Gråt Fader Berg och spela
Gråt Fader Berg och spela is No. 12 in the Swedish poet and performer Carl Michael Bellman's 1790 song collection, Fredman's Epistles.
The epistle is subtitled "Elegi över Slagsmålet på Gröna Lund". It is a lament over a pub brawl, caused by Fredman's drinking a soldier's beer and dancing with someone else's girlfriend. Set to the melody from the aria "The flocks shall leave the mountains" in George Frideric Handel's opera Acis and Galatea, it is the best-known of his poems describing the consequences of brandy-drinking. Bellman used the contrast between the romantic associations of the melody and the brutal reality of heavy drinking to humorous effect.
First page of sheet music, 1810 reprint
Comic contrast: the epistle about a pub brawl played out against Handel's pastoral aria of love from classical mythology. Painting Acis and Galatea hiding from Polyphemus by Édouard Zier, 1877
Carl Michael Bellman was a Swedish songwriter, composer, musician, poet, and entertainer. He is a central figure in the Swedish song tradition and remains a powerful influence in Swedish music, as well as in Scandinavian literature, to this day. He has been compared to Shakespeare, Beethoven, Mozart, and Hogarth, but his gift, using elegantly rococo classical references in comic contrast to sordid drinking and prostitution—at once regretted and celebrated in song—is unique.
Bellman playing the cittern, in a portrait by Per Krafft, 1779
Bellman's signature
Bellman's birthplace, the Stora Daurerska house in Södermalm, Stockholm. Carl Svante Hallbeck, 1861
Bellman by Elias Martin, 18th century