I was listening to the radio and the topic of the day was Celebrities Behaving Badly. A rather earnest discussion was taking place about the way society looks down on common drug users as scum, but is perfectly happy to see rock and pop stars off their faces on a more or less permanent basis.

“We have an expectation that our celebrities will misbehave.” One of these experts announced. ”It has been that way since Jerry Lewis, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.”

You think? That long ago, huh?

Well, for all you fans of Naughty Musicians, I have a tale with a slightly more notable pedigree. This sordid but chilling story dates back to the turn of the fifteenth century, and is, I hope, more interesting than whether or not Amy is in rehab again this week.

Don Carlo Gesualdo wrote music turned out to be a full two hundred years ahead of it’s time. That’s an easy statement to write, but just think about it for a moment. If Beethoven had been two hundred years ahead of his time, we would be still trying to catch up with him now. (Some would say that we are, of course. But that’s a discussion I’ll leave to the experts) His music is truly inspirational, with sudden tangents and flourishes which echo the whole gamut of emotion that you’d normally expect to find in a Rachmaninov, and a passion that you’d probably have to look to Beethoven to find.

Of course, way back in the fourteenth century, when Don Carlo Gesualdo was writing, music was a much simpler affair. Think of it as colouring in. Everything had to be neatly and accurately placed in the right box, with predictable patterns and easily resolved questions. What Gesualdo did was not just to “go over the edges”, but to take a paint bucket and blow torch to the paper for good measure. His work gave a voice to the divine and the human, using music, possibly for the first time, as a medium to express the raw energy of emotion.

Or at least, that’s my take on his work. It’s difficult to listen to his choral pieces in isolation these days, now that so many rich and emotional works have been composed since his death. It’s hard to see just how important he was, now that we can enjoy the works of Mahler and Metallica at the touch of a button. Our view is spoiled by the giants whose shoulders we stand on.

But, for all his inspirational, groundbreaking work, Don Carlo Gesualdo is remembered by only a few outside academia. To the average punter (like me) what makes this man so interesting is not his dazzling use of chromatic scales, but the events which took place in the Palace of Naples on the evening of October 16th 1590.

Escorted by three armed henchmen, Don Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, Count of Conza and Grand Nephew to Pope Pias 4th, stormed into the bedchamber of his wife Donna Maria d'Avalos and her lover Don Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria and murdered them both in their bed. During the attack, Donna Maria was stabbed and mutilated in a monstrous fashion, with particular attention being paid to her private parts and stomach. Her lover was left until last, and, having been forced to wear the dead Donna Maria’s clothing as a final act of humiliation, he suffered a painful and predictably emasculating demise before his body was finally abandoned.

The bodies were left on public display for all to see, and as the crowds from the town flocked to enjoy the spectacle, it is reported that a San Dominican monk ravished Donna Maria’s cold, lifeless corpse. (Although if he had gone to the trouble of getting married for six or seven years he could have enjoyed the same level of interest without the public scandal.)

Being a genuine Royal, Don Carlo was immune to prosecution. There was an inquest of course, but apart from a few scandalous headlines in the tabloids, very little was done. Back in those days it was just rather expected that the aristocracy would behave like that, or what was the point of their being above the law in the first place?

In 1605, (or pretty close to it) Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, a play about a mad Scot who chopped the forests down around his castle after killing his father, King Duncan. Well, if I had been Don Carlo, I would have been dragging the Bard through every court in Christendom, suing for the exclusive rights to that dramatic scene and presenting the blisters on my peasant’s hands as evidence. As guilt and paranoia started to consume the Don, he had the forest surrounding the castle cut right back, so that nobody could sneak up on him to avenge the murders.

It obviously never occurred to him that somebody might tip-toe up to the castle at night. But to be fair, it would be around three hundred and seventy years before the first Milk Tray commercial, so it’s likely that nobody else had thought of it either.

Donna Maria was (had been) Gesualdo’s first cousin. In those days it was rather the done thing to “marry in” to keep money and wealth tight (and it also saved a fortune on wedding invitations). She had been married twice before, and had already produced children to her previous husbands. Since the purpose of their marriage was to produce heirs, it was actually advantageous that she’d been round the block a few times. Biologically speaking, Donna Maria was a safe bet.

