John Dowland

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  John Dowland was buried at St Ann's, Blackfriars, London, on the 20th of February 1626, and almost nothing of what he experienced in his final years found its way into music. That silence at the end of a long career stands in sharp contrast to the torrential output of his middle years, when he published song collections that became some of the most widely distributed printed music in England.

  He titled one of his consort pieces "Semper Dowland, semper dolens", which translates as "always Dowland, always doleful." Few composers have so openly worn their own name as a pun on suffering. Yet whether that melancholy was a performance or a confession has been a question that has followed Dowland across four centuries.

  He was born around 1563, most likely in or near London, though Irish historian W. H. Grattan Flood placed his birthplace in Dalkey, near Dublin, a claim that has never been confirmed. He converted to Catholicism while working as a young man in Paris, tried and failed to secure a place at the Protestant court of Elizabeth I, fell briefly into treasonous Catholic intrigue in Italy, and eventually found himself employed by the King of Denmark at one of the highest salaries ever paid to a foreign musician at that court. His life was restless, suspicious, and brilliantly productive. The questions this documentary will pursue are as present in his biography as in his music: was Dowland's darkness real, and what did it cost him?

• 2. Paris, Faith, and a Locked Door

  ›

  In 1580, Dowland arrived in Paris in the household of Sir Henry Cobham, the English ambassador to the French court. He was still a teenager. It was during this service, continued under Cobham's successor Sir Edward Stafford, that Dowland converted to Roman Catholicism.

  The conversion would shadow him for the rest of his professional life. In 1594, a vacancy for a lutenist opened at the English court. Dowland applied and was turned down. He attributed the rejection to his religion, arguing that Elizabeth I's Protestant court had no place for a Catholic musician. The explanation is not entirely convincing. His contemporary William Byrd, also Catholic, maintained a court career without formally abandoning his faith. Dowland's conversion was not publicly declared, yet the rejection still came.

  What Dowland did next shaped the arc of his entire middle career. Rather than waiting in England, he returned to Europe, visiting the courts of the Duke of Brunswick and the Landgrave of Hesse in Germany, before travelling south through Italy, stopping in Padua, Venice, and Florence. He described these journeys himself, in a note to the reader at the opening of his First Book of Songs, published in 1597. That brief autobiographical aside is one of the few places where Dowland speaks in his own voice about the circumstances that drove his music.

• 3. Italy and the Edge of Treason

  ›

  In Florence, Dowland found himself inside a Catholic conspiracy. He had gone to Italy partly hoping to study with Luca Marenzio, a composer celebrated for his madrigals. What he encountered instead was a network of plotters who wanted him to work against the English crown.

  Dowland later recorded his account of this period in a letter to Sir Robert Cecil, the Queen's principal secretary. According to his own words, the conspirators offered him a substantial sum from the Pope, along with safe passage for his wife and children to join him on the Continent. He declined. He broke away from the plot and wrote to Cecil begging forgiveness, from both Cecil and the Queen herself.

  He also disclosed in that letter that the Queen had once said of him that he "was a man to serve any prince in the world," but that he "was an obstinate Papist." The remark stung. Dowland seems to have carried a genuine bitterness about it even as he remained loyal to her. The letter, written in 1593, later became the material Sting would read aloud across an entire album of Dowland songs, released on Deutsche Grammophon in October 2006, in collaboration with lutenist Edin Karamazov. That letter's combination of self-justification and heartfelt denial captures the peculiar position Dowland occupied: trusted enough by Cecil to perform espionage tasks, yet never fully trusted by the court he wanted most to serve.

• 4. Denmark's Highest-Paid Servant

  ›

  From 1598, Dowland worked at the court of Christian IV of Denmark. King Christian was deeply interested in music, and he paid accordingly. Dowland's annual salary was 500 daler, placing him among the highest-paid servants at the Danish court.

