Not So Merry Old England

Not So Merry Old England

Flowing Tears and Musical Invention

Thomas May

More than four centuries after its publication, John Dowland’s epochal Lachrimae, or Seven Tears has lost none of its power to move and haunt performers and listeners. This collection of 21 pieces published in 1604, created for solo lute and a “closed” consort (an ensemble comprising the same types of instruments) of five members of the viol or violin family, ranks among the landmark publications in Western music history. Dowland broke new ground here for instrumental music, both in its scope and in its expressive power.

Indeed, as Phantasm and other period-instrument ensembles that have emerged in recent decades demonstrate, Lachrimae is by no means a merely historical document: this music conveys an emotional depth and animation that contemporary audiences cannot resist. The musicians of Phantasm play bowed string instruments that were especially popular in Dowland’s England. Viols superficially resemble their counterparts in the violin family but have a different derivation. Featuring six strings, straight backs, and moveable frets, they are also played differently than the corresponding violins, violas, cellos, and double basses.

The string consort evolved as an imitation of groups of singers organized according to the ranges of the human voice (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) to perform polyphonic music. Viol consorts originally emerged in the aristocratic courts of Renaissance Italy but remained popular among English composers well after they had grown obsolete on the Continent, where violin consorts became the default. Lachrimae in particular cast a spell over Dowland’s compatriots Williams Lawes and John Jenkins, whose music fills the second half of the program.

A Melancholy Song and Dance Man

“Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch / Upon the lute doth ravish human sense,” writes the poet Richard Barnfield, a contemporary of Shakespeare. This reference to John Dowland occurs in a sonnet from 1598 arguing that the natural affinity between music and poetry reinforces the poet’s compatibility with his beloved, whose musical taste is exemplified by her fondness for Dowland. The year before Barnfield’s sonnet, Dowland issued his Firste Booke of Songes or Ayres, a highly successful publication, and he was already well known as a master lutenist and songsmith. And yet, despite his high renown and recognized talent, and the fact that his music was apparently played for Queen Elizabeth herself, a longed-for appointment at the royal court eluded the ambitious young musician. An ongoing sense of paranoia, even persecution, enhanced the image, traditionally associated with Dowland, of an artist prone to deep melancholy. On the title page of Lachrimae itself there appeared an epigram that enigmatically encapsulates this aspect of the downcast Dowland: Aut Furit, aut Lachrimat, quem non Fortuna beavit (“He whom Fortune has not blessed either rages or weeps”).

Parts of Dowland’s life story remain uncertain and shrouded by speculation, his early years in particular (even including the place of his birth, variously proposed as London or outside Dublin). He developed a reputation as a lutenist at a young age and, while still a teenager, was hired to serve the English ambassador to France. Dowland converted to Catholicism while abroad, yet he earned a degree from Oxford, which required formally acknowledging the Church of England. He continued with other posts on the Continent and, in 1595, visited various Italian cities, intending to study with the great madrigalist Luca Marenzio. But passing connections with a group of Catholic exiles in Florence allegedly plotting treason against the Protestant Elizabeth led him to preemptively write a confessional letter to Robert Cecil, the Queen’s Secretary of State, denying any involvement and pledging loyalty.

Notwithstanding his bad luck securing the post he desperately wanted at the English court, Dowland was highly valued and, after some time in Wolfenbüttel and Kassel, found an extremely generous employer between 1598 and 1606 in Denmark’s King Christian IV. Dowland was serving in the Danish court—where he received an extravagant salary and leave to travel for extended periods to England— when he published Lachrimae in London in 1604. He dedicated the collection to Christian’s sister, Anne of Denmark. As the wife of King James, Anne became England’s new queen consort after Elizabeth’s death in 1603. But Dowland had to wait until 1612—the year of his final publication, A Pilgrimes Solace—to be hired at long last as royal lutenist at the English court. Few works can be dated between this period and Dowland’s death in 1626. And, by then, the kind of music he represented was being rapidly superseded by new styles and even instruments that stole into the foreground with the emerging Baroque.

