do it justice. Herzog devotees out there, drop what you are doing right now! Go hunt it down already!Sample below classic lines from yet another Herzogian masterpiece:Italian Chap to a crazy woman: "What is your address? How can I contact you?" Crazy Woman, who is a self-professed incarnate of Gesualdo's murdered wife (don't ask): "I live up in heaven. You can take a helicopter up to find me...."

At a pinch, I suppose I'd accept that some of the lurid carryings-on and local legends that have gathered around the figure of the composer Gesualdo, and are retailed here with a gleeful lack of critical scrutiny, might actually be true. Perhaps quite a lot of them are, but it doesn't really matter, because Herzog seems at least as interested in the way that people create, exploit and enjoy the legends, as in the composer himself or his music. Some sequences are very obviously staged for the camera, and Herzog seems almost to be daring us to believe that we really are talking to, say, a mad ex-opera singer who believes herself to be the reincarnation of Gesualdo's murdered first wife. The results are certainly very, very funny -- but everything pales before the irrepressible wife of a local chef, who disrupts his efforts to tell us about Gesualdo's extravagant menus with a torrent of abuse dedicated at the composer, whom she regards as the devil incarnate.But then, for all its contrivances, the whole film has a deadpan, dishevelled feel about it. No effort is made to disguise that the resident expert Gerald Place is talking from notes or keeps developing a nasty frog in his throat: as one of the few people in the documentary who seems basically sensible, he has to be quietly sent up some other way! Only the intelligent and rather sympathetic Principe d'Avalos seems to escape with his dignity intact -- perhaps because he's aristocracy.Musical duties are divided between two groups of singers. The Gesualdo Consort of London mostly sing in tune, the Complesso Barocco mostly don't -- the avant-garde quality is certainly exaggerated by the problems with intonation in what is very difficult music. As with the interviews with Gerald Place I get the impression Herzog didn't want to do retakes if things went slightly wrong, and the singing certainly has plenty of enthusiasm. Only he can be blamed for the way the audio and visual get out of sync by a couple of seconds in close-ups of the director in one of the musical performances; but somehow it all seems to add to the effect of cheerful bizarrerie. How a specialist in Renaissance music would react to this documentary I dread to think (I'm sure there'd be some swearing and gesticulation) but as social comedy it's priceless.

Gesualdo was a nutcase, but a brilliant one. His madrigals are among the most moving moments in music history. You will walk away from this film realizing all of the above. While using what appears to be actual employees at the various sites of Gesualdo's life, we are given a tour of his physical life and his music. There are performance excerpts from his madrigals. There is a learned professorial type giving us a biography of his life.Simply put, if you enjoy great vocal music, you will want to go out and buy recordings of this master artist. I have recordings of his first 5 books but I can not yet find a recording of his 6th book of madrigals. This film is not quite the over-the-top approach that Mr. Herzog usually takes, but it is quite strange anyway. It is now out on DVD and I highly recommend it.