A Musical Menagerie - Chelys Consort of Viols and Fair Oriana
Translations with notes written by Alison Kinder
Welcome to our menagerie - we hope you will enjoy a guided tour through the various enclosures! We begin in the Insect Hotel, and with a composer who is celebrating his 400th anniversary this year. John Dowland was one of the Elizabethan age’s most prominent lutenists, and is perhaps best known for his Lachrimae published in 1604. The Lowest Trees Have Tops is a beautiful lute song, transcribed here for viols, which celebrates the significance of all things small - even the lowest trees have a top, even a tiny mouse has spleen, even a little spark has its heat - but the main message is that love is the same whether it is felt by a beggar or a king. The text of It Was a Time When Silly Bees Could Speak is by Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. The text laments a hard working bee, who put much time and effort into serving the hive, but ends up watching all other drones, wasps, gnats, and butterflies enjoy happiness while he alone is miserable. Perhaps a reference to the fact that Devereux himself spent his early court career very successfully building fortune and favour with Queen Elizabeth I, only ultimately to fall from grace, be tried for treason and executed. Meanwhile we hear from El Grillo (the cricket). There is a (possibly apocryphal) tale that Josquin wrote this piece to make fun of fellow singer Carlo Grillo, who frequently complained about not being paid on time!
El grillo è bon cantore
Che tiene longo verso.
Dale beve grillo canta.
Ma non fa como gli altri ocelli
Come li han cantato un poco,
Van de fatto in altro loco
Sempre el grillo sta pur saldo,
Quando la maggior el caldo
Alhor canta sol per amore.
The cricket is a good singer
He can sing very long
He sings all the time.
But he isn't like the other birds.
If they've sung a little bit
They go somewhere else
The cricket remains where he is
When the heat is very fierce
Then he sings only for love.
Next we visit the reptile house where we meet the serpent, courtesy of Italian composer Giovanelli, who worked at the Sistine Chapel:
Estote fortes in bello
et pugnate cum antiquo serpento
et accipietis regnum aeternum,
Alleluia.
Be valiant in war
and fight the ancient serpent
and you shall enter the everlasting kingdom.
Alleluia
Thomas Ravenscroft was probably a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral, and as a composer is best known for his three books of rounds, catches and ballads, the third of which, called ‘Melismata’, is where we meet our amorous Frog. The tale is much like that of the Owl and the Pussycat, where having agreed their marriage they have to decide who the celebrant will be, what they will eat etc. The end of this tale is rather less cheerful than the Owl and the Pussycat’s though…
Our menagerie is also home to creatures of a more mythical nature, and so Dering’s motet for the feast of St Michael introduces the dragon:
Factum est silentium in caelo,
Dum committeret bellum draco cum Michaele Archangelo.
Audita est vox millia millium dicentium:
Salus, honor et virtus omnipotenti Deo.
Millia millium minestrabant ei et decies centena millia assistebant ei.
There was silence in heaven
When the dragon fought with the Archangel Michael.
The voice of thousands of thousands was heard saying:
Salvation, honour and power be to almighty God.
Thousands of thousands ministered to him and ten hundreds of thousands stood before him.
Dering was an English composer, who like many of his Catholic compatriots deemed it prudent to live abroad for most of his life, in this case in the Netherlands, because of his faith. He wrote a set of fantasias for 5 viols and you will hear one this evening as a prelude to the dragon.
William Byrd wrote some of the most glorious and beautiful sacred music, and some of the highest quality viol consort music of all time, but he was clearly also a man of wit and humour. My Mistress Had A Little Dog tells the tragic tale of a dog who delighted his mistress with his acrobatic tumbling, chasing rabbits (‘conies’) - even the goddess Diana did not have such a delightful hound. But then, disaster, the little dog is killed, and a trial is called for with the suggestion that an appropriate punishment for the perpetrator would be Tyburn - i.e. execution. The song is believed to be a further satirical dig at the Earl of Essex, who went from being the ‘lapdog’ of Elizabeth I to having his head chopped off.
Heinrich Isaac was born in Flanders, but his working life saw him employed in Germany, Italy and Austria. This is relatively early polyphonic writing, and Isaac really developed the style. In Der Hund we hear him particularly playing with the idea of repeated sequences - the same musical idea repeated over and over in either ascending or descending pitch - an effective portrayal of hounds chasing round and round, up and down.
We finish the first half with two light hearted pieces - an arrangement of the dance tune Pegasus from Playford’s ‘English Dancing Master’, and a well-known madrigal about the shepherdess Phyllis.
The first bird in our aviary is a Robin - the term ‘ricercar’ literally means ‘to search out’, and here Thomas Simpson searches out the many possible ways of handling the folk tune Bonny Sweet Robin. Then in one of the more poignant moments in the programme, an avian choir lament the death of one of their singers and call on the other birds to join the chorus. This madrigal was published in ‘The Triumphs of Oriana’ in 1601, a collection in which all 25 madrigals end with the refrain ‘then sang the shepherds and nymphs of Diana, Long Live Fair Oriana’. The melancholy does not last long - next we meet Philip the sparrow, truly the most peerless sparrow in the land!
John Johnson was Elizabeth I’s lutenist and also a prolific composer for the theatre. The Baboons’ Dance is from ‘The Memorable Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn’, performed in 1613 on the marriage of Princess Elizabeth, daughter of King James I, to Frederick V, Elector Palatine in the Rhineland. Costumes, sets, and stage effects were designed by Inigo Jones - imagine what those baboons must have looked like! We follow this with a humorous madrigal about a meeting between three primates. The ape brags about his ability to ride a horse, the monkey claims to be more skilled at performing tricks, while the baboon believes that he is the most cunning of the three.
We couldn’t let an animal programme pass by without including an elephant, but it proved easier to find a mythical flying horse than a reference to an actual elephant! Fortunately, Camille Saint Saens and our very own Sam Stadlen came to the rescue…
The Elizabethan era was a golden age of exploration - Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe took place between 1577 and 1580. Weelkes’ madrigal Thule, the Period of Cosmography with its second part The Andalusian Merchant describes a voyage to the mythical island of Thule, and all of the natural wonders encountered on the way. The text is not actually about travel, it’s about how the amazing natural wonders being described are surpassed by the ‘yet more wondrous’ nature of human love.
On the occasion of the marriage of Ferdinand I de' Medici, Grand-Duke of Tuscany, with Christina of Lorraine, granddaughter of Catherine de' Medici, in 1589, a play called The Pilgrim Woman was performed. It included six musical interludes, the Intermedi de La Pellegrina, which were composed by six of the leading Florentine composers. Here we meet our dolphin:
Chi dal delfino aita, nelle tempeste sue cantand'impetra
E quel ch'al suon dicetra la perduta consorte trae de l'infernal porte
Non pero come noi canta suave che piu s'el ciel non have
Si dolce melodia ch'appo'l nostro cantar roco non sia
Who, singing, begs for help in his travails from the dolphin
And he who to the sound of his zither draws his lost consort from the eternal gates
Still does not sing as sweetly as we do, for if heaven does not have so sweet a melody
It is because in comparison our singing is less harsh
Our final stop is with the birds of prey, firstly to the slightly grisly and sad tale of The Three Ravens. This is from the same collection as the Frog and Mouse, but a very different character. The ravens in question are contemplating the body of a slain knight, and wondering whether he would make a good breakfast, but the knight has an assortment of loyal animal companions watching over him, one of whom lays down her life to bury him properly. Fortunately we end rather more cheerfully, with a charming depiction of an owl doing what owls do - hunting for mice, and going ‘tewit tewoo’!