John Dowland, as with many English musicians and courtiers of his time, enjoyed Italian music, and even may have known some of the language. The Elizabethan craze for Italian madrigals of Marenzio and Gastoldi helped found and nurture the new genre of the English madrigal in the late sixteenth century; in the seventeenth, both fads were passing, but still well-known; and nearly every English composer save Byrd flirted with Italian music. It should come as little surprise, therefore, to find Dowland setting an Italian text among his eminently English lute songs; one might even expect him to have worked with Italian more often.

Dowland's Lasso vita mia, mi fa morire sets a completely uninspired Italian verse in a number of clever and novel ways. The text itself rehashes conventions of the poet suffering—thousands and thousands of times a day—under the wounds of cruel love, to the point that he or she hopes to die. Some aspects of Dowland's musical setting, as well, borrow well-known conventions inherited from the Italian madrigalists: chromatic motions on the word "cruel," repeated short notes on the "thousands, thousands," extended pitches and other chromatic notes to heighten the "wound," and plangently sighing downward half-steps on the cry of anguish "Oihme." Yet at the same time, the composer couches these conventions in a novel musical texture—voice, continuo, and a fully independent obbligato viol part, which participates in the affect by inserting its own chromaticisms and suspensions against the voice.

In addition, Dowland includes a complete musical undertext related to "solmization" syllables. Any musician of this time would have learned to sing using syllables such as re mi fa sol la. And right at the opening of the song, Dowland makes a musical pun of his text by placing certain syllables on their "correct" notes: LAs-SO vi-ta MI-a, MI FA mo-ri-RE. And in case the musician or erudite listener of the time didn't get the joke, he repeats the same text, transposing the correct notes upward in the same places, and even juxtaposes two radically different "mi-fa" halfsteps on two successive iterations of those words. Six more times over the course of the song, he uses the text mi fa in some way, and always they fall on a different set of notes, but ones the singer would use just those syllables to solmize. If it weren't a lament, it would be downright funny.

© All Music Guide