“The teares which Musicke weepes”

As with its composer’s life and career, questions aplenty surround Lachrimae—from issues of tuning and instrumentation (what, precisely, is the role of the lute vis-à-vis the bowed strings?) to the significance of numerology in Dowland’s design (why the presentation of seven types of “tears” and the total of seven times three pieces for the collection?) Several of the pieces in Lachrimae are instrumental versions of songs with lute accompaniment that were already well known to Dowland’s contemporaries. Above all, Lachrimae’s central image of tears was familiar from the song Flow My Tears, which appeared in print in Dowland’s Second Booke of Songes or Ayres in 1600 and became his signature. Yet this song itself most likely originated as a dance tune, according to Peter Holman, an authority on the composer. “Dowland seems to have arranged a number of his songs from instrumental dances,” he writes, “and in general the type of lute song he popularized had its roots in … genres that involved adding words to existing popular tunes.”

Flow My Tears contains the musical “DNA” permeating the seven “passionate pavans” positioned at the beginning of Lachrimae: this is the “tear motif” of four descending notes (A–G–F–E in A minor). Musicological detectives have traced this motif, already “a standard emblem of grief” (Holman), to various possible sources, including Marenzio and Lassus. (The latter would make an especially intriguing connection, since one of Lassus’s own greatest works is the 21-madrigal cycle Lagrime di San Pietro from 1594.) But the motif hunters, argues Holman, are misguided in attempting to pinpoint specific sources. He compares the approach Dowland and his contemporaries represent to that of jazz musicians playing “their own pieces in a semi-improvised manner from a memorized ‘gist.’”

Dowland’s full title for the collection appears as follows: “Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares figured in seaven passionate Pavans, with divers other Pavans, Galiards, and Almands, set forth for the Lute, Viols, or Violons, in five parts.” The definitions provided by the composer and theorist Thomas Morley (in his Plain and Easie Introduction to Practicall Music of 1597) shed some light on contemporary understandings of these genres. The pavan stood for “a kind of staid music designed for grave dancing, and most commonly made of three strains, whereof each strain is played or sung twice” and “cast” in a variable number of four-beat phrases. Its relatively serious demeanor was complemented by the galliard, “a lighter and more stirring kind of dancing,” with a bounce to its triple meter. (Think of the rhythm of God Save the Queen.) Morley groups the almand (“alman”) with several other dance types, characterizing it as “a more heavy dance than [the galliard] (fitly representing the nature of the people whose name it carrieth) so that no extraordinary motions are used in dancing of it.”

Lachrimae contains ten pavans, nine galliards, and, concluding it, a pair of almands (both of which Phantasm includes in its set list). The first seven “passionate pavans” are each titled as a different kind of “tear” (we hear the first, Lachrimae antiquae; the second, Lachrimae antiquae novae; and the seventh, Lachrimae verae), creating an interrelated cycle within the larger cycle that reflects the late Elizabethan cult of melancholy. Even the “lighter” galliards in Lachrimae can be dour and elaborately drawn out.

According to prevailing medical theory of the time, melancholy is the result of an excess of the corresponding humor (over the other three humors thought to regulate human health and behavior). Music, paradoxically, could simultaneously trigger and alleviate melancholy. As Dowland writes in his dedication: “Though the title doth promise teares, unfit guests in these joyfull times, yet no doubt pleasant are the tears which Musicke weepes, neither are teares shed alwayes in sorrowe, but sometime in joy and gladnesse.” As if to underscore the point, Phantasm has chosen Mr John Langton’s Pavan—“Dowland’s least sorrowful pavan,” according to Holman—to conclude their selection.

The colorful personal references in the titles of Lachrimae’s other pieces cover a wide social spectrum, from the King of Denmark and the Earl of Essex (Robert Devereux, whose galliard has its song equivalent in Dowland’s famous Can She Excuse My Wrongs) to the convicted pirate Captain Digorie Piper. Identifying the various obscure personages (Mistress Nichol/Nichols, Mr. Bucton, and so on) has tempted many a musicological sleuth to find parallels to the composer’s apparent self-portrait in Semper Dowland, semper dolens (whose punning title means “always Dowland, always sorrowful”). Peter Holman posits the intriguing idea that Dowland anticipated Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations by honoring personal friends—and possibly, like Elgar, even “matched the mood of each piece to the character of its dedicatee” (or vice versa).

