Ulla Winblad

{{Bellman's Stockholm}}

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.{{sfn|Bellman|1790}} A solo entertainer, he played the cittern, accompanying himself as he performed his songs at the royal court.{{cite web |url=http://www.bellman.org/index.php/om-bellman-och-hans-verk/biografi |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150810032831/http://www.bellman.org/index.php/om-bellman-och-hans-verk/biografi |archive-date=10 August 2015 |url-status=dead | title=Carl Michael Bellmans liv och verk. En minibiografi (The Life and Works of Carl Michael Bellman. A Short Biography) |language=sv |publisher=Bellman Society |access-date=25 April 2015}}{{cite web |title=Bellman in Mariefred |url=https://www.kungligaslotten.se/english/calendar/events/gripsholm-concert/bellman-in-mariefred.html |website=The Royal Palaces [of Sweden] |access-date=19 September 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220621091846/https://www.kungligaslotten.se/english/calendar/events/gripsholm-concert/bellman-in-mariefred.html |archive-date=21 June 2022}}{{cite book |last1=Johnson |first1=Anna |editor1-last=Zaslaw |editor1-first=Neal |title=The Classical Era: from the 1740s to the end of the 18th century |date=1989 |publisher=Macmillan |isbn=978-0131369207 |page= |pages=327–349 |chapter=Stockholm in the Gustavian Era}}

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 of Stockholm during the 18th century. A frequent theme is the demimonde, with Fredman's cheerfully drunk Order of Bacchus,{{sfn|Britten Austin|1967|p=39}} 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.{{sfn|Britten Austin|1967|pp=81–83, 108}} The juxtaposition of elegant and low life is humorous, sometimes burlesque, but always graceful and sympathetic.{{sfn|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."}} The songs are "most ingeniously" set to their music, which is nearly always borrowed and skilfully adapted.{{sfn|Britten Austin|1967|p=63}}

Ulla Winblad features repeatedly in Fredman's Epistles. Some of her appearances are in songs about taverns in and around Stockholm; others are in pastorales, set in leafy places near the city, or on boats crossing its waterways and lakes. Alongside her is a cast of contemporary Stockholmers, accompanied by figures from classical and Norse mythology.{{sfn|Bellman|1790}}{{sfn|Britten Austin|1967|pp=81–83, 108}}

Ulla Winblad remains a popular character in Sweden and other countries, where Bellman's songs continue to be performed, both directly and adapted into theatre productions. In 1908, she was played by {{ill|Constance Byström|sv}} in Ernst Didring's play Två konungar ("Two Kings", about Bellman and Gustav the third) at the Swedish Theatre, Helsinki. In 1953 Carl Zuckmayer put on his play Ulla Winblad in Germany, to popular acclaim.{{cite journal |last=Loram |first=Ian C. |title=Ulla Winblad: Words and Music by Zuckmayer and Bellman |journal=Monatshefte |volume=47 |issue=1 |date=1955 |pages=11–18 |jstor=30160212}}

File:The steps on Skeppsbro etching by Elias Martin detail.jpg's harbour by Elias Martin, 1800. The central figure is popularly supposed to represent Ulla Winblad.{{sfn|Burman|2019|p=174}} ]]

The fictional Ulla Winblad and the real Maria Kristina Kiellström have frequently been confused, but were not at all the same.{{sfn|Kleveland|1984|p=9}} Burman comments that she was not "on the slide" but a quite ordinary woman, "not a prostitute, not a bride of Bacchus and not a goddess of love either. Just as little was she a Vestal Virgin."{{sfn|Burman|2019|p=207}} Kiellström, born in 1744 in a poor family, did borrow her stepmother's surname, Winblad (the name means vine-leaf). About 1763, she found a job in a silk factory. At the age of about twenty Kiellström became notorious for being made pregnant by a Swedish nobleman, Count Wilhelm Schildt. The child died; he abandoned her. Further notoriety came in 1767: while she was without regular employment, she was accused of wearing a red silk cape, a banned luxury item; but unlike Ulla, she was acquitted. By 1770, Kiellström had moved out of the town centre; she and another girl, whose name was Ulla, were both officially recorded as being suspected by their landlord of "loose living".{{sfn|Britten Austin|1967|pp=84–85}}

File:FrançoisBoucher,TriumphOfVenus(1740)detail.jpg sang of Ulla Winblad in Fredman's Epistle 25, which seems to depict a Rococo scene like François Boucher's 1740 Birth of Venus, which then hung in Drottningholm Palace, near Stockholm]]

