Carl Michael Bellman
Carl Michael Bellman was a Swedish songwriter, composer, musician, poet, and entertainer. He is a central figure in the Swedish song tradition and remains a powerful influence in Swedish music, as well as in Scandinavian literature, to this day. He has been compared to Shakespeare, Beethoven, Mozart, and Hogarth, but his gift, using elegantly rococo classical references in comic contrast to sordid drinking and prostitution—at once regretted and celebrated in song—is unique.
Bellman is best known for two collections of poems set to music, Fredman's epistles and Fredman's songs. Each consists of about 70 songs. The general theme is drinking, but the songs "most ingeniously" combine words and music to express feelings and moods ranging from humorous to elegiac, romantic to satirical.
Bellman's patrons included King Gustav III of Sweden, who called him a master improviser. Bellman's songs continue to be performed and recorded by musicians from Scandinavia and in other languages, including English, French, German, Italian, and Russian. Several of his songs including Gubben Noak and Fjäriln vingad are known by heart by many Swedes. His legacy further includes a museum in Stockholm and a society that fosters interest in him and his work.
Biography
Early life
Carl Michael Bellman was born on 4 February 1740 in the Stora Daurerska house, which was one of the finest in the Södermalm district of Stockholm. The house was the property of his maternal grandmother, Catharina von Santen, who had brought up his father, orphaned as a small child. Carl Michael's parents were Johan Arndt Bellman, a civil servant, and Catharina Hermonia, daughter of the priest of the local Maria parish. Her family was wholly Swedish, whereas Johan's family had German origins: they had come from Bremen in about 1660. When Carl Michael was four the family moved to a smaller, single storey dwelling called the Lilla Daurerska house. He briefly went to a local school, but was educated mainly by private tutors. He was the eldest of 15 children who lived long enough for their births to be registered. His parents had intended him to become a priest, but he fell ill with a fever, and on recovering found he could express any thought in rhyming verse. His parents appointed a tutor called Ennes who Bellman called "a genius". Bellman was taught French, German, Italian, English, and Latin. He read Horace and Boileau; Ennes taught him to write poetry and to translate French and German hymns. He was familiar with stories from the Bible including the Apocrypha, many of which found their way into the songs he composed in later life. However, expenses including the Swedish tradition of hospitality left the family with no money to start him off in life with a journey to the south of Europe, such as to Spain to visit his uncle, Jacob Martin Bellman, who was the Swedish Consul in Cádiz. Carl Michael translated a French book by Du Four and dedicated it to his uncle, but the hint was ignored. Deep in debt, at the end of 1757 the family sent Carl Michael to Sweden's central bank Riksbanken as an unpaid trainee. He had no aptitude for numbers, instead discovering the taverns and brothels which were to figure so largely in his songs.As the banking career was not working out – and as trainees were again required to sit an exam, for which Bellman was ill-equipped – he took a break in 1758, going to Uppsala University, where Linnaeus was professor of botany. The idea of attending lectures was no more congenial than banking, and he stayed only one term; one of his songs records that "He contemplated Uppsala—the beer stung his mouth—love distracted his wits..." However, he met young men from wealthy and noble families, went drinking with them, and started to entertain them with his songs. Bellman returned to the bank job, and seems quickly to have fallen into financial difficulty: "a jungle of debts, sureties and bondsmen began to proliferate around him." The character of bailiff Blomberg appears in his songs, constantly trying to track down debtors and seize all their property. The law allowed the bankrupt only one way to escape from debtors' prison: to leave Sweden. In 1763, Bellman ran away to Norway. From the safety of Halden he writes to the Council applying first for a passport, and then for a safe-conduct, both of which were granted. Meanwhile, his father had first mortgaged the Lilla Daurerska house, and then sold it: the family's finances were no better than his own. Even worse, by April 1764 the Bank had become tired of the riotous behaviour of its young men: its investigations showed that Bellman had been the ringleader, leading them into "gambling, masquerades, picnics and suchlike". Bellman resigned, his safe banking career at an end.
Poetry and song
In 1765, Bellman's parents died; deeply moved, he wrote a religious poem. Then his fortunes improved: someone found him a job, first in the Office of Manufactures, then in the Customs, and he was able once again to live happily in Stockholm, observing the people of the city, with at least a modest salary. In 1768, his life's work as we now know it got under way:File:Fredmans Epistel 23 music start.jpg|thumb|300px|The start of Fredman's Epistle No. 23, "Alas, thou my mother". To a graceful minuet tune, Fredman, lying drunk in the gutter outside the Crawl-in tavern, "a summer night in the year 1768", blames his mother for his conception; but a morning visit to the tavern revives his spirits.
Bellman mostly played the cittern, becoming the most famous player of this instrument in Sweden. His portrait by Per Krafft shows him playing an oval instrument with twelve strings, arranged as six pairs. His first songs were "parody songs", a common form of entertainment at the time.
