Dowland / Marco: Rota Fortunae: Musical Portraits In Tarot – Francesco Molmenti

The programme proposed here relates some characters of the Elizabethan era, as musically portrayed by the English lutenist John Dowland (1563-1626), with as many tarot cards, musically translated by composer Tomás Marco (b. 1942), from Madrid. On the one hand we have pieces referring to historical persons, about whom (at least in some cases) solid biographical sources exist; on the other, the faceless figures evoked by tarots, who (thanks to their symbolic value and their divinatory function) speak to us with a hermetic, arcane language, occasionally becoming enchanting and fairy-tale-like. The choice to link figures from the sixteenth-seventeenth century with tarot cards is entirely arbitrary. The juxtaposition derives from the underpinning of some biographical episodes, from the correspondence with the character of some pieces, and, sometimes, from purposeful misunderstandings.