Stolta Stad!
| "Stolta stad" | |
|---|---|
| Art song | |
First page of sheet music for the 1790 edition; there are also spoken sections. | |
| English | Proud city! |
| Written | 16 October 1771 |
| Text | poem by Carl Michael Bellman |
| Language | Swedish |
| Melody | Allegedly from Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny's opera Le cadi dupé |
| Composed | 1761 (if Monsigny is the source) |
| Published | 1790 in Fredman's Epistles |
| Scoring | voice and cittern |
Stolta stad! (Proud city!) is Epistle No. 33 in the Swedish poet and performer Carl Michael Bellman's 1790 song collection, Fredman's Epistles. One of his best-known works, it combines both spoken (with words in German, Danish, Swedish, and French) and sung sections (in Swedish). In the spoken sections, Bellman, as composer and as performer, imitates a whole crowd of people of many descriptions. It has been described as Swedish literature's most congenial portrait of the country's capital city, Stockholm.
The epistle is subtitled "1:o Om Fader Movitz's öfverfart til Djurgården, och 2:o om den dygdiga Susanna." (Firstly about father Movitz's crossing to Djurgården, and secondly about the virtuous Susanna). Performances of the epistle have been recorded by Fred Åkerström and by Sven-Bertil Taube.