My coming month is devoted to lute song, one of the glories of the English renaissance—and, more particularly, to the work of John Dowland. This year marks the 400th anniversary of his death: born in 1563, a year before Shakespeare, he died 10 years after him in 1626. I’ve often roped Dowland into a Shakespeare recital (mostly composed of songs by the likes of Benjamin Britten, Gerald Finzi or Erich Wolfgang Korngold) by starting the whole thing with his greatest song, with piano rather than the original lute accompaniment. “In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell” works very well on another instrument, and I remember the first time I did it this way: on the stage at Carnegie Hall, the cavernous auditorium in darknesse, and the song immediately followed by my pianist, Thomas Adès, playing his own “explosion” of the song, “Darknesse Visible”. As Adès writes, “No notes have been added; indeed, some have been removed. Patterns latent in the original have been isolated and regrouped, with the aim of illuminating the song from within, as if during the course of a performance.” Since his revival in the 20th century, Dowland has been an inspiration as well as a reminder that, long before Elgar or Britten, English composers could be part of the continental mainstream. And it’s not just the songs. His set of pieces for viol consort, Lachrimae, based on the song “Flow My Tears”, is a masterpiece of the genre.
Dowland was a European figure not only because he travelled to Italy and France and bathed in their influence, not only because the debt was repaid and his music was studied abroad, but also because he spent the best part of his career at the Danish court. Most of his great music was published, in England, during his Danish years between 1598 and 1612. Coming out of Denmark, published in 1612, “In Darknesse Let Mee Dwell” seems to carry a Shakespearian weight of melancholy, “hellish jarring sounds” straight out of Elsinore:
Thus wedded to my woes, and bedded to my tomb,
O let me living die, till death, till death do come.
Hamlet was written about a dozen years before.
Dowland’s motto, equally compounded of self-mocking and self-promotion, was “Sempre Dowland, sempre dolens”, and irony came easily to him: a galliard published in the Lachrimae collection is named for Captain Digorie Piper, a notorious Cornish pirate who preyed on Danish ships. The galliard was usually a vigorous dance: “the Queen is so well as I assure you,” a privy counsellor tells us of the fiftysomething Elizabeth I, “six or seven galliards in a morning, besides music and singing, is her ordinary exercise.” Here it becomes a doleful lament. Piper was executed in 1589.
Dowland’s role at the Danish court set me thinking about musicians and the realms of power. Unusually well paid at 500 daler per annum, Dowland was a trusted courtier; and, no doubt, with Anne of Denmark as James I’s consort back in London, English musicians were at a Danish premium.
In the latter days of Elizabeth I, Dowland’s position had been much more perilous. His stay in France in the 1580s made a Catholic of him, and in Italy in the mid 1590s, a time of intense anti-Catholic persecution in England, Dowland fell in with some likely Jesuit-inspired conspirators whose treasonous talk clearly freaked him out. He wrote a very long and confused letter to Elizabeth’s secretary of state, Robert Cecil, and hotfooted it back home via Protestant Nuremberg. Historians dispute exactly what was going on here—was Dowland actually an agent provocateur, a spy, an informer ? Was he even really a Catholic, as he took a degree at Oxford, something forbidden to those who embraced Catholicism? He certainly felt that his reputation as an “obstinate papist” had prevented him from getting a job at Elizabeth’s court. Hence to Denmark.
Anyway, being a lutenist can clearly be a dangerous job. Readers and viewers of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor saga, Wolf Hall, will remember the fate of Mark Smeaton. He was a twentysomething lute player and singer in the household of Anne Boleyn, drawn into the tragedy of her downfall. It was his racked confession of adultery with the queen that initiated the whole horrible saga and he was mercifully beheaded rather than hanged, drawn and quartered—a nice reward for his cooperation. “A rotten twig upon so high a tree,” wrote the poet Thomas Wyatt, snobbily shaken by the idea that the queen might have consorted with such a lowly lutenist.
The other famous dispatched theorbist (a theorbo is the long-necked bass lute, difficult to get into a taxi) was David Rizzio, whose musical talents and charm made him private secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots. Her husband, Lord Darnley, notoriously burst into one of their private evening sessions and had him brutally murdered. The unlikely story was that he had slept with the queen; even more unlikely was the rumour that she was pregnant by him, which would have made him father of James I, Anne of Denmark’s husband and Dowland’s final employer.
I’ll be singing Dowland in London, Seville and Paris with the viol consort Fretwork and the lutenist Liz Kenny, who first showed me, 40 years ago, how you get a theorbo into a London cab.
