John Dowland’s Lute and Holbein’s The Ambassadors

In Holbein’s painting a brilliantly foreshortened lute. One string is broken, hinting at the discord between Catholic and Protestant faiths. Five million would die in those wars. A generation later, the Catholic John Dowland, the most famous lutenist in history, could not get a job in Queen Elizabeth’s court. When I was a young man like Dowland, I played his music on guitar in restaurants for 25 dollars a night. Background music for the rich like “Queen Elizabeth’s Galliard” and “Lady Hundson’s Puffe.” More complex works like Dowland’s “Fantasia #7,” his melancholy “Lachrimae.” Music of invention, polyphony, and the strong beats of dance. How many in the restaurant, in those Renaissance courts, know they are witnessing the birth of instrumental music?

I imagine a party in a Renaissance middle-class home. Neighbors open a book to one of Dowland’s songs: “Come again, Sweet love.” I finger a lute, the most popular instrument of the day. Others sing together in ascending notes: “To see, to touch, to die.” (In Renaissance poetry and song, death means the little death, orgasm.) A skull lies beneath the lute in Holbein’s painting. It’s an unrecognizably, weirdly stretched-out lute shape that only becomes a skull when viewed from the far-right hand side. Death Love Lute Catholic Sex Melancholy Dowland improvises often while responding to his environment of bodies, voices, dances, streets . . .  He writes some of it down, passes it around in manuscripts. If you hear it today, or try to play it, it should sound free, spontaneous. Not practiced, rehearsed, as I once played it. That’s how one should learn to play Dowland. That’s how one should learn “to see, to touch, to die.”

To hear John Dowland’s Lachrimae for Solo Lute, click here. Lutenist is Tuomas Kourula.

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