"Liksom en Herdinna, högtids klädd"
Art song
Sheet music
First page of sheet music for Epistle 80, a Siciliana or musical pastorale
EnglishLike a Shepherdess, festively dressed
Written1789 or 1790
Textpoem by Carl Michael Bellman
LanguageSwedish
MelodyUnknown origin, perhaps Bellman himself
Published1790 in Fredman's Epistles
Scoringvoice and cittern

Liksom en Herdinna, högtids klädd ("Like a Shepherdess, festively dressed"), is a song by the Swedish poet and performer Carl Michael Bellman from his 1790 collection, Fredman's Epistles, where it is No. 80. The Epistle is subtitled "Angående Ulla Winblads Lustresa til Första Torpet, utom Kattrumps Tullen" (Concerning Ulla Winblad's pleasure-trip to Första Torpet, outside Kattrump Tollgate). It is a pastorale, starting with a near-paraphrase of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux's French guide to the construction of pastoral verse. That doesn't prevent the supposed shepherd and shepherdess from falling into bed drunk at the end of the song. It has been described as lovelier in Swedish than in Boileau's original French. The epistle's humorous depiction of the human condition has been praised by critics.

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.[1] A solo entertainer, he played the cittern, accompanying himself as he performed his songs at the royal court.[2][3][4]

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.[5] 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,[6] 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.[7] The juxtaposition of elegant and low life is humorous, sometimes burlesque, but always graceful and sympathetic.[2][8] The songs are "most ingeniously" set to their music, which is nearly always borrowed and skilfully adapted.[9]

Song

Music and verse form

Epistle 80 of Fredman's Epistles is dedicated to the poet and founder member of the Swedish Academy, Johan Henric Kellgren.[11] The song has six stanzas, each of 8 lines. The rhyming pattern is ABAB-CCDD. The scholar of Swedish literature Lars Lönnroth states that the song form of the Epistle is a Siciliana, a musical pastoral piece.[10][12] The music is in 6
8 time and is marked pastorale.[13] The source melody is unknown.[14]

Lyrics

Epistle 80 starts with a close paraphrase from Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux's 1674 guide to writing pastorales.

The song, written in 1789 or 1790,[15] starts with a near-paraphrase of the French poet and critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux's classic 1674 L'Art Poetique,[16] a guide on the construction of pastoral verse:[17]

Inspiration for Epistle No. 80
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, 1674[16]Prose translation
Telle qu'une bergère, au plus beau jour de fête,
De superbes rubis ne charge point sa tête,
Et, sans mêler à l'or l'éclat des diamants,
Cueille en un champ voisin ses plus beaux ornements;		 As a shepherdess, on the finest feast day,
Does not load her head with splendid rubies,
And, without mixing her gold with the sparkle of diamonds,
Picks in a nearby field its most beautiful ornaments;
Epistle No. 80, first verse
Carl Michael Bellman, 1790[1][13] Prose translation Hendrik Willem van Loon, 1939[18] Paul Britten Austin, 1967[17]

Liksom en Herdinna, högtids klädd,
Vid Källan en Juni dag,
Hopletar ur gräsets rosiga bädd
Sin prydnad och små behag.
Och ej bland Väpling, Hägg och Siren,
Inblandar Pärlors strimmande sken,
Innom den krants i blommors val,
Hon flätar med lekande qval.

As a Shepherdess festively dressed
By the spring one day in June
gathers from the grass's rosy bed
adornments and accents for her dress.
And not among clover, may and lilac,
Is mixed the streaming shine of pearls,
Inside the wreath of her choice of flowers,
She braids with playful care.

She looks like a festive shepherdess,
One bright summer day in June.
She gathers the flowers for her dress,
Her hair with garlands strewn.
No glimmer of the pearl is shown.
'Tis clover, birch and lilac alone.
She wreathes the flow'rs with sad restraint,
And tenderly hums her soft plaint.

