Berit Norbakken and Solmund Nystabakk and Lawo has recently made a recording of John Dowland’s “The First Book of Love” and Morgenbladet’s reviewer Emil Bernhardt can’t hide his enthusiasm:
Not confusing the composer’s private thoughts and feelings with what is expressed in the music is a well-established principle for anyone involved in interpretation. It can be linked to a modern way of thinking, which ensures so-called aesthetic autonomy – the work works first and foremost on its own terms. An element of professionalism also comes into play: Mozart, for example, could easily, on the same evening that his mother died, scribble down a cheerful minuet.
But something is amiss here. Not because aesthetic autonomy has gone out of fashion – as if it were just something superficial, or because a professional distinction simply seems unlikely. Rather, because the relationship between the composers – their lives, history and the works they wrote – and us who hear them today is often more complex than a categorical demarcation suggests. In addition, this complexity is aesthetically interesting.
Life and art
A fascinating example is the English Renaissance composer and lute virtuoso John Dowland (1563–1626). When we listen to his First Booke of Songes and Ayres, published in 1597, as performed on a new, excellent disc with soprano Berit Norbakken and lutenist Solmund Nystabakk, it is striking how directly emotional this music works. Here I am not talking primarily about flashy effects and bold outbursts, but rather about a type of immediate genuineness in expression, a glow and authenticity in the sense of something personal, even subjective. The anonymous texts of Dowland’s songs are about hurt and pain, painful, unclear thoughts, but also about love, devotion and hope. They are lifted by a kind of half-humble, half-high-pitched melodic contour that feels both old and current. The expression is in a way as unpretentious – a voice with instrumental accompaniment – as it is alive.
If we follow a biographical interpretation, it is obvious to understand this in light of the gifted Dowland’s in many ways wandering life. It was filled with ambition and disappointment, from studies in France and Italy, to positions in Germany and Denmark, but always with the desire for a permanent position at the court in his homeland, something that would only become a reality late in life. This soreness could be reflected in the music. But of course it is not that simple. And as the musicians describe in the cover text, Dowland was also enterprising and strategic, not least with regard to the printing and distribution of his own compositions.
More generally, it is also interesting to study the cleverness with which Dowland stylizes the sorrowful through a kind of noble, “musicalized” melancholy, especially symbolized by the tear. In the First Booke in question, this complex, both burdensome and seemingly dignified psychological state is admittedly only hinted at, but in the later central instrumental work Lachrimae, or Seven Tears (1604), it is strongly present.
The roots of personality
Now the two musicians are perhaps wise to downplay this particular aspect, which is often brought up and can easily become a typical modern cliché in the discussion of this composer. In this sense, it is perhaps no coincidence that the relatively brief cover text mainly deals with the history of printing and instrumental technique. Nystabakk has also worked academically with the material, without this putting any damper on the engagement in the playing.
Rather, it is a striking, well-considered sobriety that characterizes the album, literally in Norbakken’s both effortless clarity and secure intonation, and Nystabakk’s clear, but never exaggerated lute playing. Where, given the simple form, not to mention the smoldering emotionality of the material, one could easily get lost in improvisational trivia, Norbakken and Nystabakk cultivate a sober, even unsentimental line, without there being any doubt at any point about their musical involvement. This maturity sharpens the tension between what becomes Dowland’s, historically speaking, distant sensibility, and the music’s equally glowing aesthetic presence. It may not be ruled out that here, admittedly complex and indirect, it rings with an element of personal life experience even for the old composer.
/Morgenbladet 19.06.2026/
Photo: Marius Fiskum