Chord of the curse 2

The other day I wrote about a spooky harmonic progression that shows up in Wagner's early opera Die Feen and recurs in Strauss's Salome. It occurred to me that the sequence has old roots: at the beginning of Carlo Gesualdo's madrigal Moro, lasso ("I die, alas, in my suffering") a chord of C-sharp major gives way to one of A minor. In the above video, the madrigal is sung by the Gesualdo Consort of Amsterdam. The shadowy Renaissance master is much in the air these days: as I mention just...