Contributions
The greatest lutenist-composer of his age, Dowland raised the ayre for voice and lute to a major art. His collections — the First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1597), an unprecedented publishing triumph, followed by two further books and A Pilgrimes Solace (1612) — spread across all of Europe an English way of blending sung melody, lute tablature and a rare precision of feeling. His instrumental masterpiece, Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares (1604), lines up seven pavans built on the falling motif of his song "Flow, my tears," a tearful meditation that became the international hit of the Renaissance, quoted and imitated from one end of the continent to the other. A sought-after virtuoso, Dowland made a long career abroad: with the Duke of Brunswick and the Landgrave of Hesse, in Italy (Padua, Venice, Florence), then at the lavish court of Christian IV of Denmark (1598-1606), where he was richly paid. At last, in 1612, he secured the post of one of the King's Lutes to James I.
Significance
Dowland brought the lute ayre to perfection — that intimate genre in which a single voice and instrument suffice to voice a whole inner life — and made it the vehicle of a new emotion: melancholy, the fashionable humour of Elizabethan England, which he raised into a veritable artistic identity under his Latin motto. His fame was European, a rare thing for an English musician: "Flow, my tears" circulated, transformed, seeped into the works of other composers, making him one of the first Englishmen whose art radiated beyond the Channel. A shadow lies over his fate: a Catholic, he long failed to win the court post he coveted in England, and blamed that rejection on his faith; he roamed Europe in search of recognition, admired everywhere but, for years, at home. From that very frustration may have come the depth of his music: no one sang of sorrow, exile and the dark night of the soul with such beauty. His influence on English song, and his enduring aura down to modern rediscoveries, make him a singular figure of the Renaissance.
Influence
He set the model of the lute ayre followed by the English lutenist-songwriters of the early seventeenth century. "Flow, my tears"/Lachrimae became an international motif taken up and varied by many composers across Europe; his glory, long eclipsed, inspired a vast twentieth-century revival of early music. He himself absorbed the art of the continental lutenists and madrigalists he met in Germany, Italy and Denmark, and the polyphonic learning of his English elders, while the Elizabethan cult of melancholy directly fed his aesthetic and his famous persona of the "ever-doleful" musician.
Anecdote
In November 1595, from Nuremberg, Dowland wrote to Robert Cecil, Elizabeth's great minister, a letter in which all his contradictions surface: he confesses Catholic sympathies, protests his absolute loyalty to the queen, reports having heard English exiles plotting against her and names those involved, all while bitterly lamenting that he had been denied a court post because of his religion. Loyal and suspect, adored abroad and rebuffed at home, England's greatest lutenist shows himself here entire: a divided man.