LITMIR.BIZ

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lowness, depth, and hell, leaving the heavenly register somewhat neglected.

      The supreme melancholic among English composers was the lutenist John Dowland. Like so many of his international colleagues, Dowland indulged in chromatic esoterica, but he also showed a songwriter’s flair for hummable phrases: his lute piece Lachrimae, or Tears, achieved hit status across Europe in the last years of the sixteenth century. When, in 1600, Dowland published his Second Book of Songs, he included a vocal version of Lachrimae, with words suitable for a Hamlet soliloquy:

       Flow my tears, fall from your springs,

       Exil’d forever let me mourn

       Where night’s black bird her sad infamy sings,

       There let me live forlorn.

      The first four notes of the melody have a familiar ring: they traverse the same intervals—whole tone, whole tone, semitone—that usher in Ockeghem’s “Fors seulement.” Underscoring the personal significance of the theme, Dowland made it the leitmotif of his 1604 cycle of pieces for viol consort, also titled Lachrimae.

      In Dowland’s instrumental masterpiece, no reason for the flow of tears is given, no biblical or literary motive. Music becomes self-sufficient, taking its own expressive power as its subject. Lachrimae could have been cited as an illustration in Robert Burton’s 1621 treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, which meditates on music’s capacity to conquer all human defenses: “Speaking without a mouth, it exercises domination over the soul, and carries it beyond itself, helps, elevates, extends it.” Music might inject melancholy into an otherwise happy temperament, Burton concedes, but it is a “pleasing melancholy.” That phrase encapsulates Dowland’s aesthetic. His forlorn songs have about them an air of luxury, as if sadness were a place of refuge far from the hurly-burly, a twilight realm where time stops for a while. The Lachrimae tune becomes, in a way, the anthem of the eternally lonely man. Indeed, as the musicologist Peter Holman points out, Dowland anticipated Burton’s thought in the preface to his collection: “No doubt pleasant are the tears which Musicke weepes.”

      It has long been understood that music has the ability to stir feelings for which we do not have a name. The neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel, in his book Music, Language, and the Brain, lays out myriad relationships between music and speech, and yet he allows that “musical sounds can evoke emotions that speech sounds cannot.” The dream of a private kingdom beyond the grasp of ordinary language seems to have been crucial for the process of self-fashioning that so preoccupied Renaissance intellectuals: through music, one could make an autonomous, unknowable self that stood apart from the order of things. In a wider sense, Dowland forecast the untrammeled emotionalism of the Romantic era, and even the moodier dropout anthems of the 1960s, the likes of “Nowhere Man” and “Desolation Row.” As Oscar Wilde wrote of Hamlet, “The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy.”

      OPERA

      In 1589, Ferdinando de’ Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany, married Christine of Lorraine. The duke had acquired his title two years earlier, after the sudden demise of his older brother, Francesco. Modern analysis has confirmed what rumor long held: Francesco died of arsenic poisoning. Against this suitably sinister backdrop the art of opera arose. For decades, Medici festivities had offered dramatic musical interludes within a larger theatrical presentation. These intermedi, as they were called, grew ever more extravagant as the century went on, serving, in the words of the poet Giovanni Battista Strozzi the Younger, to “stun the beholder with their grandeur.” The play accompanied the music rather than the other way around. The writers and composers of Florence eventually decided to let the music run continuously. It was a new kind of sung drama, modeled on the theater of ancient Greece.

      The first true opera was apparently Jacopo Peri’s Dafne, presented in Florence in 1598, with a text by Ottavio Rinuccini. Two years later, for another Medici wedding, Peri set Rinuccini’s Euridice, telling of the unhappy adventures of the poet and musician Orpheus. In a preface to the score, Peri announced the ascendancy of “a new manner of song,” through which grief and joy would speak forth with unusual immediacy. Peri’s chief rival, the singer-composer Giulio Caccini, wrote an opera on the same Euridice libretto not long after, and managed to get his version into print first. Claudio Monteverdi, an ambitious younger composer from Cremona, trumped them both with his five-act opera Orfeo, which had its premiere in 1607, at the court of the Gonzagas in Mantua, and which still holds the stage more than four centuries later.

      Without the lament, opera might never have caught fire. The story of Orpheus is little more than a string of lamentations: the bard bewails the loss of Euridice, goes down into the underworld to rescue her (his plaint wins Hades over), and then, with one ill-timed backward glance, loses her again. Both Euridice operas, despite their tacked-on happy endings, perform familiar gestures of musical weeping. Peri briefly applies the falling four-note figure to Orpheus’s words “Chi mi t’ha tolto, ohime” (“Who has torn you from me, alas”). There’s a noteworthy expansion of the motif in Caccini’s treatment of the same text. After Orpheus finishes his lament, a nymph and various other voices echo him, bemoaning “Cruel death.” Caccini’s version is slower and grander than Peri’s, making more deliberate use of repetition. Seven times the chorus sings the formula “Sospirate, aure celesti, / lagrimate, o selve, o campi” (“Sigh, heavenly breezes / Weep, o forests, o fields”), with four-note laments threaded through the voices. The spaciousness of the sequence seems essentially operatic.

      The next step was to back away from aristocratic refinement and incorporate elements of popular song and dance. Spain served as a primary source. Back in 1553, the viol player Diego Ortiz published a set of improvisations over a repeating bass line—a basso ostinato, or ground bass. The art of improvising on an ostinato went back centuries, although it had gone largely undocumented in notated music. When composers finally took hold of it, the effect was exhilarating, as if someone had switched on a rhythmic engine. Renaissance harmony in all its fullness was wedded to the dance. As Richard Taruskin observes, in his Oxford History of Western Music, this mammoth event—the birth of modern tonal language—was a revolution from below. A “great submerged iceberg” of unrecorded traditions, in Taruskin’s phrase, came into view, not least because publishers realized there was money in it.

      The chaconne was one such bass-driven dance. The first major composer to impose his personality on the form was the magisterial Italian organist Girolamo Frescobaldi, another beneficiary of the largesse of the dukes of Ferrara. In 1627, Frescobaldi published Partite sopra ciaccona, or Variations on the Chaconne, in which the popular formula is sent through the compositional wringer: the bass line breaks away from its mold, the rhythmic pulse speeds up and slows down, and the harmony darkens several times from major to minor, with a spooky dissonance piercing the texture just before the end. Frescobaldi also wrote Partite on a related ostinato dance, the passacaglia, holding to the minor mode until the very end. (Chaconnes were generally in major keys and passacaglias in minor ones, although composers enjoyed subverting the rule.) A decade later, Frescobaldi upped the ante with his Cento partite, a dazzling sequence of one hundred variations that includes both passacaglias and chaconnes. In the words of the scholar Alexander Silbiger, Cento partite is “a narrative of the flow and unpredictability of human experience.” It deserves comparison with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, and other consummate displays of compositional virtuosity.

      Monteverdi, the reigning Italian master, appropriated the chaconne at around the same time. Although he held the lofty title of maestro di cappella, or director of music, at the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, he never lost his ear for the music of the streets. A rocketing chaconne propels the 1632 duet Zefiro torna, on a Rinuccini text:

       Zephyr returns and blesses the air

       with his soft perfume, draws bare feet to the shore,

       and, murmuring among the green branches,

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