JOHN DOWLAND
When John Dowland, the lutenist and composer, grew up in Elizabethan England, the threat of foreign invasion had been removed by the routing of the Spanish Armada. It would not be renewed until the early nineteenth century, with Napoleon, and the mid-twentieth century, with Hitler. In the interim, national security was in safe hands, thanks to the strength of the British Navy. But in an earlier time, there had been no such protection from attack. Intermittently, the inhabitants had to face various assaults from continental Europe. First came the Romans, subduing the whole country up to the Scottish border, but eventually departing when their Empire collapsed. Later, waves of Angles and Saxons arrived, pushing most of the indigenous Celts out of England into Wales, but not significantly displacing the Celts of Scotland and Cornwall. Later still, Danish raiders not only pillaged several coastal areas, but also settled in so extensively that for a while there was a joint Anglo-Danish kingdom. Finally, in the eleventh century there was the Norman conquest: it reduced the Anglo-Saxon majority to the level of a subject race, but in time the Normans were absorbed into the general population; and there then emerged what came to be known as the English people, a mongrel species of mixed strains, Celtic, Teutonic, Scandinavian, and Norman-French, gradually homogenized. Eventually, despite their diverse origins, the English acquired a sense of themselves as one nation, proudly different from others, safe in their island fortress, and insular in attitude.
Occasionally, the shoe was on the other foot. English kings, laying claim to ancestral lands, invaded France, with temporary but not lasting success. These military adventures were rooted in dynastic ambition, but they tapped into, and enhanced, a kind of patriotism that degenerated over many years, into a supercilious arrogance in the populace at large: not everyone was so coarse as to refer to the Italians and the French as Wops and Froggies, or the Jews as Kikes; but almost everyone felt superior, though only employing subtler forms of condescension.
Nevertheless, there did exist, at the same time, a curiously ambivalent attitude in England towards the Continent. Prior to the Reformation, England had been an integral part of Roman Catholic Europe. Christianity was a unifying culture, Latin was the international language, and travelling clerics made light of frontiers. Even after the Reformation, a feeling of connection remained, at least among the educated. Especially was this true of those English who remained loyal to Rome: some of them emigrated; others remained, enduring the persecution, which was long-lasting in some degree, but notably vicious under Queen Elizabeth.
When Dowland left England, in 1594, it was for musical reasons, not religious ones. He had hoped to be appointed court lutenist, and the hope was reasonable, for he was the foremost lute virtuoso in the country — and he knew it. However, the appointment went to someone else. He was much disgruntled, and went to Germany, where professional employment awaited him commensurate with his talent. He also went to Italy, expressly to meet Marenzio, whose chromatic experimentation made him a kindred spirit. Earlier he had converted to Roman Catholicism. Yet this did not prove to be a serious handicap after his return, for he did not flaunt his faith: open recusants were subjected to fines or imprisonment, but there is no record of his being punished — for many, discretion was the better part of valour.
Professionally, religion did not create a dilemma for Dowland. His great contemporary, William Byrd, was primarily a composer of church music. He composed magnificent Anglican music for the Chapel Royal. But he was, discreetly, a Roman Catholic, and the equally magnificent music he composed for his co-religionists had to be clandestinely performed. Dowland, by contrast, was in no such difficulty, for by talent and inclination he wrote instrumental music for lute, and secular songs.
His output was fairly large, but not enormous like Byrd’s or Palestrina’s. And it was oddly spotty. That is, between bouts of creativity there were periods of no productivity at all. This artistic seesawing seems to have gone in tandem with a certain inconsistency in his emotional make-up. For his contemporaries give conflicting accounts of his character: some speak of him as cheerful, and as what would nowadays be called extroverted; to others he seemed both melancholic and sour. These judgments are mirrored in his work: some of his songs are effervescent and lively; others are profoundly sad. There is not enough evidence to suggest a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. But it is probably safe to assume that he suffered from clinical depression. The important thing, though, is the quality of what he produced when he did produce. His most famous piece, “In darkness let me dwell”, with its anguished line and poignant discords, may be a record of deep inner pain, but it is also one of the finest art-songs ever written.
Dowland’s career did eventually receive the long overdue recognition it deserved, when he was appointed to an official post at the court of King James I. But before this, once again disappointed, he had left England again, this time to work for King Christian of Denmark. It is not certainly known whether he composed any songs to Danish texts during his eight years there. But it is reasonable to surmise that he learnt to speak Danish. If he did, this will have stood him in good stead when he returned to England and was rewarded with a royal appointment. The Queen was Anne of Denmark, and the chance to converse occasionally in her mother tongue would be a welcome pleasure in her otherwise miserable existence — in James, she was married to a monarch who not only was, in public, a pusillanimous and crafty ruler in cahoots with the Spanish Ambassador, but in private was a corrupt, manipulative sadist; and although he did his dynastic duty and sired two sons, he was far more interested in handsome young men than in his wife. She probably looked back on her youth in Copenhagen with frustrated longing.
Under James, Roman Catholics like Dowland continued to be oppressed. Some plotted against the government and were summarily executed. Others, prudently, kept a low profile. Their predicament, whether actively resistant or numbly patient, calls to mind a similar but non-religious predicament in Denmark, many years later, when Hitler invaded the country. Patriotic Danes unanimously resented the occupation — no Quisling came forward to serve as a Nazi puppet. The citizens, for the most part, endured the German presence with sullen fortitude, refusing as best they could to co-operate with the alien authorities. But some people, both men and women, formed a determined underground resistance, devoted to sabotage and to secret transmission of strategic information to Britain.
One of the staunch supporters of the resistance movement was the star tenor of Danish music, Aksel Schiøtz. He had begun adult life as a schoolteacher, only singing as an amateur. In the late nineteen-thirties, he turned professional and quickly rose to the top, specializing in Mozart and Lieder. During the occupation, as a form of protest, he refused to sing in public, and returned to teaching to earn his living. But on the side, and at considerable risk, he gave song-recitals to clandestine gatherings of resistance workers.
The Germans were not very successful at hunting down members of the resistance, and none were ever betrayed by their fellow-activists. A few were caught, from time to time; and they were tortured in the hope of extracting the names and plans of their friends. None of them gave anyone up. In this, they resembled Dowland’s contemporary, Father Edmund Campion, who was mercilessly tortured by Elizabeth’s bullies, but refused to divulge the names or whereabouts of his fellow-Jesuits. Stubborn to the death, he was then barbarously executed. And similarly stubborn Danes were likewise murdered by the Germans. Their bodies were then handed over to their families for burial in their home parishes, not for any humanitarian reason, but to impress on any like-minded citizen the consequences of disobedience to the Third Reich.
On the day of each such funeral, a lonely figure could be seen bicycling along the back roads of Denmark’s flat countryside, a harmless-looking citizen of nondescript appearance and modest bearing, whose papers were all in order, and who had a plausible story about visiting a sick relative in the town or village he was heading for. It was Aksel Schiøtz, taking a day off school, to go to the funeral. Arriving there, he stood respectfully and bare-headed at the graveside with the family. Then as the coffin was lowered into the ground, he lifted up his golden voice and sang the Danish national anthem.
Of such stuff are heroes made.
