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Originally Posted by wikipedia
In 1586 Gesualdo married his first cousin, Maria d'Avalos, the daughter of the Marquis of Pescara. Two years later she began to have a love affair with Fabrizio Carafa, the Duke of Andria; evidently she was able to keep it secret from her husband for almost two years, even though the existence of the affair was well-known elsewhere. Finally, on October 16, 1590, when Gesualdo had allegedly gone away on a hunting trip, the two lovers took insufficient precaution at last (Gesualdo had arranged with his servants for the doors to be left unlocked), and he returned to his palace in Naples, caught them in flagrante delicto and brutally murdered them both in their bed; afterwards he carried their mutilated bodies to a public place in Naples and left them for all to see. (Maria was "viciously stabbed in the parts which it is best for a woman to keep modest," read a contemporary account.) Being a nobleman he was immune to prosecution, though not to revenge, so he fled to his castle at Gesualdo where he would be safe from any of the relatives of either his wife or her lover.
Holy crap. That reminds me of that metal band that ended up killing some guy and eating his brain (or something along those lines).
As for great composers. There are many reasons why people capable of creating great classical aren't. The places where they would have in the past learned how to go about doing that are now teaching them to treat music as a science instead of an art. People care more about teaching you about music than they do about actually making it. Also, the people who care only about making pleasurable music will more likely go into pop than classical. Beyond that there is the pressure to do something original and also be high quality enough that someone would want to listen to you as opposed to the hundreds of years worth of established composers. And of course there are the money issues.
With all of those circumstances, is it really surpising that there aren't any truly great composers around? There have been similarly sized gaps between great composers in the past when the music environment was much better than it is now. How long ago did Shostakovich die anyway?
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