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Opp Amaryllis!

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"Opp Amaryllis!"
Art song
Sheet music
EnglishUp, Amaryllis!
Written1773
Textpoem by Carl Michael Bellman
LanguageSwedish
Published1791 in Fredman's Songs
Scoringvoice and cittern

Opp Amaryllis! (Up, Amaryllis!) is one of the Swedish poet and performer Carl Michael Bellman's songs from his 1791 collection, Fredman's Songs, where it is No. 31. The song is a graceful pastorale in rococo style, involving a sleeping nymph who is invited to come fishing upon the sea's stormy wave. In reality, the nymph is a Swedish woman, Wilhelmina Norman, the stormy wave is a Swedish waterway, and the progression from shore to fishing-boat can equally well be read as a seduction. It is one of Bellman's best-known and best-loved songs, and has been recorded by musicians including Folke Andersson and Edvard Andreasson.

Context

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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]

The eponymous character Amaryllis is taken from classical tales. In Ancient Greek literature, Theocritus's Idylls portray a goatherd singing a serenade outside the cave of the nymph Amaryllis.[10] In Ancient Roman literature, Amaryllis was a heroine in Virgil's Eclogues, a suite of pastoral poems.[11]

Song

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Melody and verse form

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Melody of Fredman's Song 31
Bellman's 3
4 time melody for "Opp Amaryllis!"
Problems playing this file? See media help.

The song is in 3
4 time and is marked Menuetto. It has 4 verses, each consisting of 11 lines; lines 2-7 are short. The rhyming pattern of each verse is AA-B-CCC-B-DDD-B. No source has been identified for the melody, which may well have been composed by Bellman himself.[12]

Lyrics

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Medallion of a nymph on a dolphin
The song in rococo style invokes classical images of the sea, with nymphs and dolphins. Medallion by Francesco Marti, A Nymph on a Dolphin, c. 1500

The song, headed "Om fiskafänget" ("About catching fish"), is dated 1773, and was written for Bellman's opera Fiskarena.[13][12] The song invites the sleeping nymph, in reality Wilhelmina Norman (who Bellman courted in the summer of 1773), to awaken and come fishing.[14][13] The waterways, too, are Swedish, with familiar fish like pike.[15]

Verse translations of the second stanza of song 31
Carl Michael Bellman, 1791[16] Charles Wharton Stork, 1917[17] Hendrik Willem Van Loon, 1939[18] Paul Britten Austin, 1977[19]

Kom nu och fiska, noten är bunden,
Kom nu på stunden,
    Följ mig åt;
    Kläd på dig tröjan,
    Kjorteln och slöjan;
    Gäddan och löjan
    Ställ försåt.
Vakna Amaryllis lilla, vakna;
Lät mig ej ditt glada sällskap sakna;
Bland Delphiner och Sirener nakna
Sku vi nu plaska med vår lilla båt.

Let's go a-fishing—nets are all spread now—
Mope not in bed now,
Quickly rise!
Come thou, all bodiced,
Kirtled so modest;
Fish of the oddest
Be our prize!
Amaryllis, little one, awaken,—
Lacking thee, of joy I'm quite forsaken;
From our boat the spray will soon be shaken,
As mid the dolphins and sirens it flies.

Let's go a-fishing, nets are now spread, oh,
Leave your cozy bed
and follow me.
Fasten your placket,
Put on your jacket,
Stop now all the racket,
Hear my plea.
Amaryllis, waken little one,
Without you life is robbed of mirth and fun.
Let's follow dolphins and with sirens run,
And in our skiff, splash and dance over the sea.

Come, come a-fishing! Ready our rod is;
    Fasten thy bodice,
        Skirt and coat.
    Cease then thy railing
    Little availing;
    Perch, pike and grayling
        Greedy float.
Fairest Amaryllis, do not fly me,
Nor the pleasure of these hours deny me.
Where the dolphin rolls on billow briny
    Let us be splashing in our little boat.

Reception and legacy

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Painting of a pastoral scene
The song invokes a pastoral landscape with a stream, a couple in a rowing-boat, and a shepherd with his sheep. Painting by Karl Schallhas [de], 1649

The Bellman scholar Lars Lönnroth calls the song a graceful pastorale in rococo style. He notes that people have taken his pastoral songs, of which this is "the best known", as completely conventional works following the classical template of a shepherd-poet in pursuit of his fair nymph. It indeed begins, Lönnroth writes, as an aubade or morning song, like a medieval Provençal troubadour's. The young fisherman wakens his beloved and, in the first stanza, asks her to come fishing with him in an Arcadian landscape peopled with mythic figures, including Morpheus the god of sleep and Neptune, god of the sea. In the next stanza, he bids her dress herself; in the third, to fetch her fishing-tackle, and in the last stanza to climb into his boat. This plays out as a simple sequence of theatrical scenes. But, writes Lönnroth, it can equally well be read as a seduction. The last stanza drops the pretence of going out to catch pike, and states openly that "Love shall rule/In our chests." The seascape, too, he writes, has suddenly changed from calm to stormy; but the shepherd sings that he can find comfort "In thy calm embrace." Lönnroth observes that in Fredman's Epistle No. 25, "Blåsen nu alla", Bellman goes further into full-blown grotesque, sharply contrasting the classical imagery with the drunken orgiastic reality; but in "Opp Amaryllis!", the poet shows his skill in creating drama from a simple shepherd-poem, and undermining the pastoral with discreet hints of storms and death.[15]

Bellman's biographer Paul Britten Austin describes the song as "one of his most delightful, and for many years [it] was far and away the most popular. It goes to a charming air."[20] "Opp Amaryllis!" was recorded in 1924 by Folke Andersson and Edvard Andreasson for HMV.[21] More recently, the song has been recorded many times; it was among the Bellman songs recorded in 1960 by Roland Bengtsson and Folke Sällström,[22] and in 1988 by the actor Mikael Samuelson.[23] The song was recorded in English by Martin Best in 1995.[24]

References

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  1. ^ Bellman 1790.
  2. ^ a b "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. ^ "Theocritus, Idylls". Loeb Classical Library. Retrieved 29 December 2020.
  11. ^ Virgil. "Virgil's Eclogues". virgil.org. Retrieved 29 December 2020.
  12. ^ a b Bellman 1984, pp. 78, 134.
  13. ^ a b "N:o 31 (Kommentar tab)". Bellman.net (in Swedish). Retrieved 2 February 2022.
  14. ^ Bellman 1989, pp. 209–212.
  15. ^ a b Lönnroth 2005, pp. 120–124.
  16. ^ Bellman 1989, p. 209.
  17. ^ Stork 1917, p. 8.
  18. ^ Van Loon & Castagnetta 1939, pp. 83–84.
  19. ^ Britten Austin 1977, p. 121.
  20. ^ Britten Austin 1967, p. 103.
  21. ^ "Opp Amaryllis by Folke Andersson, Edvard Andreasson". SecondHandSongs. Retrieved 27 June 2021.
  22. ^ Bengtsson, Roland; Sällström, Folke. "Bellman, C. M.: Fredmans sånger (excerpts) (Sällström, Bengtsson)". Naxos. Retrieved 27 June 2021.
  23. ^ Samuelson, Mikael. "Music of Carl Michael Bellman". AllMusic. Retrieved 27 June 2021.
  24. ^ "To Carl Michael with love : Martin Best sings the songs and epistles of Sweden's 18th century songwriter / Carl Michael Bellman Solna : EMI, cop. 1995". Svensk MedieDatabas. Retrieved 27 June 2021.

Sources

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