JAVS Fall 1997

So much for the "... Song of Dowland." What did Britten mean by "Reflections ... "? Obviously he was more comfortable with that term than with variations, which Primrose rightly under stood as the form of the work. Like the term Bach used for his work based on the chorale "Von Himmel hoch':.._Veranderungen (changes)- Britten's word reflections frees the minds of composer and listener alike from expectations associated with variations and from the hun dreds of years of history attached to that term. Then, too, reflections allows for an element of fancy, even fantasy, that Britten must have found essential to his creative enterprise. Britten's musical language, while generally regarded as quite conservative when contrasted with that of the avant-garde of his day, was, after all, not Dowland's. This was not the only time Britten employed such an unusual term to describe a set of varia tions. Ten years before Lachrymae he had com posed a work consisting of ten variations titled Diversions for Pianoforte (Left Hand) and Orches-

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tra, opus 21. Thirteen years after Lachrymae he composed Nocturnal after john Dowland, opus 70, for guitar, a work subtitled "Reflections on 'Come, Heavy Sleep.' " 8 Nocturnal is almost a double of Lachrymae in the choice of a Dowland song as a theme for variations, the treatment of the theme, and, of course, the choice of descriptive term in the subtitle. Nor does Lachrymae represent the first time Dowland's melodies have been the object of variations. The melody of "If My Complaints," for example, had already been set by a contem porary of Dowland's in a manner he would surely have recognized. William Corkine's setting for lyra viol is a minor classic in the art of writing divisions, the sixteenth-century English term for ornamental variations (See page 34 of this issue for the Corkine setting). 9 Each strain of the original melody appears in harmonized form, followed by a division. While a fine setting of the melody-and incidentally a good programming companion to the Britten work Corkine's piece covers no new ground, merely notating a performance practice that was common in his day and that has perished only for want of notation in a thousand other instances. Britten's setting, on the other hand, reflects his own musical language and his own aesthetic concerns. It covers the full range of his creative response to Dowland's melody, eschewing any limitations that might be imposed by strict adherence to the stylistic or historical context of the original. Britten would be limited neither by Dowland's notes nor by the latter's "place in history.'' Instead, Dowland's music would serve as the raw material from which Britten would craft his edifice. And what would it matter-save as a historical curiosity-who had made the material from which it was formed? This attitude is evident from the first appearance of Dowland's melody: Britten would be limited not even by its dimensions. Something the length of a theme is needed, but only the first strain of "If My Complaints" is heard, and even this lazily trails off on repetition in an aug mented version of motive y at the beginning of the second phrase. Indeed, this first strain of Dowland's song provides all the material Britten uses until close to the end of Lachrymae. This