This account of Don Carlo fully illuminates his life as Prince of Venosa, as accused murderer, and as composer of extraordinary genius.

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

Steeped in the overripe beauty, violence and exoticism of sixteenth century Naples, this is the riveting story behind one of the most famous and terrible murders in the history of the Renaissance. In 1590, the great and tormented composer Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, murdered his beautiful wife Maria d'Avalos and her aristocratic lover. Gesualdo was a character of Shakespearian proportions: nobleman, musical genius and, for the last sixteen years of his life, madman or so it is alleged. With the chilling calculation of a hunter, he staged the violent and bloody murder of the lovers like an opera. Yet far from ending his torment, in the years that followed Gesualdo became increasingly persecuted by his furies and demons. Inspired by this story that has haunted generations of Neapolitans and ignited the imaginations of artists the world over, Victoria Hammond has written a lush and sensual evocation of love, desire and madness, vividly imagining the life of the mysterious and seductive Maria, her tormented marriage to Carlo, and her affair with Fabrizio Carafa, the handsomest and accomplished nobleman in Naples.

Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, is equally celebrated as the composer of madrigals of great power and tortured complexity and as the murderer of his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto. His life and compositions are not unconnected. His neurotic sensibility found an ideal outlet in the mannerist tendencies of late Renaissance music, and his works are the most extreme examples of those tendencies. Watkins's extended study of Gesualdo's life and works was originally published in 1973. Alongside detailed analysis of Gesualdo's remarkable madrigals and of the few works in other genres, it contained much new biographical material, particularly on the latter part of the composer's life. This new edition has been extensively updated, and contains a new chapter covering the research of recent years. The preface to the first edition, by Igor Stravinsky is reprinted.