  Despite this, Dowland was not a model employee. He repeatedly overstayed his leave in England, where he continued publishing his music, and where his family remained. His wife never joined him in Denmark; the separation was long and apparently difficult. The arrangement suited Dowland's output, if not his domestic life. His Second Book of Songs appeared in London in 1600, followed by the Third and Last Booke of Songs or Aires in 1603, and then the Lachrimae collection in 1604, all while he was nominally serving abroad.

  King Christian eventually dismissed him in 1606. Dowland returned to England, and not until early 1612 did he finally secure the position he had spent decades seeking: a post as one of James I's lutenists. The irony was sharp. By the time the English court door opened, the productive flood of his career had largely run dry. His last published collection, A Pilgrimes Solace, appeared that same year, and scholar John Palmer later described it as arguably Dowland's best set, noting his absorption of the style of the Italian monodists.

• 5. Tears in Seven Pavanes

  ›

  "Flow my tears, fall from your springs, Exil'd for ever let me mourn" are the opening lines of the lute song that became the seed of Dowland's most ambitious instrumental work. He built the Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares, Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans from a musical theme drawn from that song. Published in 1604, the collection contains seven pavanes for five viols and lute, each a different emotional refraction of the same melodic material.

  The work became one of the best known collections of consort music of its era. The pavane "Lachrymae antiquae" drew particular attention in the 17th century, and composers arranged and varied it as a theme for decades afterward. The names of the seven pavanes in the Lachrimae collection read like a taxonomy of grief: Lachrimae Antiquae, Lachrimae Gementes, Lachrimae Tristes, Lachrimae Coactae, Lachrimae Amantis, Lachrimae Verae, and Lachrimae Antiquae Novae.

  The poet Richard Barnfield, writing in 1598 in a poem included in The Passionate Pilgrim, described Dowland's "heavenly touch upon the lute" as something that could "ravish human sense." Barnfield placed Dowland alongside Edmund Spenser as one of the two defining artistic voices of the age, the one commanding music, the other commanding poetry. That pairing, made by a contemporary, says something about how completely Dowland dominated his instrument in the minds of his listeners.

• 6. A Darkness Revived

  ›

  Frederick Keel was one of the first 20th-century musicians to bring Dowland back to a general audience. Keel included fifteen Dowland pieces in two sets of Elizabethan love songs, published in 1909 and 1913. These were free arrangements for piano and voice, shaped to the tastes of the art-song tradition of the time. They achieved genuine popularity.

  The early music revival later pursued a more historically grounded approach. In 1951, counter-tenor Alfred Deller recorded Dowland songs for HMV, and in 1977, Harmonia Mundi published two records of Deller singing Dowland's lute songs. Julian Bream and tenor Peter Pears also brought Dowland into the revival repertoire, along with Christopher Hogwood, David Munrow, and the Early Music Consort in the late 1960s, and later the Academy of Ancient Music from the early 1970s onward.

  Benjamin Britten, writing in 1963, drew on Dowland's "Come Heavy Sleepe, the Image of True Death" as the basis for his Nocturnal after John Dowland, composed for Bream. The piece unfolds through eight variations on themes from the song and its lute accompaniment, only arriving at a direct statement of the melody at the very end. Britten also wrote a set of variations for viola titled Lachrymae, based on Dowland's song "If my complaints"; that piece, too, withholds the source melody until the final bars.

  The 1999 ECM New Series recording In Darkness Let Me Dwell brought a different kind of interpretation: tenor John Potter, lutenist Stephen Stubbs, and baroque violinist Maya Homburger worked alongside English jazz musicians John Surman and Barry Guy. Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick referenced Dowland in multiple works, including his 1974 novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and even used the pseudonym "Jack Dowland" at least once. Nigel North recorded Dowland's complete works for solo lute on four CDs between 2004 and 2007 on Naxos, completing a body of documentation that Dowland himself began with a note to the reader in his First Book of Songs.