One of the innovations of Lachrimae as it appeared in print was the intended practicality of its layout. The music was printed not in part-books but in a folio to be laid out flat on a table, with the performers arranged around it; tablature appears for the lutenist, staff notation for the other five consort musicians. From her perspective as lutenist, observes Elizabeth Kenny, “at times the viols act … as superhuman purveyors of contrapuntal implications that can only be hinted at on an instrument that decays into silence, and at other times they pull the music in new directions.”

Altogether, the 21 pieces in Lachrimae combine and blend impulses from the worlds of both song and dance into something startlingly new. “The viol parts may start from an imagining of what these songs and dances would sound like expanded from the lute,” according to Kenny, “but the whole enterprise goes beyond that into territory that is undiscovered even in the most familiar tunes.”

Another Apotheosis of the Dance

If Dowland faced a potentially very dangerous situation on account of rumors of an association with English Catholic conspirators, William Lawes fell victim to the first stage of the Civil War that raged between his employer, King Charles I, and Parliament two decades after the death of Dowland. As a member of the King’s personal guards, Lawes was fatally shot during one of the Royalists’ losing battles in September 1645. Charles himself was said to have paid his respects, referring to the deceased Lawes as “Father of Musick.”

William was born into a musical family. His father served as a singer at Salisbury Cathedral, and his younger brother Henry became a leading songwriter (even collaborating with John Milton). Details about the course of William’s career are even sketchier than those for Dowland, but he came into prominence early on as a lutenist and theorbo player and, along with Henry, belonged to King Charles’s retinue of private musicians. By the time he was killed at the age of 43, William Lawes had composed not only for the stage (including court masques) but an important body of consort music for the viol and violin families alike.

Lawes was a significant innovator. His ten “setts” (suites) of dance music for the Royal Consort represent “a range and depth of expression on a par with Dowland’s Lachrimae, J.S. Bach’s orchestral suites, Rameau’s orchestral dances, even the waltzes of Johann Strauss, Jr.,” in the judgment of Laurence Dreyfus, who adds: “In every sett there are astounding moments that excite both mind and body. Not only are you touched by the striking musical invention, but you feel summoned to dance. And all this Lawes achieves with four bowed string instruments and a plucked theorbo.”

Lawes quotes Dowland’s “tear motif” in both the Consort Sett in C minor (in four movements) and in the Royal Consort Sett No. 2 in D minor (its six movements more obviously pointing ahead to the multi-movement Baroque dance suite), where the motif is woven into the counterpoint of the opening pavan (“paven”). “Dowland famously rides mounting waves of melancholy by singing of his tears in a unified poetic voice: it is the poet-musician who bares his soul with a solitary lyrical intent,” Dreyfus observes. But in the case of Lawes, “the harmonic richness is personalized into multiple utterances. It is the often painful outpourings of several melancholic lovers that burn soulful phrases into the consciousness.”

The Captivating John Jenkins

John Jenkins, who was born in Maidstone in southeast England, most likely to a carpenter, shared the Royalist cause with his friend William Lawes and was similarly praised by King Charles. Because of his longevity, Jenkins’s career spans from the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell through the Restoration and into the era of Henry Purcell, though his inclination was largely conservative.

The six-part consorts that Jenkins likely composed in the 1620s include a direct homage to the Lachrimae verae (at the start of his Fantasy No. 5 in in D minor), and later in the century he stood out as a purveyor of what were regarded as distinctly old-fashioned tastes in his use of polyphony and his treatment of consort textures. Jenkins’s viol fantasies form the backbone of his compositions in the first half of his career, notes Andrew Ashbee. Whether in four, five, or six parts, they make intricate use of the techniques of polyphonic writing, “the themes being freely modified to suit the counterpoint.”

Pointing to his effect on contemporaries, Laurence Dreyfus quotes an admirer of Jenkins from the 1670s, who rhapsodized about his fantasies and pavans as “Divine Raptures, Powerfully Captivating all our unruly Faculties, and Affections, (for the Time) and disposing us to Solidity, Gravity, and a Good Temper, making us capable of Heavenly, and Divine Influences.”