Poetry
Fredmans epistlar
Not translated into English
Carl Michael Bellman · 1790
Synopsis
Eighty-two songs, written over twenty years and gathered in one book. Their narrator is Jean Fredman, a fallen watchmaker and drunkard, who was a real man of Stockholm. Around him is a troupe: Father Berg and his violin, Corporal Mollberg, Ulla Winblad, the old woman of the tavern and her daughters. We pass from the pastoral peopled with ancient gods to the lament of brandy, from the tavern scene to what looks like an improvisation. In the twenty-third, Fredman wakes up in the gutter.
Context
The collection appeared in 1790 from Olof Åhlström, with royal privilege, in three hundred and ninety-one pages, although the pieces had been written since 1768; a companion volume of sixty-five songs followed the next year. The poet Johan Henrik Kellgren revised the texts and supplied the preface, in which he writes that the work had no model and can have no successor. Each piece is sung to a melody, often borrowed from a French opera or from a tune then in circulation. The thirty-third, in which the author imitates a whole crowd single-handedly in four languages, is held to be the truest portrait of Stockholm that Swedish letters have produced.
Who it is for
A book of poems in eighteenth-century Swedish, with no French translation. It can be approached through recordings: several Swedish singers of the last century recorded most of it.
Prizes and reception
The work that founded the learned song in Sweden, and one of the few books whose pieces are still sung two and a half centuries later.