Bellman met Kiellström in about 1769. Soon afterwards, he sang of Ulla Winblad for the first time in Fredman's Epistle number 25, Blåsen nu alla, subtitled Which is an attempt at a pastoral in Bacchanalian taste, written on Ulla Winblad's crossing to Djurgården.{{sfn|Britten Austin|1967|p=86}} It begins with rococo "angels, dolphins, zephyrs and the whole might of Paphos" (compare Boucher's Birth of Venus) and musical flourishes on the horn ("Corno") and ends with Ulla as "my nymph" and the sentiment "May love come into our lives".{{sfn|Bellman|1790|loc=Epistle 25}}

Bellman worked up the silk cape incident into the rococo Epistle 28, I går såg jag ditt barn, min Fröja, where Fredman sees a "goddess", elegantly dressed, with illegally flounced and frilled petticoats.{{sfn|Britten Austin|1967|p=86}}

Kiellström married a customs officer, Eric Nordström, in 1772: Bellman found him his job. The couple lived very close to Bellman, and Norström too appears in the Epistles; a "quarrelsome violent man" and a drinker, he died in a police cell. Kiellström, still attractive, remarried at the age of 42; her second husband, 11 years younger than her, complained that she was "generally and in printed songs known for passionate living."{{sfn|Britten Austin|1967|p=89}}

Edvard Matz, author of a book about Carl Michael Bellman's women, calls Ulla "one of the really great female figures in Swedish literature".{{sfn|Matz|2015|p=31}}

Bellman's English biographer, Paul Britten Austin, summarizes Ulla's dual nature, both romanticised and sexual: "Ulla is at once a nymph of the taverns and a goddess of a rococo universe of graceful and hot imaginings".Britten Austin, 1967. pages 81–83 Fredman's Epistles are distinctive in combining realism - drink, poverty, gambling, prostitution, old age - with elegant mythological rococo flourishes, enabling Bellman to achieve both comic and elegiac effects. Britten Austin cites the Swedish critic {{ill|Nils Afzelius|sv}}: "Several of the most personal poems are staged with a heavy overlay of classical mythology ... It is as if a curtain with a whole rococo world of gods and goddesses on rosy clouds ... were suddenly raised, revealing a tavern-interior with shaky chairs, spilled and shattered glasses, staggering clients and sluttish barmaids [N. Afzelius).]" Ulla Winblad is, as Carina Burman writes, the only female character in Fredman's Epistles to have her own surname. The others may have a first name, like Lotta or Jeanna, or may simply be known by the tavern where they work, like Mutter på Tuppen ("Mother at the Cockerel [Tavern]").{{sfn|Burman|2019|p=162}}

The sluttiest of the barmaids, though as Britten Austin writes "on the rosiest mythological clouds", is of course Ulla. In Epistle 36 Vår Ulla låg i sängen och sov, (Our Ulla lay in bed and slept), Bellman in full rococo style describes Ulla asleep in a tavern bedroom - while the owner peeps through the keyhole and three excited drunks wait outside. As she wakes, three rococo cupids assist her with make-up, perfume, and her hair. Then she runs into the bar, revives herself with a glass of brandy, and leaves with the blindest of the waiting fellows, "leaving the inmates of the tavern, shaken, to contemplate Ulla's glass where she has left it, empty and broken on the bar."

File:"Ulla Winblad kära syster. Du är eldig, qvick och yster...". Fredmans Epistel 3 (cropped).jpg|Illustration for "Ulla Winblad kära syster. Du är eldig, qvick och yster...". Fredman's Epistle No. 3, by Carl Wahlbom (d. 1858)

File:Ulla Winblad by Elis Chiewitz.png|Ulla Winblad by Elis Chiewitz (d. 1839)

File:Ulla dansar menuett.jpg|"Ulla dansar menuett": Ulla Winblad dances a minuet. Lithograph by {{ill|Wilhelm Wallander|sv}} (d. 1888)

The Ulla Winblad depicted in Fredman's Epistles is at once romanticised and clearly sexual. Epistle 71, in Britten Austin's words "the apogee, perhaps, of all that is typically bellmansk" evokes the Swedish countryside at Djurgården in summertime, as Bellman imagines riding out of town and finding Ulla at her window.{{sfn|Britten Austin|1967|p=155}} The song is called a Pastorale, and titled "To Ulla at her window, Fiskartorpet, lunchtime, one summer's day". It begins{{sfn|Bellman|1790|loc=Epistle 71}}[http://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Fredmans_epistel_n:o_71 Swedish Wikisource: Fredmans epistel n:o 71]

:Ulla, min Ulla, säj, får jag dig bjuda

:rödaste smultron i mjölk och vin,...

:Ulla, my Ulla, say may I offer you

:reddest strawberries in milk and wine...