As festively garb'd a shepherdess
A garland of grasses weaves,
And kneels by the spring to garnish her dress
Entwining wild roses' leaves,
Nor blends with clover, lilac and may,
A sheen of pearls on midsummer day,
In one fair wreath of leafy spoils,
Whereo'er she so gracefully toils:

The Epistle's tone soon departs from Boileau, as the nymph of verse 2 is a prostitute.[19] Furthermore, a horse appears as a symbol of erotic energy, as it does in Epistles 70 ("Movitz vik mössan högt öfver öra") and 71 ("Ulla! min Ulla! säj får jag dig bjuda"), and this is juxtaposed with a mention of Ulla Winblad.[20] However, Bellman displays a fine feeling for nature in the Epistle.[21]

Reception and legacy

Liksom en herdinna has been described as depicting a scene much like John Constable's oil paintings (here his 1821 The Hay Wain) as the "farmer heavy on staggering wheel" trundles through the meadows.[17]

Bellman's biographer Paul Britten Austin describes the song "with its almost religious invocation of a shepherdess, 'clad for some solemn feast'" as "more lovely in Swedish" than in Boileau's French. He comments that in the Epistle, Bellman depicts the countryside just north of Stockholm like a John Constable painting, with "Mark how between meadows all awry/the Cot to the lake descends... Where farmer heavy on staggering wheel/Makes haste to his hearth and evening meal". However, he finds "quintessentially Swedish" the mood of high summer, with a swallow flying into the room, the cock crowing outside, and the bell of the village church ringing steadily. Everything is perfectly innocent until the last verse, when "Ulla, flat in the face of all Boileau-esque canons of what is permitted in a pastoral and forgetting all new-found respectability, falls into bed with her cavalier, both having drunk too much."[17]

Lönnroth writes that Bellman, who had begun to observe the human condition with nature's help in earlier Epistles, brought the approach to perfection with Epistles 71 and 80.[22] He notes that the description of the rural environment and Ulla Winblad's way of dressing both respond to the classical ideal of tasteful simplicity without frills.[23] The song perfectly fits Boileau's pastoral idyll, until the last two verses when the "shepherd" and his "shepherdess" throw aside their conventional masks and reveal themselves as "drunk, untidy, and not specially well-brought-up".[24]

Carina Burman comments in her biography of Bellman that Epistle 80 is one of six or seven new songs, in her view more classical in tone and better suited to print than Bellman's more strident Baroque verse of the 1770s.[25] The Epistle has been translated into English by Eva Toller.[26] It appears on the 1969 studio album Fred sjunger Bellman by the Bellman interpreter Fred Åkerström, re-released on CD in 1990,[27] and on Mikael Samuelsson's 1990 Sjunger Fredmans Epistlar.[28]

References

  1. 1 2 Bellman 1790.
  2. 1 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. 1 2 Lönnroth 2005, pp. 325.
  11. ↑ "Information om Fredman i Bellmans epistlar" [Information on Fredman in Bellman's Epistles] (in Swedish). Stockholm Gamla Stan. Retrieved 17 June 2021.
  12. ↑ Burman 2019, p. 686.
  13. 1 2 Hassler & Dahl 1989, pp. 182–185.
  14. ↑ Massengale 1979, p. 204.
  15. ↑ "N:o 80 (Kommentar tab)". Bellman.net. Retrieved 3 February 2022.
  16. 1 2 Boileau-Despréaux 1837, p. 191.
  17. 1 2 3 4 Britten Austin 1967, pp. 153–155
  18. ↑ Van Loon & Castagnetta 1939, pp. 80–81.
  19. ↑ Burman 2019, pp. 462–463.
  20. ↑ Burman 2019, pp. 463–464.
  21. ↑ Burman 2019, p. 500.
  22. ↑ Lönnroth 2005, p. 118.
  23. ↑ Lönnroth 2005, p. 328.
  24. ↑ Lönnroth 2005, pp. 324–330.
  25. ↑ Burman 2019, p. 460.
  26. ↑ Toller, Eva. "Liksom en herdinna - Epistel Nr 80". Eva Toller. Retrieved 9 March 2016.
  27. ↑ "Fred sjunger Bellman". Svensk mediedatabas. Retrieved 23 March 2014.
  28. ↑ Mikael Samuelson – Sjunger Fredmans Epistlar (CD). Polydor. 847 400-2.

Sources

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