In the last decade of the 20th century alone, three operas were written about the "principe dei musici": Alfred Schnittke's Gesualdo was premiered at the Vienna State Opera in 1995, Franz Hummel's opera of the same name was written the following year as a commission from the city of Kaiserslautern, and in 1998 Salvatore Sciarrino wrote his opera Luci mie traditrici for the Schwetzingen Festival, based on a Cinquecento drama about the prince's murder of his wife. So when Munich director and film producer Werner Herzog became interested in Gesualdo during those same years, the subject was in the air. Herzog's predilection for eccentrics, which he had sufficiently demonstrated in films such as Aguirre, Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo with Klaus Kinski, seemed to predestine him for this, as did his musical vein, which since the mid-1980s had made itself felt in regular opera productions at the Bayreuth Festival, the Opera Bastille in Paris or La Scala in Milan. Of course, a conventional documentary film was not to be expected from an artistic personality like Herzog, and it was not.