| "Ack du min moder" | |
|---|---|
| Art song | |
 Sheet music for Fredman's Epistle No. 23, "Ack du min moder" (Alas, thou my mother). To a graceful minuet tune, Fredman, lying drunk in the gutter outside the Crawl-in Tavern, "a summer night in the year 1768", blames his mother for his conception; but a morning visit to the tavern revives his spirits. 1810 reprint of 1790 first edition. | |
| English | Alas, thou my mother |
| Written | 1770 |
| Text | poem by Carl Michael Bellman |
| Language | Swedish |
| Melody | Unknown origin |
| Published | 1790 in Fredman's Epistles |
| Scoring | voice, cittern, and flute |
Ack du min moder (Alas, thou my mother), originally written Ach! du min Moder, is one of the Swedish poet and performer Carl Michael Bellman's best-known and best-loved songs, from his 1790 collection, Fredman's Epistles, where it is No. 23. The collection is ostensibly of drinking-songs, but they vary in character from laments to pastorales, often simultaneously realistic and elegantly rococo in style. The song has two parts, despairing and celebratory: it begins as a lament, with Jean Fredman lying drunk in a Stockholm gutter outside the Crawl-in tavern, and repeatedly cursing his mother for conceiving him. Then he goes in, is revived by a stiff drink, and repeatedly thanks his mother and father for his life.
The epistle is subtitled Som är et Soliloquium då Fredman låg vid krogen Kryp-In, gent emot Bancohuset, en sommarnatt år 1768 (A soliloquy in which Fredman lay outside the Crawl-in Tavern, right by the Bank, one summer night in the year 1768). The epistle's "soliloquy" was described by the critic Oscar Levertin as "the to-be-or-not-to-be of Swedish literature".[1] Fredman was a real character, a watchmaker, but in Bellman's depiction he is an unemployed drunkard.
The song's themes include burlesque and social realism. It has strong biblical echoes from the books of Job and Jeremiah, and from the Psalms, reflecting a Lutheran background. The song touches on the philosophical debate about whether children are like their fathers or take after both parents.
- ^ Britten Austin 1967, p. 61.