The life and songs of Carl Michael Bellman: Genius of the Swedish Rococo

"If Carl Michael Bellman (1740-95), a unique figure in world literature, has been as unknown to the world at large as he has been perennially popular in Scandinavia, it has been due to the untranslatability of poetry. His great song-cycle "Fredman's Epistles, a genre, "which had no forerunners and cannot have any successors," is perhaps the only great work of poetic art to be conceived throughout to music. In Sweden it has been the means of preserving a whole treasure trove of lovely melodies, which once delighted Europe" "The Life and Songs of Carl Michael Bellman contains altogether 184 pages of text and 72 picture-pages with more than 100 illustrations, most of which are in gravure. Also 6 color plates of Stockholm in Bellman's day."