DOWLAND
Both Doron and I grew up with parents who are great music lovers. From a young age, we found ourselves exposed to an eclectic variety in music, ranging from Machaut to Bach, Mahler to the Beatles. Doron’s first encounter with Dowland was in singing some of his more upbeat, popular tunes, such as Fine Knacks for Ladies, in a choir as a young boy. A few years later, under his first singing teacher, Doron found himself singing Dowland’s Sorrow Stay as one of his first solo songs.
Dowland was one of many composers that my father used to love but that I found hopelessly boring. My affinity was for the Beatles, and it was my boyish crush on that band that led me to pick up the study of the guitar. It was, in turn, my love of plucked instruments that finally led me to appreciate the melancholic joy of Dowland.
In fact, the first time Doron and I met was in a singing masterclass in Jerusalem in 2002 where I, a young and proud owner of a new lute, attempted to accompany a friend on the song Can She Excuse My Wrongs. Thus, one could say that it was Dowland who brought us together.
The legacy of Dowland, as our personal experiences confirm, can be seen as something of an inevitable point of arrival and departure for any budding young Early musician. Indeed, he is one of the most significant composers of the late Renaissance; a virtuoso lutenist with an extraordinarily prolific output. His lute oeuvre, which is to be found scattered across numerous manuscripts throughout Europe and in his son’s publication, A Variety of Lute Lessons, stretches both instrument and player to their limits. Despite the fact that Dowland himself apparently did not possess anything that could be called an angelic voice, he perfected the genre of the lute song in his Three Books of Songs and Ayres, a Pilgrim’s Solace and his son’s publication, A Musical Banquet. Dowland’s pieces often convey sadness, darkness and even yearning for death. It was not uncommon for composers of the late Renaissance to relish in melancholy, but of all of them, it is Dowland’s name that became synonymous with the word.
With this album, Doron and I have chosen to focus on some of John Dowland’s best-known works. Sorrow Stay and In Darkness Let Me Dwell are both through-composed masterpieces that demonstrate Dowland’s precise and meticulous word-painting through his use of chromaticism, imitation and other techniques. I saw My Lady Weepe is a strophic song exemplary of Dowland’s passion and sensuality, adorned with a final Phrygian cadence. In addition, we present here perhaps the most emblematic of his songs, Flow My Tears, or as it is also known in its earlier instrumental version, Lachrimae Pavane noted for its motif of the falling tear that appears at the beginning of the song. These works not only represent Dowland's somber artistic persona in all its gravity but are also, like any great art, inexhaustible: they offer us profound longing that is both universal and timeless, they are composed of highly complex counterpoint, and demand much from singer and lute player alike.
Like Flow My Tears, the famous Can She Excuse My Wrongs and If My Complaints Could Passions Move are also based on a dance. Both are Galliards and both offer much more than may first meet the eye. The Galliard is an upbeat dance, but Dowland weaves in elaborate polyphony and layers of complexity that emerge in the dialogue between music and poetry. This is perhaps most striking in the former, the text of which is presumed to be by Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, who was first a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, but later fell from grace and was executed for treason.
Dowland, too, had a complicated relationship with Queen Elizabeth. He had always hoped to attain a position at her court, an honour that was never bestowed upon him. Dowland resentfully attributed this misfortune to his conversion to Catholicism. However, the fact that other court musicians at the time were openly Catholic discredits his claim. Say, Love, If Ever Thou Didst Find is a thinly disguised praise to the Queen, most likely composed with the hope of flattering her into a positive response.
The Fancy was the English equivalent to the Italian Fantasia or Ricercar. A purely instrumental musical form that emerged in the 16th century. Two of the three Fancies that appear in our album are brilliant examples of Dowland’s dexterity upon the lute while the third takes us to a whole new level; Forlorn Hope Fancy follows the song In Darkness Let Me Dwell as the “darkest hour” of our program. Its chromatic motif appears and reappears relentlessly through the entirety of the piece, an unforgiving four-voice polyphonic masterpiece.
Inspired by Dowland’s travels through Europe, we have included in our album three foreign songs that were published in the collection A Musical Banquet. These songs are the French Air de cour Si Le Parler, the Spanish song Vestros Ojos, and Caccini’s famous Amarilli Mia Bella, published with a written-out lute accompaniment most likely by Dowland himself.
Three of the lute solos in our album are “dedication pieces”, that bear rather interesting inscriptions. The King of Denmark’s Galliard was written in honor of King Christian IV of Denmark, who was Dowland’s employer for eight years. The King must have held his musical servant in very high regard as Dowland was paid an unusually generous salary, despite his less than exemplary behaviour; repeatedly overstaying his leave, and when in court, often intoxicated. In contrast to the famous King of Denmark, there is no information about the identity of a certain mysterious Barbara, to whom Dowland dedicated the sweet and elegant pavan entitled, in Italian, La Mia Barbara. The title of the piece, Dowland’s journey to Italy, and the fact that his wife never joined him on his travels may leave room for speculation. The third dedication piece exemplifies the high esteem in which Dowland was held by various noble patrons. It is a Pavan by Prince Mauritius, Landgrave of Hessen, based on the aforementioned Lachrimae motif, and bearing the inscription Fecit in Honorem Joanni Doulandi Anglorum Orphei (in honour of John Dowland, the English Orpheus).
For both Doron and myself, the pursuit of specialising in Early Music has often been connected to the idea of uncovering forgotten composers and bringing to light hitherto unexplored music. Ever since we found each other again in Basel in 2010, through our common work with ensemble Profeti Della Quinta, we have been very happy to be able to do just that. Now, after years of close musical collaboration, we have chosen to devote an entire album to this much-celebrated composer whose music we both love, and to share with you our own personal Dowland.
Ori Harmelin
Basel, 2018