Carl Michael Bellman - Life and Work

Life and Work

Bellman was born in Stockholm. His main works are Fredman's songs (Fredmans sånger) and Fredman's epistles (Fredmans epistlar), each including some 70 songs, many of which are about sociable drinking, or were designed and are still used for such drinking. But this aspect of his songs is not the main reason he has become such an icon in the Scandinavian song tradition. Bellman was a master of rhyme and rhythm, with a wonderful sense for combining words and music. He wrote songs that were innovative and original in form (parodying and refreshing contemporary literary styles was one of his specialities), as well as challenging in subject matter.

On the surface, his songs centre to a large extent around themes like the joy of inebriation and the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Against this backdrop, however, he manages to elucidate the tender and fleeting themes of love, death, and the elusive qualities of the "present", the here-and-now, in a unique and moving manner. His songs reflect aspects of the life of the common man in 18th century Stockholm, but by his composition Gustafs skål, an informal royal anthem, he had also acquired the patronage of King Gustav III of Sweden.

King Gustav III called Bellman "Il signor improvisatore" ('Mister Improviser').

Bellman has been compared with poets and musicians as diverse as Shakespeare and Beethoven. Kleveland notes that he has been called "Swedish poetry's Mozart, and Hogarth", observing that

"The comparison with Hogarth was no accident. Like the English portrait painter, Bellman drew detailed pictures of his time in his songs, not so much of life at court as of ordinary people's everyday".

Britten Austin says instead simply that:

"Bellman is unique among great poets, I think, in that virtually his entire opus is conceived to music. Other poets, of course, notably our Elizabethans, have written songs. But song was only one branch of their art. They did not leave behind, as Bellman did, a great musical-literary work nor paint in words and music a canvas of their age. Nor are their songs dramatic."

As for the songs, Britten Austin writes:

"In 1768, .. Bellman had begun to compose an entirely new sort of song. A genre which 'had no model and can have no successors' (Kellgren), these songs were to grow swiftly in number until they made up the great work on which Bellman's reputation as a poet chiefly rests."

Some of the recurring characters in his songs are the clockmaker Jean Fredman, the prostitute Ulla Winblad, the ex-soldier, now alcoholic Mowitz and Fader Berg, a virtuoso on several instruments. Some of these were based on living models, others probably not. His songs often make references to Greek and Roman mythological characters such as the ferryman Charon and the God of wine and pleasure, Bacchus, brought for comic effect into Stockholm's surroundings.

Bellman mostly played the cittern; the instrument is on display in Stockholm City Museum.