On the other hand, eels and dill seem to suggest much more of a medieval and country poisoning than a refined, palatial and renaissance one. More in keeping with a lord whose estate (which is enumerated throughout the song) includes houses, fields, cows and horses instead of castles, fabrics, ships and money. Lord Rendall’s wealth is feudal and his place the English countryside, with its small streams (the same ones Graham Swift describes in Waterland) full of eels.
Melancholy
The English composers of the Elizabethan period were specialists in sorrow. There are songs, such as Sorrow, Stay or Flow My Tears (or its derivation, the great Lachrimae or Seven Tears figured in seven Passionate Pavans), by John Dowland (who suffered from chronic depression) that are true masterpieces of melancholy –the mother of all the diseases for medieval science. The tradition came from earlier on and goes on to the present, to the song in which the child in Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw sings the word “bad”, to Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles and probably to new British rock bands such as Radiohead or Blur. In fact, another Beatles’ song, She’s Leaving Home, took one of the preferred forms of this difficult art and used it to perfection: the three-movement dance (originally a galliard), apparently frivolous, but plagued with sorrow. In contrast to the dance, the harsh, distant description free of adjectives (Picks up the letter that’s lying there / Standing alone at the tops of the stairs / She breaks down and cries to her husband / Daddy our baby’s gone), causes the same effect as the words of the last verse Can she excuse my wrongs with virtue’s cloak? (Better a thousand times to die, / Then for to live thus still tormented), written in an unsuccessful attempt to plead mercy from Queen Elizabeth I for the insubordinate Duke of Essex, who was executed a few days later. The music is clearly a galliard and there is even an instrumental version called The Earl of Essex galliard. The trio sung by Lucia, Bianca and the Female Chorus (a role sung by a lone soprano), in act one of Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera The Rape of Lucretia, also runs along similar lines.
Lord Rendall magnificently sums up the best of this tradition. Many artists in England and the United States have interpreted it. Martin Carthy recorded two very interesting versions, one a cappella (in “Because it’s There”, released by Topic Records) and the other accompanied by steel-string guitar (in “Shearwater”, on Mooncrest Records). Andreas Scholl, an extraordinary countertenor combining the high notes of a mezzo-soprano with a completely masculine vocal colour, has recently included it in his CD titled “English Folksongs and Lute Songs” (harmonia mundi). This performer, who formed part of a children’s choir and began singing in falsetto without realising it as his voice changed, alternates a series of folksongs (Lord Randall, The Three Ravens –which was performed by Peter, Paul and Mary, among others–, Waly, Waly, I will Give my Love an Apple and Barbara Allen, also sung by numerous popular artists including Joan Baez) with works by John Dowland and Thomas Campion. He is accompanied by the lutenist Andreas Martin (with a ten-string instrument, a replica of an original English lute from the seventeenth century, constructed by Andreas Von Holst). Their performances are masterly.
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