Kära syster
Song by the 18th century Swedish bard Carl Michael Bellman / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kära Syster (Dear Sister) is No. 24 in the Swedish poet and performer Carl Michael Bellman's 1790 song collection, Fredman's Epistles. The epistle is subtitled "Till kära mor på Bruna Dörren" ("To dear mother at The Brown Door [Tavern]"); its themes are drinking and death. One of his best-known works, it is set to a tune extensively modified from one by Egidio Duni for Louis Anseaume's 1766 song-play La Clochette. Bellman's biographer, Carina Burman, calls it a central epistle.
"Kära Syster" | |
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Art song by Bellman, music reworked from Egidio Duni | |
English | Dear Sister |
Written | May 1770 |
Text | poem by Carl Michael Bellman |
Language | Swedish |
Published | 1790 in Fredman's Epistles |
Scoring | voice and cittern |
This was the sixth epistle to be written, and the first not to be continuously cheerful. The narrator, Fredman, encounters the ferryman of the underworld, Charon, and the theme of death is repeated with the ticking of the watch that measures out Fredman the watchmaker's life. Fredman's world, here as in many later epistles, has two sides: one is drunkenness, dance, and love; the other is angst, hangovers, and a longing for death. Kära Syster has accordingly been called a central epistle. The borrowed melody has been adapted with as much work as creating a new one, implying to scholars that Bellman intended a humorous contrast between the familiar melody and the epistle's sombre theme.