«Beltà, poi che t’assenti»: Milva, from Madrigals to Ghosts, in Gesualdo – Death for Five Voices by Werner Herzog

This article explores the interrelation between music, image, and narrative in Werner Herzog’s cinema through the conceptual metaphor of spectrality. Herzog’s films construct an “acoustic vision,” where music does not merely accompany images but unlocks their latent meanings, creating a tension between the visible and the audible. From his early linguistic experiments in Last Words (1967) and Precautions Against Fanatics (1968) to later works such as Signs of Life (1968), Fitzcarraldo (1982),...