This guide is part of our overview of the essential classical guitar repertoire. John Dowland (c.1563–1626) was the greatest lutenist-composer of the English Renaissance — a musician whose melancholic genius produced some of the most beautiful and emotionally complex music of the sixteenth century, now enjoyed by classical guitarists worldwide.
Flow My Tears and the Lachrimae Tradition
Born in London or Ireland (the precise birthplace is uncertain), Dowland spent decades at European courts before eventually receiving the appointment he had long sought — lutenist to King James I of England — in 1612. His biography is marked by repeated disappointment and a melancholy that seems to have been both temperamental and cultivated. His output includes over 80 lute solos and a large body of songs for voice and lute — among the finest vocal music of the Elizabethan age.
His most famous work, Flow My Tears (published 1600 as a song, and widely circulated as the instrumental Lachrimae), became one of the most performed pieces in all of Europe in the early seventeenth century. Its characteristic descending four-note motif — representing falling tears — was quoted and elaborated by Sweelinck, Byrd, Frescobaldi, and dozens of other composers. The guitar has inherited the lute repertoire naturally: the instruments share a fretted neck, a similar range, and an expressive vocabulary of plucked polyphony. Dowland's fantasias, pavans, and galliards transfer to classical guitar with particular felicity, preserving their delicate counterpoint and emotional subtlety.