Had his advisors done their homework, they would have found out that Donna Maria had something of a reputation. If they’d had access to Google in those days they would have found that her first husband Frederigo had “forse per aver troppo reiterare conquella I congiugiamenti carnali” on his death certificate, which means, to put it bluntly, that it was the Coroner’s opinion that he’d been shagged to death.

Widowed twice by the time she was 25, Donna Maria was said to be beautiful and charming. But then the Venosan equivalent of “Hello” would have said that, as they were probably angling for the exclusive wedding photo rights. There was little time lost before there had been a Royal Son, and then another.

But Gesualdo’s first love was music. He had little interest in playing happy families. He had other plans. He put a band of musicians together, but despite the best of intentions they were never really sure what they should call themselves. Then there was the concept album to worry about, and the world tour to plan…

It’s quite likely that Donna Maria took a lover because she was lonely. All those hours sat alone in the Royal chambers with only George Michael on the Walkman for company… Her undoing was when Don Carlo’s uncle, Don Giulio decided she was fair game and made a pass at her. Privacy was non existent in a castle of that size and it was a fairly open secret that she had been conducting an affair with Don Fabrizio for some time. When she rejected the sinister, moustache-twirling Don Giulio*, he wasted no time in having a sneaky word in his nephew’s ear while the rest of the band were busy getting their heads around the latest key changes to the opening number.

(*Okay, I admit that the uncle might well have not had a moustache, but history is often subject to revision, so let us now assert it as historical fact that Don Giulio was the exact likeness of the Child-Catcher from Chitty Bang Bang)

Gossip gets around a royal court, and pretty soon it became common knowledge that there was a lynching brewing. Rather understandably, Don Fabrizio suggested they might cool things down for a while, but Princess Donna Maria wouldn’t hear a bit of it.

DF – Look, I like you and everything, but I saw him sharpening that carving knife yesterday, and the kitchens have started serving sliced salami as “Fabrizio Surprise”
DM – What are you trying to say?
DF – Well, you know. It was fun and everything, but-
DM - What are you? A prince or a lackey?
DF – Have you seen those three new roadies he’s got for the band?
DM - What about them?
DF – Oh, come on. Since when did roadies wear full plate armour and carry seven foot long pikes?
DM – Well, I’d rather die than give you up, my fab Fabrizio. Don’t you think it would be romantic to die in my arms?
DF – Erm…. I’m just popping out to the shops…
DM – Don Fabrizio! You come back to bed this minute!

And that’s pretty much how it happened. Don Carlo announced in a stage whisper that he was going on a long hunting trip, while sneaking upstairs to hide in one of the unused bedrooms. He’d cunningly broken the locks on the Princess’ bad chamber a couple of nights before, and the rest you know.

Soon after, consumed by guilt, and slipping steadily into insanity, Don Carlo’s actions became more and more erratic as time went on. He became obsessed with divine judgement, and the fear of retribution either in this life or the next was always uppermost in his mind.

As a means of insuring himself against the flames of hell, he ordered the building of Capuchin monastery at Gesualdo, where commissioned monks could pray for forgiveness on his behalf (In those days monks offered a kind of virtual penitence service for those too busy or too rich to actually change their lives. Today we have the same guilt abatement scheme, but now we call it Carbon Offsetting.)

Deep in the heart of this monastic retreat was a larger-than-life-size painted picture, at which it is believed Don Carlo used to spend hours in prayer. It depicted a scene of the dead lovers being brought up into heaven as angels by Christ himself, and also showed Don Carlo, complete with the moustache-twiddling villain in the shadows, awaiting their own redemption. And there was something else in this picture; a small boy who, like the lovers, was also decked out with a set of angel’s wings.

The details of this are sketchy, but it seems that in one of his blacker moods, Don Carlo had looked into the eyes of his second born son and recognized that features of Don Fabrizio. According to (uncorroborated) folklore, he had devised a sort of Heath-Robinson pulley on which the cradle had been bounced around violently until the baby had “rendered up its soul to God.” I told you this was a sordid tale.

