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  • 21 Aug, 2019

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I Går Såg Jag Ditt Barn, Min Fröja
I går såg jag ditt barn, min Fröja (Yesterday saw I your child, my Freya), is a ballad from the Swedish poet and performer Carl Michael Bellman's 1790 collection, Fredman's Epistles, where it is No. 28. The epistle is subtitled "Om et anstäldt försåt emot Ulla Winblad." (About an ambush of Ulla Winblad). It describes an attempt to arrest the "nymph" Ulla Winblad, based on a real event. The lyrics create a rococo picture of life, blending classical allusion and pastoral description with harsh reality.

Context

Carl Michael Bellman is a central figure in the Swedish ballad tradition and a powerful influence in Swedish music, known for his 1790 Fredman's Epistles and his 1791 Fredman's Songs. A solo entertainer, he played the cittern, accompanying himself as he performed his songs at the royal court.

Jean Fredman (1712 or 1713–1767) was a real watchmaker of Bellman's Stockholm. The fictional Fredman, alive after 1767, but without employment, is the supposed narrator in Bellman's epistles and songs. The epistles, written and performed in different styles, from drinking songs and laments to pastorales, paint a complex picture of the life of the city during the 18th century. A frequent theme is the demimonde, with Fredman's cheerfully drunk Order of Bacchus, a loose company of ragged men who favour strong drink and prostitutes. At the same time as depicting this realist side of life, Bellman creates a rococo picture, full of classical allusion, following the French post-Baroque poets. The women, including the beautiful Ulla Winblad, are "nymphs", while Neptune's festive troop of followers and sea-creatures sport in Stockholm's waters. The juxtaposition of elegant and low life is humorous, sometimes burlesque, but always graceful and sympathetic. The songs are "most ingeniously" set to their music, which is nearly always borrowed and skilfully adapted.

Song

Music and verse form

Melody of Epistle 28
A reworked Languedoc folk tune
Problems playing this file? See media help.

The song has five verses, each of 8 lines. The verses have the alternating rhyming pattern ABAB-CDCD. The music is in
4 time, and is marked Andante. The melody was reworked by Joseph Martin Kraus from a Languedoc folk tune; it is accompanied throughout by rapid, nervous quavers (eighth notes), giving the Epistle in Edward Matz's view a cinematic slow motion effect. The melody was used by "several parodists" in the 18th century; it had timbres (named melodies) including "Quoi–" and "Ah! ma voisine, es-tu fâchée?" which the musicologist James Massengale suggests Bellman may have had in mind.

Lyrics

etching of harbour scene
Detail from etching "The steps on Skeppsbro" depicting a scene in Stockholm's harbour by Elias Martin, 1800. The central figure is popularly supposed to represent Ulla Winblad, the bawdy non-mythological heroine of Epistle 28.

The song is dated 17 August 1771. The epistle is subtitled "Om et anstäldt försåt emot Ulla Winblad" ("About an attempted ambush of Ulla Winblad"), which Bellman's biographer Lars Lönnroth describes as relatively vague, compared for instance to that of epistle 31, which gives exact co-ordinates in time and space. The story is at least loosely based on a real event, although the real Ulla Winblad, Maria Kristina Kiellström, was neither a prostitute nor a barmaid, and never prosecuted for wearing unauthorised finery in the form of silk dresses.

The first stanza in verse and prose
Carl Michael Bellman, 1790 Prose translation Paul Britten Austin's verse, 1977

I går såg jag ditt barn, min Fröja,
   I Yxsmedsgränd,
Klädd i en svart garnerad tröja,
   Så snörd och spänd;
En kullrig vidd af många stubbar,
   Bjäfs och granlåt och flärd.
Men i dess fjät såg jag två gubbar
   Med långa svärd.

Yesterday I saw thy child, my Freya,
   On Yxsmeds Alley,
Dressed in a black trimmed top,
   So laced and tight;
A hilly place with many stumps,
   Finery and show and frivolity.
But behind her I saw two men
   With long swords.

Yestre'en thy child I saw, my goddess
   In Yxsmed Street,
Clad in a black embroider'd bodice,
   So trim and neat.
Petticoats flounced their frills and laces,
   All in spite of the laws;
Aye, and two wights went in her traces
   With long drawn swords.

Reception

Bellman's biographer, Paul Britten Austin, describes the Epistle as rococo, along with No. 25: Blåsen nu alla (All blow now). In it, Ulla Winblad, "a luxuriant Venus, incarnation of love and beauty" is almost caught by the bailiffs in Yxsmedsgränd, a narrow street in Stockholm's Gamla stan, where Bellman himself lived from 1770 to 1774. Carina Burman, in her biography of Bellman, wonders whether Bellman found it slightly amusing to move into the street where the bailiffs had pursued Ulla sixteen years earlier. The epistle describes how she just manages to escape. Bellman simultaneously uses classical and contemporary imagery. He calls Ulla a nymph; she has been given a "myrtle" (crown of leaves) by Freya, the Nordic goddess of love; the Bonde Palace (visible from the corner of Yxsmedsgränd) is called the temple of Themis, classical goddess of justice; and Freya is to be worshipped in Paphos' land, equating her with Venus/Aphrodite. Paphos in Cyprus was where, in the myth, Aphrodite rose naked from the foaming sea, and her temple is nearby. But, non-mythologically, Ulla wears "a black embroider'd bodice" and petticoats with "frills and laces", and she loses her watch in the struggle. Britten Austin translates the entire Epistle.

Burman notes that the cheerful last stanza of the Epistle was one of the Bellman songs used in 19th century student celebrations. Epistle 28 has been recorded by Cornelis Vreeswijk, a noted Bellman interpreter, on his 1971 studio album Spring mot Ulla, spring! Cornelis sjunger Bellman, among others.

References

  1. ^ Bellman 1790.
  2. ^ "Carl Michael Bellmans liv och verk. En minibiografi (The Life and Works of Carl Michael Bellman. A Short Biography)" (in Swedish). Bellman Society. Archived from the original on 10 August 2015. Retrieved 25 April 2015.
  3. ^ "Bellman in Mariefred". The Royal Palaces [of Sweden]. Archived from the original on 21 June 2022. Retrieved 19 September 2022.
  4. ^ Johnson, Anna (1989). "Stockholm in the Gustavian Era". In Zaslaw, Neal (ed.). The Classical Era: from the 1740s to the end of the 18th century. Macmillan. pp. 327–349. ISBN 978-0131369207.
  5. ^ Britten Austin 1967, pp. 60–61.
  6. ^ Britten Austin 1967, p. 39.
  7. ^ Britten Austin 1967, pp. 81–83, 108.
  8. ^ 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.".
  9. ^ Britten Austin 1967, p. 63.
  10. ^ Matz 2004, p. 38.
  11. ^ Bellman 1790
  12. ^ Massengale 1979, p. 171.
  13. ^ "N:o 28 (Kommentar tab)". Bellman.net. Retrieved 3 February 2022.
  14. ^ Lönnroth 2005, p. 187.
  15. ^ Matz 2004, p. 36.
  16. ^ Hassler & Dahl 1989, pp. 65–67.
  17. ^ Britten Austin 1977, p. 28.
  18. ^ Britten Austin 1967, pp. 86–88.
  19. ^ Burman 2019, pp. 399–401.
  20. ^ Matz 2004, pp. 35–38.
  21. ^ Burman 2019, pp. 622 and note 9 (p. 698).
  22. ^ Hassler & Dahl 1989, p. 284.

Sources

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