Kristina From Duvemåla

This is a wonderful Swedish musical, I have seen it twice and I think it is absolutely fantastic!! It is written by Björn Ulveaus and Benny Andersson - who also wrote the musical Chess - and this musical is based on the famous book The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg. The book was actually awarded Book of the Century in Sweden!

The musical (and the book) deals with a Swedish farm family in the mid-19th century. They can't make a living for themselves in Sweden and decide to move to America. The musical is astonishingly well-written, a lot of the lyrics are practically copied from the book, and the music is very beautiful!!

I know Kristina From Duvemåla was performed in America as well as in Sweden, and I take it, it would have been translated into English. It would be very interesting to see the English lyrics and compare them to the Swedish ones ...

The cast of this production was wonderful, with famous Swedish actors Helen Sjöholm, Anders Ekborg adn Peter Jöback (who also has played Chris in Miss Saigon in London!)

"From the preface of Vilhelm Moberg's emigrantion epic

This is a story from a group of people, who emigrated to North America from their homes in Ljuder, Småland. They were the first to move from their neighbourhood. They came from the land of small cottages and large families. They were the people of the soil, and for thousands of years they had farmed the land they left.

Through all vicissitudes the farm remained their home and the provider of life's necessities. All indispensable things were taken from the earth. Man was dependant on the Lord's weather, giving him good years and bad, but on no other power under the sun. Life was led quietly, while the farmer's year completed its circle. And so it remained, generation after generation, through the centuries.

But in the middle of the nineteenth century after the birth of Christ, this order of unchangeableness was shaken in its foundations. Newly discovered forces were exploited, carriages could be driven without horses and ships could cross oceans without sail. The different parts of the globe were brought closer together. And to new generations, who had been introduced to the art of reading, the printed word came with a message from a country far away, emerging from the mist of fairy-tales, taking the clear and tempting shape of reality.

The new country had land, but no one to cultivate it, and bid farmers without land to come. It opened itself to those who longed for a kind of freedom they were denied at home. And in every part of the old country there were a few men and women, who obeyed the summons and started the dangerous enterprise of emigrating to another part of the world.
The most audacious were the first to make the move. The bold ones were the first to set out on the hazardous voyage across the wide ocean. Those who stayed, the inert and the hesitant, called them adventurous.

The first emigrants knew little about the country awating them. And they could not know, that more than a million men, women and children were to follow them from home. They could not have a feeling or guess, that a cultivated area, larger than their old country, would be the fruit of the enterprise they had begun in uncertainty, under the sign of daring, as a perilous adventure.

The men and women of this story hae long since left this life. A few of their names can still be discerned on disintegrating gravestones, erected thousands of miles away from the place where they were born.

Back home their names are forgotten and the adventure of their emigration will soon be part of the fairy-tale or legend. "

Taken from the theatre programme to Kristina Från Duvemåla, 27 March 1997.

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