Bacchi tempel öppnat vid en hjältes död ("The Temple of Bacchus opened at a Hero's Death"), commonly known as Bacchi Tempel is a song play, a long poem in two thousand alexandrines, written by Carl Michael Bellman and published by Sweden's royal printing press in 1783. The illustrator was Elias Martin. The work had been preceded by a version from 1779 titled "Bacchi Temple opened at the death of Corporal and Order Oboist Father Movitz", but had been reworked and expanded several times.
The work has probably never been performed in its entirety, but individual songs are sometimes performed by the Par Bricole society. It has been described as a curious hybrid, a combination of comic opera and mock-heroic verse, and as a not very satisfactory work, despite the "lovely" song Böljan sig mindre rör (Still'd is the hasty wave).
Context
The songs originate in Carl Michael Bellman's performances on the theme The Order of Bacchus (Bacchi Orden), starting in 1769-1771, after which the production was largely unseen until 1777. That the production of song games, of which Bacchi Tempel was the most important, was resumed can probably be linked to the Par Bricole society at the end of the 1770s. In contrast to the previous parodies, the new social life was strictly ritualized with many participants, the style more solemn and the music more ambitious. In addition, several of the figures from Bellman's songbook Fredman's Epistles have now been identified in the cast: both Movitz and Mollberg have minor roles, while Ulla Winblad has taken on a central role as leader of the "Bacchi priestesses".
Bellman began work on what would become Bacchi Tempel soon after the news of the death of the model of his corporal Movitz in May 1779; an initial print was dedicated to the court engraver at the end of the year with the hope of engaging him for an illustrated edition of the work. This failed, but later he succeeded in getting Elias and Johan Fredrik Martin to illustrate the work. In 1780, extended versions in handwriting were handed over to Elis Schröderheim and , suggesting that the author had great ambitions with the work, possibly with the aim of improving his reputation after he was attacked by the famous critic Johan Henric Kellgren in 1778 through the derisive ("My Laughter"). Bellman continued to work on it, adding, among other things, long descriptions of nature in alexandrines in the style of James Thomson.
The work was advertised for sale via subscription in Stockholms Posten in September 1782, as a "poetic, comic and musical work". The announcement was aimed at "lovers of madness", which again points to ambitions. However, the work was not printed until the end of 1783, and new advertisements pointed to its suitability as a Christmas present. It was warmly reviewed in .
Publication
Bacchi Tempel was published in 1783 by Kongliga Tryckeriet, the Swedish royal printing press in Stockholm. It was Bellman's first book. The illustrations were by the landscape painter Elias Martin; they were engraved by his brother Johan Fredrik Martin. The brothers were friends of Bellman's; Elias had studied painting, especially Hogarth's, in London, had visited and painted an ornamental Temple of Bacchus in Painshill Park at Cobham, Surrey, and had come back to Stockholm in 1780. The book had been planned as the first volume of a two-volume set; the second was to have been Fröjas Tempel ("Freya's Temple"), but it never appeared.
Summary
The play takes place around a temple dedicated to Bacchus, the god of wine, on an island of mixed flora and fauna: there are pine trees and crows as well as parrots and almond trees. Somewhere nearby, the goddess of pleasure Fröja also has a temple. Around the temple, a celebration is being commemorated by the dead Movitz, initially by a group of supporters under the leadership of the highly pregnant Ulla Winblad. The work begins with a stormy night, but at dawn the storm passes and everything turns into rural idyll, and the readers are informed that it is Movitz who is the father of Ulla's children, and she describes how it came to be in this particular place. Then the male participants, the "brothers of the order" arrive in boats, led by the order's "grenadier" Mollberg and its sexton Trundman, and march up to the temple. When they arrive, together with barrels of drink, songs and celebrations are held in honour first of the dead, then of Trundman and the brothers, Ulla and the priests, the order's chancellor Planberg, and finally the head of the order, Janke Jensen. The rituals are interrupted from time to time by various intermezzos, but eventually fade out completely as Ulla gives birth to a new Movitz, and everything turns into a happy party.