Monumentum pro Gesualdo
ballet by George Balanchine
Monumentum pro Gesualdo is a 1960 arrangement and recomposition by Igor Stravinsky of three madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo:
Asciugate i begli occhi (Book 5, XIV)
Ma tu, cagion di quella (Book 5, XVIII)
Beltà poi che t'assenti (Book 6, II)
It was composed to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Gesualdo's birth and was intended to complement Stravinsky's similar Tres Sacrae Cantiones. It was premiered on September 27, 1960, at the Venice Biennale, played by the Orchestra del Teatro la Fenice conducted by Stravinsky.
The piece was later choreographed by the New York City Ballet (NYCB) co-founder and balletmaster George Balanchine. The premiere took place on Wednesday, November 16, 1960, at City Center of Music and Drama, New York, with scenery and lighting by David Hays (new lighting by Ronald Bates in 1974; current production's lighting by Mark Stanley).
It was first performed in conjunction with Balanchine's choreographic interpretation of Movements for Piano and Orchestra in 1963 and was regularly performed in this pairing thereafter.
References
Cited source
White, Eric Walter (1979). Stravinsky: The Composer and his Works (2nd ed.). University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520039834.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Monumentum pro Gesualdo” is ballet by George Balanchine. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Monumentum, Gesualdo and ballet, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3323503. VIAF identifies the subject as 176564766. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1974, 1963 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Monumentum pro Gesualdo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.