Ulla Winblad

Fictional character created by Carl Michael Bellman

Ulla Winblad is a semi fictional character in many of Carl Michael Bellman's musical works. She is at once an idealised rococo goddess and a tavern prostitute, and a key figure in Bellman's songs of Fredman's Epistles. The juxtaposition of elegant and low life is humorous, while allowing Bellman to convey a range of emotions. Ulla Winblad has been called "one of the really great female figures in Swedish literature". The character was partly inspired by Maria Kristina Kiellström (1744–1798).

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. A solo entertainer, he played the cittern, accompanying himself as he performed his songs at the royal court. 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 of Stockholm during the 18th century. A frequent theme is the demimonde, with Fredman's cheerfully drunk Order of Bacchus, 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. The juxtaposition of elegant and low life is humorous, sometimes burlesque, but always graceful and sympathetic.

The fictional Ulla Winblad and the real Maria Kristina Kiellström have frequently been confused, but were not at all the same. Burman comments that she was not "on the slide" but a quite ordinary woman, "not a prostitute, not a bride of Bacchus and not a goddess of love either. Just as little was she a Vestal Virgin." Kiellström, born in 1744 in a poor family, did borrow her stepmother's surname, Winblad (the name means vine leaf). About 1763, she found a job in a silk factory. At the age of about twenty Kiellström became notorious for being made pregnant by a Swedish nobleman, Count Wilhelm Schildt. The child died; he abandoned her. Further notoriety came in 1767: while she was without regular employment, she was accused of wearing a red silk cape, a banned luxury item; but unlike Ulla, she was acquitted. By 1770, Kiellström had moved out of the town centre; she and another girl, whose name was Ulla, were both officially recorded as being suspected by their landlord of "loose living". Bellman met Kiellström in about 1769. Soon afterwards, he sang of Ulla Winblad for the first time in Fredman's Epistle number 25, Blåsen nu alla, subtitled Which is an attempt at a pastoral in Bacchanalian taste, written on Ulla Winblad's crossing to Djurgården. It begins with rococo "angels, dolphins, zephyrs and the whole might of Paphos" (compare Boucher's Birth of Venus) and musical flourishes on the horn ("Corno") and ends with Ulla as "my nymph" and the sentiment "May love come into our lives". Bellman worked up the silk cape incident into the rococo Epistle 28, I går såg jag ditt barn, min Fröja, where Fredman sees a "goddess", elegantly dressed, with illegally flounced and frilled petticoats. Kiellström married a customs officer, Eric Nordström, in 1772: Bellman found him his job. The couple lived very close to Bellman, and Norström too appears in the Epistles; a "quarrelsome violent man" and a drinker, he died in a police cell. Kiellström, still attractive, remarried at the age of 42; her second husband, 11 years younger than her, complained that she was "generally and in printed songs known for passionate living."