On 16^th  and 17^th September, 2008 there will be the first Italian production of Gesualdo Considered as a Murderer by Luca Francesconi. at Teatro Franco Parenti in Milan as part of the MITO SettembreMusica music festival. Taking as its starting point the infamous case of Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, who in 1590 killed his wife and her lover, the libretto by Vittorio Sermonti explores how opera developed as an art form. At the end of the 16^th century composers were testing the limits of polyphony’s expressive potential: as Francesconi explains, Gesualdo “had the necessary musical intellect to invent opera but the musical language of the day did not offer, one could say, the extra dimension needed to create a dramatic structure…The cuckold’s revenge, by now rather hackneyed, is not of interest per se: what strikes us instead is the power of its theatrical appeal. The entire opera takes the form of the preparation for the famous scene, which in fact we never see. The characters emerge as though locked in an old fresco. The narration is in the third person, as if in a kind of madrigal or oratorio, in a sonic space generated by fragments from “Respondit”, an electronic elaboration of music composed by Gesualdo”. The singers will be Alda Caiello, Leonardo de Lisi, Maurizio Leoni, Ensemble Vox ‘Altera and the Divertimento Ensemble conducted by Sandro Gorli, while the stage direction is by Francesco Micheli.