“Moro, lasso”

Here’s a performance of Carlo Gesualdo’s supremely strange madrigal “Moro, lasso” from the equally odd documentary by Werner Herzog, “Death for Five Voices.” If you want to see the most extreme manifestation of the Gesualdo myth, see this film: with psychiatric ward patients who believe themselves to be reincarnations of Gesualdo and Ferraraese parking lot attendents who swear that this spot in the lot was precisely where the mad composer killed his wife and her lover, the hysteria quotient is upped to a hilarious degree here. It does have some beautiful music in it, though.