SOPRANO turned playwright Clare Norburn explores the dissonant music and life of Italian composer, prince and murderer Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa in Breaking The Rules, a concert cum play that The Marian Consort and Gerald Kydd will perform at the Ryedale Festival on Wednesday.

Clare, who studied at Leeds University and London College of Music, has a particular passion for medieval music and has sung with such early music groups as Third Voice, Fifth Element, Mediva, The Troubadours and Vox Animae.

After the two science-fiction television scripts she wrote before the age of 11 went unrecorded, she had a 30-year hiatus in writing but now finds herself somewhat surprised to be a playwright with four works to her name, each one a hybrid of concert and drama that calls for a single actor with live music.

Breaking The Rules, the third in the sequence, was premiered in 2013 at Brighton Early Music Festival, the festival for which Clare is the co-director, and her collaboration with vocal ensemble The Marian Consort now returns in a newly reworked version directed by Nicholas Renton.

Tomorrow it visits St Mary's Church, Lastingham, near York, as part of a 12-date tour funded by Arts Council England to tie in with the 450th anniversary of Gesualdo's birth.

"The performance began as a bit of an experiment at the Brighton festival, where we wanted to bring people to early music who might not otherwise go to a concert, and one way to do that is for music to collaborate with other artforms," says Clare.

Carlo Gesualdo's life story leapt out as being ideal for such a union. "It's classical music's goriest story: a tale of jealousy, a multiple stabbing and murder, committed by Gesualdo, an Italian musician who was Prince of Venosa and Count of Conza" says Clare. "He was a very difficult man. He didn't have easy social graces; he was neurotic, demanding, changeable."

York Press:

The Marian Consort

Breaking the Rules is set on the final day of Gesualdo’s life, September 8 1613, when he is alone in the castle chapel of his family estate near Naples. Two weeks ago his only son died. Now he must come to terms with his own mortality, facing purgatory for his multitudinous sins, haunted by a vision of his first wife, Maria, whom he murdered 23 years previously along with her lover.

Intoning religious platitudes offers no release; only listening to music, such as his Tenebrae Responsories and madrigals, here performed by The Marian Consort, can free him.

"It was not uncommon in the Italian nobility to kill your wife if she was having an affair, which she was, so he got away with it because it was almost the done thing, like an honour killing, but it was extraordinary as it was so violent, stabbing her more than 20 times. It was all very calculated: he pretended to go hunting, came back, found them together and killed them," says Clare. "For years and years after, poems were written about it and the 'gutter press' of the late-16th century really ran with it."

Not least because of the circumstances in which the bodies were found. "Maria, his wife, was naked, but her lover, the Duke of Andria, was wearing Maria's nightgown, and it is thought Gesualdo probably put it on him to humiliate him," says Clare.

Later Gesualdo was welcomed into the House of Ferrara, in northern Italy, where they wanted his money and influence and he could make his mark in its cutting-edge musical world that made it the place to be.

His second marriage was, however, to be no happier than his first. "It was miserable. His wife spent as much time as possible with her brother; Gesualdo abused her and committed adultery in a very upfront way with women at his castle," says Clare.

She chose to set Breaking The Rules on Gesualdo's dying day. "It gives you the biggest range of possibilities to look back on his life, and we also know that Gesualdo was obsessed with what was going to happen to him in the afterlife," says Clare. "He was caught between wanting to atone for his sins and not being able to do so."

A collection of 27 motets ensued from this troublesome dilemma. "He was only 47 when he died, but he was not a man in middle age but an ailing man, who had been ill for some time. For him, as a Roman Catholic, it meant he would be facing purgatory and damnation for what he had done, which is reflected in his Tenebrae Responsories," says Clare. "He wrote them as his 'Get out of hell free' card, meant as some kind of atonement."

His music, however, was not the stuff of painful beauty. "He's unique. His writing sits within a period right at the end of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Baroque, which was why it was so exciting for him to go to Ferrara, where lots of composers were experimenting. He was breaking the rules in his music all the time," says Clare, whose choice of title reflects how Gesualdo broke the rules as both a murderer and composer.

"As he was rich, he didn't need a patron, and could do what he wanted as a composer, so he wrote madrigals and motets and wasn't interested in writing opera. His music is his personal response to his experiences in life.

"Gesualdo experimented with dissonance and while those experiments went up a blind alley, they were the forerunner of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, so he was ahead of his time as well as outside his own time."

Ryedale Festival presents The Marian Consort, Breaking The Rules, at St Mary's Church, Lastingham, York, Wednesday at 8pm. Box office: 01751 475777 or at ryedalefestival.com