It was in the middle of all this guilt and angst that we find Don Carlo Gesualdo being contacted by another nobleman. This one had a cousin that needed marrying off to prevent the Catholic church getting their hands on his family's assets. Such a sweet man. ”Honestly, my dear. I don’t know what all the fuss is about. He may have brutally slaughtered his first wife and descended into paranoia and madness but he’s rich.”

Don Carlo agreed to marry Eleonora without even meeting her. He just clicked on “add to basket”, waited for the email from Paypal, and that was that. This may seem a little rash, but the deal had a sweetener: the broker of the deal, Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara (Or Fonzie to his friends) was about as mad about music as Don Carlo was. The marriage represented a chance to do what the tortured Don wanted to do more than anything else in the whole world: He could get the band back together again!

They married in 1594. I’d love to have heard the best man’s speech. All those little in-jokes about mutilated corpses and babies being shaken to death. It must have been a hoot.

Don Carlo produced a couple of statutory heirs, and threw himself into his music. It was during this time that he wrote the work he is most famous for – a series of madrigals; compositions for choral voices in several “books” which were both spiritual and (unusually) secular.

As I said before, these works were revolutionary in their content. Not least for their marginalia. Where as composers of the day would make neat little observations ((ff) A little louder here… (Legatio) Sing clearly) Don Carlo’s marginal notes were outlandishly expressive. With the fourteenth century equivalent of a Jumbo Marker, he set about embellishing his scores with expressions such as “Ecstasy! Rage! Passion! Grief!” leaving no doubt at all about what he was getting at.

In true Sid and Nancy style, rumours soon began to spread about domestic abuse at home. Don Carlo spent most of his time in Alfonso’s court, jamming the evenings away and conducting any number of sexual affairs with both male and female groupies which he did openly and in full knowledge of Eleanora. Months on end would pass without him even meeting his wife. A couple of years later, Don Carlo returned to his castle and set up a musical court of his own, surrounding himself with musicians and hangers on of all kinds.

The music he was writing was still just as revolutionary as ever, but hardly anyone ever got to hear it. The music was performed behind closed door and much of it was improvised. Very little of it survives to this day.

As Don Carlo’s moods became increasingly stormy and violent, Eleanora took comfort from her close family. Well, that’s a polite way of putting it. What I meant was that she started fucking her brother. He did his best to persuade her to escape the marital home, and start divorce proceedings, but even though she took papers out on more than one occasion, she would always end up going back to him.

It’s been said on other web sites that she’d become addicted to the cycle of violence and abuse, and that in some twisted way she craved the brutality of Carlo’s beatings. Either way, she never did break free. But although she became very seriously ill on more than one occasion, she ended up outliving him and seeing out her days as a charity worker, which is still the exile career of choice for the rich and pointless.

Don Carlo’s court must have been a sight to behold. This ranting maniac of a man, soothed only by music, surrounded by the most creative and artistic minds in Europe, lost in hedonism and lechery, always living with the ever present threat of violence and madness…As he became more isolated, he slipped further into sadism and masochism. The prince kept a staff of “ten young men” whose job it was to beat him, and it was reported that he couldn’t “go to the stool” (Which I assume means take a dump) without first being hit about the temples and other parts of his body. Somebody really needed to hurry up and invent Senokot.

And that’s just about the whole story. Don Carlo’s surviving boys produced only girls, and with no clear inheritors for the future, the castle fell into disrepair. When composer Igor Stravinsky visited the castle on a musical pilgrimage in the early part of the twentieth century, he found it inhabited only by “…some hens, a heifer, and a browsing goat, as well as a human population numbering, in that still Pill-less, anti-Malthusian decade, a great many bambini. None of the inhabitants had heard of the Prince of Venosa and his deeds, of course.”

Except that it’s not the end of the story. There is at least one remarkable post script which I really do think is worth mentioning. A true Hollywood ending to the story in which the special effect are quite expensive.

Don Carlo died in his castle, less than a month after the death of his surviving son from his first marriage. I’ve read rumours that his wife even had a hand in his passing, but I couldn’t find anything to back it up. What is interesting, however, is that the sepulchre in which he was buried, in a church in Naples, was destroyed soon after by a violent earthquake which brought the whole building down to bare rubble. I’m not a religious man, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that he wasn’t ever likely to rest quietly for very long.