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The Queen's Goodnight
Charivari Agréable Susanne Heinrich - Treble, Tenor and Bass Viols
Programme Her Majesty lay upon her back, with one hand in the bed and the other without. The bishop kneeled down by her, and examined her first of her faith: and she so punctually answered all his several questions by lifting up her eyes and holding up her hand, as it was a comfort to all beholders. Then the good man told her plainly, what she was and what she was to come to, and though she had been long a great Queen here upon earth, yet shortly she was to yield an account of her stewardship to the King of Kings. After this he began to pray ... with earnest cries to God for her soul’s health, which he uttered with that fervency of spirits as the Queen, to all our sight, much rejoiced thereat, and gave testimony to us all of her Christian and comfortable end ... Between one and two of the clock on Thursday morning, he ... brought me word the Queen was dead. Thus wrote the Queen’s cousin Sir Robert Carey, recording in his memoirs the events of March 23rd-24th 1603, and the end of an era in England’s history. Elizabeth, last sovereign of the House of Tudor, had ruled England for 45 years, and under her ‘stewardship’ the country had developed from a provincial backwater on the fringes of Europe to a noted naval power with a glittering court and thriving cultural life. For Elizabeth, ever mindful of her gender and her politically precarious unmarried state, her court was an important safeguard against insurrection in her realm. Attendance at court was a prerequisite for royal favour, and any aristocrat so constrained was unlikely to be able to nurture any personal military or political power on their home estates. Furthermore, favoured courtiers were periodically required to play host to the Queen and her enormous entourage, and more than one stately home was hastily extended to accommodate this peripatetic court. The ruinous expense weighed heavily upon many a nobleman’s purse, a further effective check upon incipient political ambitions. With such a tight circle of ambitious aristocrats dancing attendance upon a multi-lingual, highly educated and musical queen, it was almost inevitable that this court should become a focus for the arts, and music and literature in particular flourished under Elizabeth. The Queen’s professional musical establishment was more modest than that of her father Henry VIII, but brought together the finest talent in the land and created repertories of consort, lute and keyboard music still renowned today. We have tried to show representative facets of this wonderful repertory in the first part of our programme. Surprisingly few instrumental works were expressly dedicated to the Queen. A Dump or The Queenes Treble, by the leading Elizabethan lutenist John Johnson, consists of a virtuosic treble line (originally for lute) over a repeating chord sequence. Johnson was one of the ‘Musicians for the Three Lutes’ and this piece probably formed part of the repertory he and his colleagues played to the Queen. When Johnson died in 1594 John Dowland, the most famous lutenist of the age, applied unsuccessfully for his post. The cryptic title of Dowland’s pavan Solus cum sola (‘the male and the female alone together’) is a quotation from Terence’s The Eunuch, well-known in Elizabethan England, and comes from a scene where a lover gains illicit access to a girl by exchanging clothes with the eunuch appointed to care for her. One wonders if the story had personal resonances for the original dedicatee! Dowland’s biographer Diana Poulton has suggested that the phrase refers to the mystic philosopher Plotinus’s concept of ‘a flight of the alone to the Alone’, but if so the reference is a subtle one indeed, for in Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation of the original Greek the phrase reads ‘solius ad solum’. The poignant ballad tune Robin was a favourite of the period, and Ophelia quotes a fragment of its otherwise lost text in Hamlet: ‘for bonny sweet Robin is all my joy’. It may have had resonances with the Queen and her courtiers: Sir Walter Ralegh wrote to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in 1586, telling him ‘The queen is in very good tearms with yow, and ... yow are agayne her ‘Sweete Robyn’. Johnson’s Medley exists in both lute and keyboard versions, ascribed to John and Edward Johnson respectively. The latter offered ‘Jhonsons Medley’ as a B.Mus examination piece at Cambridge in 1594, though the work is mentioned in Munday’s Banquet of Daintie Conceyts in 1588. Shorn of its divisions it has a lute concordance in Matthäus Waissel’s Tabulatura (Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, 1591), and the English versions preserve the conspicuously continental and somewhat archaic suite-like form, with pavan-galliard-saltarello sections marked by changes of meter. This is distinctly unusual, for continental pieces are not common in Elizabethan sources. We perform the piece as a lute-virginals duet, a pairing often seen in paintings and which we hope would have appealed to Elizabeth, who was a noted executant on both instruments. Allison’s Knell has been adapted from the most striking of Elizabethan ensembles, the broken consort. The main melody instruments in this consort are treble viol and lute, and we have retained these parts and added some further divisions for the viol. The organ provides the remaining melodic lines, originally on flute and bass viol, together with the harmonies which would have been supplied by cittern and bandora. The lute and viol exchange bell-like phrases, and there are further change-ringing motifs buried within the texture. The ‘Dump’ was a popular genre of the day, and was a piece built over a repeating chord sequence, usually a very simple one. A Dump or The Queenes Treble uses three chords; the anonymous Artheres Dump uses only alternating chords of C and G, and is probably the earliest piece in our programme. Both dumps sound strikingly modern, largely because their trademark figurations and simple harmonic foundations are still a feature of the folk music tradition. Thomas Robinson’s Schoole of Musicke was printed in 1603, perfectly timed to commemorate the Queen’s passing with his poignant settings of Twenty Waies upon the Bels and The Queen’s good Night, originally for two lutes. Both the ‘Bell’ ground and the ‘Goodnight’ ground were popular basses upon which to improvise divisions. Dowland’s commemorative galliard dedicated to ‘The most Sacred Queen Elizabeth’ is a reworking of an earlier work originally called ‘K[atherine] Darcyes Galliard’, and retitled for publication in 1610. The transparent simplicity of Farnaby’s Rest recalls Carey’s almost comforting description of the Queen’s death. However, Tobias Hume’s extended and heartfelt Lamentations express the sadness her contemporaries surely felt, with a more typical display of Elizabethan melancholia. Bells—‘the poor man’s only music’—marked all the significant events in a person’s life, including state occasions of course, and with the veritable carillon of William Byrd’s Bells we welcome King James VI of Scotland to the English throne. Tobias Hume supplies a final lingering farewell for Elizabeth and her age in his reflective fantasia on Deth with its haunting refrain, but leaves us with an altogether more confident and optimistic glimpse of Life. Coronations are occasions for lavish music-making: we mark the event with a magisterial organ fantasia by Orlando Gibbons, one of the most favoured keyboard players at James’s court, who eventually became organist of both the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey. Among the new musical fashions fostered at the Jacobean court was the technique of playing the viol ‘lyra way’. We have already encountered the lyra viol music of Tobias Hume, which uses the regular viol tuning, but his contemporary William Corkine obtains a very different effect in his variations on the folk tune Whoope, doe me no harme, goode man by using a very wide scordatura tuning known as ‘Fifths’ or ‘Alfonso Way’ (in our case G’ D G d g c’). Here we have created a duet by conflating Corkine's viol solo and Gibbons’ variations on the same tune for keyboard. Most of the significant Jacobean musical developments happened in the households of the music-loving princes Henry and Charles, for their father’s chief passion was hunting, not music. John Johnson’s The New Hunt is Upp could hardly be more fittingly titled, and we close our programme with another musical hunt, this time representative of the Celtic music which followed the Stuart monarch south and begins to appear in English manuscripts after James’s accession. The Scottish Huntsupe is an anonymous Jacobean lutenist’s startling attempt to imitate the skirl of the pipes at a ceilidh: the thematically related Jigg is a keyboard version of the same. Lynda Sayce, 2002 |
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