Between 1769 and 1773, Bellman wrote 65 of 82 of his Epistles, as well as many poems. He attempted to publish the poems in 1772, but was unable to obtain the permission of the king, Gustav III, as a political coup intervened. He finally managed to obtain the permission in 1774, but soon discovered that the cost of printing, especially as he was determined to publish the sheet music alongside the text, was prohibitive given his ruinous finances, and he was forced to put off his plans. In 1776, the king gave him a sinecure job as secretary to the national lottery; this supported him for the rest of his life.
On 19 December 1777, at the age of 37, he married the 22-year-old Lovisa Grönlund in Klara Church. They had four children, Gustav, Elis, Karl, and Adolf; Elis died young.
Throughout his life, but especially during the 1770s, Bellman also wrote religious poetry, seeing no conflict with his bacchanalian works; he published collections of his religious poems in 1781 and 1787. He wrote some ten plays as divertimentos, some of them later serving as entertainments at the royal court. The plays fill Volume 6 of his collected works. In 1783, Bellman brought out The Temple of Bacchus, perhaps hoping to establish his reputation as a poet, rather than the merry entertainer that he was in fact known as at the time; but he always stood out in people's minds as unique, a different kind of writer and performer.
File:Mollberg playing Bowls.jpg|thumb|left|300px|Wash drawing by Pehr Hilleström in a 1792 letter showing Bellman in Swedish dress with Mollberg playing bowls.
Bellman's main works are the 82 Fredman's epistles and the 65 Fredman's songs. Their themes include the pleasures of drunkenness and sex. Against this backdrop, Bellman deals with themes of love, death, and the transitoriness of life. The settings of his songs reflect life in 18th-century Stockholm, but often refer to Greek and Roman mythological characters such as the goddess of love, Venus, Neptune and his retinue of water-nymphs, the love-god Cupid, the ferryman Charon and Bacchus, the god of wine and pleasure. Many of Fredman's Epistles are peopled by a cast which includes the clockmaker Jean Fredman, the prostitute or "nymph" Ulla Winblad, the alcoholic ex-soldier Movitz, and Father Berg, a virtuoso on several instruments. Some of these were based on living models, others probably not. Ulla Winblad was widely believed to have been closely based on Maria Kristina Kiellström, though the real woman, a silk worker once arrested for alleged prostitution, was not the ideal romantic figure of Bellman's songs. Fredman's songs also include Old Testament figures such as Noah and Judith.
File:François Boucher, Venus triumf - 03.jpg|thumb|300px|François Boucher's 1740 painting Triumph of Venus is the model for Epistle 25, "All blow now!", where Bellman humorously contrasts rococo classical allusions with bawdy remarks.
Bellman achieved his effects of rococo elegance and humour through precisely organised incongruity. For example, Epistle 25, "Blåsen nu alla!", begins with Venus crossing the water, as in François Boucher'sTriumph of Venus, but when she disembarks, Bellman transforms her into a lustful Ulla Winblad. Similarly, the ornate and civilized minuet melody of "Ack du min Moder" contrasts with the text: Fredman is lying with a hangover in the gutter outside a tavern, complaining bitterly about life. Ulla Winblad recurs through the Epistles; Britten Austin comments that
File:Fredman's Song 21 Så lunka vi så småningom.jpg|thumb|300px|left|Start of Fredman's Song 21, "Så lunka vi så småningom". March, time, 1791. The song refers to "Bacchus's tumult"; the gravediggers discuss whether the grave is too deep, taking swigs from a bottle of brännvin.
The songs are "most ingeniously" set to music, the melodies accentuated by the bold construction of music, word pictures and choice of words, while the music brings out a hidden dimension not seen if the words are simply read as verse. The poems themselves, far from being the brilliant improvisations that they appear, are striking in their "formal virtuosity". They may be drinking songs in name, but in structure they are tightly woven into a precise metre, situating the "frenzied bacchanalia within a strict and decorous rococo frame." The musicologist James Massengale writes that the technique of reusing tunes in musical parody had already been overused and had fallen into disrepute by Bellman's time, just as his subject matter was initially looked down on. Despite this, Massengale argues
Massengale observes that Bellman was "fully aware of the complexity of the musical-poetic problem; his poems were not simply talented improvisations." and points out that Bellman was "also interested in concealing this complexity", with the discrepancies between the music and the poetry "apparently resolved".
Bellman was a gifted entertainer and mimic. He was able to
In 1790, the Swedish Academy awarded Bellman its annual Lundblad prize of 50 Riksdaler for the most interesting piece of literature of the year. Although Fredman's Epistles was neither exactly literature as understood by the academy, nor meeting the standards of elegant taste, the poet and critic Johan Henric Kellgren and the King ensured that Bellman won the prize.