GESUALDO - Death for 5 Voices (Werner Herzog) (NTSC)

GESUALDO – DEATH FOR FIVE VOICES

A Film by Werner Herzog

With
Il Complesso Barocco (leader: Alan Curtis),
Gesualdo Consort Of London (leader: Gerald Place)

Director: Werner Herzog

SPECIAL FEATURE:
- Biography of Don Carlo Gesualdo
- Audio Commentary by Werner

Picture format: NTSC 4:3
Sound format: PCM Stereo
Region code: 0
Menu Languages: English, German, French, Spanish
Subtitle Languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian
Running time: 101 mins
No. of DVDs: 1 (DVD 5)

• The last decade of the twentieth century alone spawned three operas based on the life of the "principe dei musici": Alfred Schnittke's Gesualdo was premiered in 1995 at the Vienna State Opera; then the following year came Franz Hummel's opera of the same name, a commission from the city of Kaiserslautern; and in 1998 Salvatore Sciarrino wrote an opera for the Schwetzingen Festival entitled Luci mie traditrici, after a sixteenth century drama about a prince who murders his wife.
  
  
• Gesualdo was therefore already the focus of a good deal of interest when the acclaimed Munich-based director and film producer Werner Herzog also developed an interest in the composer at about this time. Herzog seemed somehow predestined for the job.
  
  
• His preference for eccentric protagonists, amply attested to in films such as Aguirre, Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo starring longterm collaborator Klaus Kinski, as well as the recent and much talked-about Grizzly Man, went hand in hand with a musical streak that has won him a great deal of admiration since the mid 1980s with regular opera productions at the Bayreuth Festival, the Opera Bastille in Paris and La Scala, Milan.
  
  
• A typically unconventional documentary film from this acclaimed director.