Kära syster
"Kära Syster" | |
---|---|
Art song by Bellman, music reworked from Egidio Duni | |
English | Dear Sister |
Written | May 1770 |
Text | poem by Carl Michael Bellman |
Language | Swedish |
Published | 1790 in Fredman's Epistles |
Scoring | voice and cittern |
Kära Syster (Dear Sister) is No. 24 in the Swedish poet and performer Carl Michael Bellman's 1790 song collection, Fredman's Epistles. The epistle is subtitled "Till kära mor på Bruna Dörren" ("To dear mother at The Brown Door [Tavern]"); its themes are drinking and death. One of his best-known works, it is set to a tune extensively modified from one by Egidio Duni for Louis Anseaume's 1766 song-play La Clochette. Bellman's biographer, Carina Burman, calls it a central epistle.
This was the sixth epistle to be written, and the first not to be continuously cheerful. The narrator, Fredman, encounters the ferryman of the underworld, Charon, and the theme of death is repeated with the ticking of the watch that measures out Fredman the watchmaker's life. Fredman's world, here as in many later epistles, has two sides: one is drunkenness, dance, and love; the other is angst, hangovers, and a longing for death. Kära Syster has accordingly been called a central epistle. The borrowed melody has been adapted with as much work as creating a new one, implying to scholars that Bellman intended a humorous contrast between the familiar melody and the epistle's sombre theme.
Context
Song
Music and verse form
The epistle was written between March and May 1770.
The melody has been attributed to a duet, "A la fête du Village", from Egidio Duni's music for Louis Anseaume's 1766 song-play La Clochette, but the musicologist James Massengale states that while that timbre is not "incorrect", the epistle cannot be sung to that tune.[13] Massengale analyses the elaborate changes that Bellman made to the Anseaume-Duni melody, including splitting the music for Colinette's part of the song and placing it at the start and end of the epistle, certainly in his view a conscious reworking. He says that the changes must have cost "an enormous amount of labor ... not to mention the musical talent that was necessary to bring about such change successfully".[14] He notes that Bellman could well have seen the French production of La Clochette at Bollhuset which ran from 1767 to 1769, so there is no need to propose a Swedish variant of the melody for Bellman to have heard.[14]
Lyrics
The epistle is set in the Bruna Dörren tavern, which stood on Stockholm's Stadsgården wharf to the southeast of Gamla stan, the old town. The drunkard Fredman confronts his imminent death.
Carl Michael Bellman, 1790[1] | Eva Toller's prose[15] |
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Kära syster! |
Dear sister, |
Reception
The Bellman scholar
The scholar of Swedish literature, Carina Burman, writes in her biography of Bellman that Fredman's world has two sides: one is drunkenness, dance, and love; the other is angst, hangovers, and a longing for death. She calls Kära syster "a central epistle", stating that in 1770, Bellman must have been driven by his idea of Fredman, and wrote like a man possessed. The epistle, she writes, sees Fredman speculating about the world after his death, when he has been "embalmed by Bacchus", but even as a dead man he cannot imagine leaving his tavern, asking that when his ghost returns to the Bruna Dörren, the barmaids are not to be mean with his drink. She notes the paradoxes in all this: the real Fredman had already died, but was still flourishing in Bellman's imagined present-day Stockholm; while at the end of the epistle, the fictionalised Fredman is dying, but is begging for a drink (of brandy) so that he won't die of thirst.[18] She notes that in epistle 79, "Charon i Luren tutar", written 1785, Fredman again hears Charon calling, and there he says his farewell to the barmaids of another pub, Maja Myra's tavern on Solgränd off Stortorget in Stockholm's Gamla stan; "with one foot in Charon's boat, Fredman drains his last glass" – but it is not brandy but ale, and it runs down his clothes: before death, he is baptised in the almost magical fluid.[19]
The
The song has been recorded by Bellman interpreter Fred Åkerström on his 1969 album Fred sjunger Bellman, by the Dutch interpreter of Bellman Cornelis Vreeswijk on his 1971 studio album Spring mot Ulla, spring! Cornelis sjunger Bellman, and by the actor Mikael Samuelsson on his 1988 album Carl Michael Bellman.[21]
References
- ^ a b Bellman 1790.
- ^ Bellman Society. Archived from the originalon 10 August 2015. Retrieved 25 April 2015.
- ^ "Bellman in Mariefred". The Royal Palaces [of Sweden]. Archived from the original on 21 June 2022. Retrieved 19 September 2022.
- ISBN 978-0131369207.
- ^ Britten Austin 1967, pp. 60–61.
- ^ Britten Austin 1967, p. 39.
- ^ Britten Austin 1967, pp. 81–83, 108.
- ^ Britten Austin 1967, pp. 71–72 "In a tissue of dramatic antitheses—furious realism and graceful elegance, details of low-life and mythological embellishments, emotional immediacy and ironic detachment, humour and melancholy—the poet presents what might be called a fragmentary chronicle of the seedy fringe of Stockholm life in the 'sixties.".
- ^ Britten Austin 1967, p. 63.
- ^ "Epistel N:o 24". Bellman.net. Retrieved 9 December 2021.
- ^ Bellman 1790
- ^ Hassler & Dahl 1989, pp. 52–55.
- ^ Massengale 1979, pp. 166–168.
- ^ a b Massengale 1979, pp. 74–77.
- ^ Toller, Eva (2009). "Till kära mor på Bruna Dörren – Epistel Nr 24" (PDF). Eva Toller (translator). Retrieved 12 December 2021.
- ^ Lönnroth 2005, pp. 163–164.
- ^ Lönnroth 2005, pp. 164–165.
- ^ a b Burman 2019, pp. 167, 169.
- ^ Burman 2019, pp. 466–468.
- ^ Massengale 1979, pp. 78–79.
- ^ Hassler & Dahl 1989, pp. 276–285.
Sources
- Bellman, Carl Michael (1790). Fredmans epistlar. Stockholm: By Royal Privilege.
- ISBN 978-3-932759-00-0.
- ISBN 978-9100141790.
- Hassler, Göran; ISBN 91-7448-742-6. (contains the most popular epistles and songs, in Swedish, with sheet music)
- ISBN 91-7736-059-1. (with facsimiles of sheet music from first editions in 1790, 1791)
- OCLC 61881374.
- ISBN 91-554-0849-4.
External links
- Text of epistle 24 at Bellman.net