Fantasies of Greatness

In English, GOAT has become a popular abbreviation meaning the Greatest of All Time. (There’s been a lot of it during the World Cup this summer). Sixteenth-century musicians liked playing this game too, not only on behalf of themselves but on behalf of their instruments. They used it cleverly in order to bring their music to their contemporaries’ attention. And – through their published works – to ours. John Dowland (whose 400th anniversary we celebrate this year) and Tobias Hume both engaged in publicity-seeking controversy over which instrument, the lute or the viol, was the greatest: the best suited to express all the passion and complexity of the human soul.

Here is Dowland, writing in the Preface to his final great song collection, A Pilgrim’s Solace, in 1612. He accuses his lute colleagues of being so obsessed with their own petty rivalries that they have missed a bigger threat: “being that here under their own noses hath been Publish’d a book in defence of the Viol da Gamba, wherein not only all other the best and Principall Instruments have been abased, but especially the Lute by name”.

He goes on scornfully to quote the words of Captain Tobias Hume, written in 1605 in his First Part of Ayres, or Musical Humours “From henceforth the statefull instrument Gambo Violl, shall with ease yield full various and deviceful Musicke as the Lute”, The word-for word accuracy of Dowland’s quotation betrays the amount of time he must have spent studying his rival’s work. They even aspired to please the same patron: Hume wrote to Queen Anne of Denmark in 1607 “I humbly beseech your Maiestie, not to esteeme my Songs unmusicall, because my Fortune is out of tune…”. Dowland also had high hopes of the new Queen, who came to England with her husband King James I in 1603: he dedicated his monumental 1604 collection for viols and lute, Lachrime, to her. On the title page he too laments his fortune “Aut Furit, aut Lachrimat, quem non Fortuna beavit” (“he whom Fortune has not blessed either rages or weeps”). This was not the most tactful way to describe his recent career as lutenist to Chirstian IV of Denmark, Anne’s brother: he served at Elsinore from 1598 to 1608, when he was dismissed for persistent absences and other unruly behaviours. Even the GOATs are dependent on their patrons, a point Dowland never seemed to learn. Hume did receive 100 shillings for his trouble.

We begin this exploration of the two composers with Dowland’s signature song Flow my Tears, in which he sets out his melancholy stall. His identity may have been more complicated than the one he presented in music: Thomas Fuller would later describe him as a “cheerful person” who passed his days in “lawful merriment”. Dowland’s imagination transformed folk songs as well as serious madrigals: A Fancy takes its theme from the popular tune “All in a Garden Green”. Hume, a professional soldier, described music as his “the most effeminate part of me”, playing on gender identity by conjuring the King of Denmark – as did Dowland – as a character full of masculine swagger. Melancholy and its cousin, nostalgia, inform the character of the next section: in Weep you no more, Sad Fountains, the singer addresses her own eyes with a kind of rapture, seated next to her sleeping lover. Me, me and none but me pursues this solipsistic enjoyment of melancholy. As in the famous madrigal by Orlando Gibbons, the Silver Swan, the song evokes the swan who finds her voice only once, singing her way towards a beautiful death. Semper Dowland Semper Dolens is another self-fashioning Latin motto to remind us that Dowland was always mournful, in case anyone should forget. This and the Passion of Musick pit the darker explorations and fancies of both composers against each other.

Hume did his politics on the battlefield, soldiering in Russia and Sweden. Dowland risked his life and career in a different way, skirting around Catholicism in his youth, and eventually finding the congenial job he had craved in working for the powerful Howard family who secured him access, finally, to the court, of James I. Both were unusual in their broad European experience, influence and outlook which enabled their music to travel widely. In some ways Dowland’s reputation was more the “GOAT” in Germany, France and Italy where collectors eagerly reprinted his works. At home he tended to sabotage his own advancement by siding with problematic figures like the disgraced favourite the Earl of Essex (author of the complaining text of Can she excuse my Wrongs?). He immortalised the unpopular Duke of Alençon, whose unsuccessful suit of the Queen was mocked in the Frog Galliard (Elizabeth called Alençon her “little Frog”). Dowland casts this as the beautiful adieu of a dignified, disappointed lover. But the tune of the Frog, and the rather cruel English ridicule, underpins the music. Loth to Depart contains another satirical reference, this time to Essex who did not take his exile from the court well, and whose doomed attempt to mount a coup against the Queen would cost him his head. Hume’s Love’s Farewell is less conflicted in its lovely exploration of sadness and loss: no gritty political disappointment here.

In war and football, being a winner meant creating a loser. Lovers of the viol and the lute didn’t see it that way, and both flourished in the hands of these two virtuosi.

Elizabeth Kenny