The scholar of Swedish literature Lars Lönnroth writes that the song is a serenade, originally a profession of love set to the strings of a guitar outside the beloved's window of an evening. In Bellman's hands, the setting is shifted to midday in a Swedish summer. Fredman can, Lönnroth writes, be supposed to have spent the night with Ulla after an evening of celebration; now he sits on his horse outside her window and sings to her. In the first half of each verse, in the major key, he speaks straight to Ulla, offering his love in the form of delicious food and drink; in the second half, the refrain, in the minor key, he encourages her more softly to admire nature all around, and she replies with a meditative word or two: "Heavenly!"; "Oh yes!".{{sfn|Lönnroth|2005|pp=320–323}} There is, furthermore, a definite erotic charge, increasing in each of the three verses. In the first verse, the house's doors are suggestively blown open by the wind, while in the last verse, the neighing, stamping, galloping horse appears as a sexual metaphor alongside Fredman's expressed passion.{{sfn|Lönnroth|2005|pp=320–323}}

File:Fredmans Epistel 71 music start.jpg|The start of Fredman's Epistle no 71,
Ulla, min Ulla, säj, får jag dig bjuda

File:Ulla Min Ulla 1903.jpg|A serenade at Fiskartorpet:{{sfn|Lönnroth|2005|pp=320–323}} Coloured postcard of Epistle 71, Ulla! min Ulla!, with Fredman on his horse, and Ulla Winblad at her window, 1903

• Österlånggatan
• Ulla von Höpken

{{reflist|24em}}

• {{cite book |last=Bellman |first=Carl Michael |author-link=Carl Michael Bellman |title=Fredmans epistlar |date=1790 |publisher=By Royal Privilege |location=Stockholm |url=http://litteraturbanken.se/#!/forfattare/BellmanCM/titlar/FredmansEpistlar/sida/v/faksimil}}

• {{cite book |last=Britten Austin |first=Paul |author-link=Paul Britten Austin |title=The Life and Songs of Carl Michael Bellman: Genius of the Swedish Rococo |publisher=Allhem, Malmö American-Scandinavian Foundation |location=New York |date=1967 |isbn=978-3-932759-00-0}}

• Britten Austin, Paul. Fredman's Epistles and Songs, (Stockholm: Proprius, 1999).

• {{cite book |last=Burman |first=Carina |author-link=Carina Burman |title=Bellman. Biografin |trans-title=Bellman. The Biography |year=2019 |publisher=Albert Bonniers Förlag |location=Stockholm |isbn=978-9100141790 |language=sv }}

• {{cite book |last1=Hassler |first1=Göran |last2=Dahl |first2=Peter (illus.) |title=Bellman - en antologi |trans-title=Bellman - an anthology |publisher=En bok för alla |year=1989 |isbn=91-7448-742-6 |ref=none}}

• {{cite book |last=Kleveland |first=Åse |author-link=Åse Kleveland |others=Svenolov Ehrén (illus.) |title=Fredmans epistlar & sånger |trans-title=The songs and epistles of Fredman |publisher=Informationsförlaget |year=1984 |location=Stockholm |isbn=91-7736-059-1 |url=http://libris.kb.se/bib/7663908}} (with facsimiles of sheet music from first editions in 1790, 1791)

• {{cite book |last=Lönnroth |first=Lars |author-link=Lars Lönnroth |title=Ljuva karneval! : om Carl Michael Bellmans diktning |title-link=Ljuva karneval! |trans-title=Lovely Carnival! : about Carl Michael Bellman's Verse |publisher=Albert Bonniers Förlag |publication-place=Stockholm |year=2005 |isbn=978-91-0-057245-7 |oclc=61881374}}

• {{cite book |last=Matz |first=Edvard |title=Carl Michael Bellman Nymfer och friska kalas |language=sv |trans-title=Carl Michael Bellman: Nymphs and Lively Parties |publisher=Historiska Media |year=2015 |isbn=978-91-7545-218-0 |oclc=941607965}}
• Roberts, Michael. Epistles and Songs, (Grahamstown, three volumes, 1977–1981).

• Stork, Charles Wharton. Anthology of Swedish Lyrics from 1750 to 1915, (New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1917). {{oclc|1393517}}

• Van Loon, Hendrik Willem; Castagnetta, Grace. The Last of the Troubadours, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939). {{oclc|1472172}}

• [http://bellman.net/texter/ordPers.php?id=2 Bellman.net] on Ulla Winblad and Maija-Stina Kiellström (In Swedish)
• [http://sv.wikisource.org/wiki/Författare:Carl_Michael_Bellman Carl Michael Bellman] at Swedish Wikisource

{{Carl Michael Bellman}}

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