L.L. Carlo Gesualdo - Moro, Lasso, al mio duolo

I've always been fascinated by the music of Gesualdo, as I am also fascinated by the works of Schonberg, Stockhausen, and other composers of more recent vintage. However, I find that I run into trouble when I sit down to listen to them in larger quantities than just a few minutes. Gesualdo's music is jarring, deep, painful, strange, and wonderful. It is exactly what makes it wonderful to me that also makes it a challenge. Especially when the listener is aware of the sort of inner mental world that belonged to Gesualdo it is easy to equate it with madness, bitterness, and morbidity. In some ways I see a hateful and spiteful man taking sadistic pleasure in creating some of the most bizarre and dissonant music yet written, but in more ways I see a man reaching out and trying to express his own pain and heartache in what he unfortunately discovered could be his only outlet, that of yet deeper pain. I wonder if Gesualdo's music was meant to reflect his own mindset, whether it helped him deal with his pain, or whether it was simply for his own pleasure. When I ask those kinds of questions, I feel like a Freudian examining another persons dreams. Maybe to look at music as if it were a dream, and to ask just wherefore that dream in that way, is a way to get at deeper psychological roots to music.