Life

Michael Zethrin was enrolled at Uppsala University in 1678, and became a member of the Samuel Columbus and Petrus Lagerlöf circle. Zethrin worked for many years at St Nicholas’ (the Great Church’s) Trivial school in Stockholm, where he was a teacher from 1689, becoming assistant headmaster in 1694 and finally headmaster in 1728. During this time, between 1690 and 1706, Zethrin was also a salaried instrumentalist at the Great Church and organist at Riddarholm Church. In 1711 he joined the Kungliga Hovkapellet (the Royal Court Orchestra), where he served until 1728 when he resigned to take up the post of headmaster at the Trivial school.

Michael Zethrin was married twice, the first time on 7 May, 1693 to Catarina Warenberg, and the second time to Maria Cederström (d. 1730).

Musical and literary works

There are a number of texts, translations, arrangements and poems in existence in Zethrin’s own hand. While some of them are no doubt the product of his work as a teacher, others are occasional poetry to which he would often use melodies from stage works by French court composers, such as Jean-Baptiste Lully and his successors.

Zethrin’s arrangements largely involve the superimposition of new Swedish lyrics onto songs taken from French stage works. Unlike other examples of parodying from the 17^th century, Zethrin’s lyrics, and the way in which they are accommodated to the existing music, show marked sensitivity to the stress patterns of the language and the structure of the melodies.

The three compositions that can be ascribed to Zethrin with a certain degree of confidence are even in metre and regular in phrasing, and being composed in the German Lied and choral tradition reveal nothing of the partiality for the French style manifested by Zethrin’s countless arrangements of Lully and his ilk.

Zethrin was also a keen antiquarian, and was said by the 18^th century Swedish author and genealogist Abraham Hülphers to have ‘owned Hist. Collections of Music, which since his death have been misappropriated’. The content of Zethrin’s library can be seen in a catalogue dated 1779 in the Musik- och teaterbiblioteket (the Music and Theatre Library of Sweden).

Maria Schildt © 2015
Trans. Neil Betteridge