7

HERE’S THE FIRST

Here’s the first

Sing hup fol-de-rol la la la la

Here’s the first

Sing hup fol-de-rol la la

He who doesn’t drink the first

Shall never, ever quench his thirst

Here’s the first!

[drink]

Sing hup fol-de-rol la la!

When Scandinavians want to party like the Swedes, they raise their glasses and sing the first line of ‘Helan går’ (‘Here’s the first’). That does the trick. They then go back to getting drunk in the normal way.

The first three notes of the drinking song — e, g, and c — sound bright and challenging, a signal to interrupt-whatever-you’re-doing-and-listen-up! It’s easy to imagine a trumpeter in an army band playing them as a fanfare. Some time around the turn of the century, someone put words to the melody and ‘Here’s the first’ became as popular as drinking itself. (Even though the Swedish capital at the time only had a population of 70,000 people, there were around 700 pubs.)

The first time the drinking song is noted in a historical context was on stage in an opera by Frans Berwald in 1845. It turned out the drinking song wasn’t considered classy enough for the jewel-rattling audience. The orchestra obstructed it by drumming their bows on the music stands and that was the end of that. No one ever heard anything of that opera again. Not that ‘Here’s the first’ lost its power — far from it. Forty years later, the writer August Strindberg rhetorically asked if it was not in fact Sweden’s true national anthem. In an essay called ‘I Bernadottes land’ (‘Bernadotte’s country’) he described how respectable men stood up at dinner parties and with serious dedication sang their hearts out: ‘It is a strange sight to see the director-general of the national heritage board, the university professor, the theatre manager and the member of the Royal Swedish Academy turn into young boys.’

Another fifty years later, the Hungarian-Austrian composer Franz Lehár made a similar observation. When his operetta The Merry Widow was to be performed in Stockholm in 1936, he visited the city and was wined and dined by the cultural stars of the time as well as business executives. After a dinner at Operakällaren — the ‘in’ place at the time — when all the men in evening dress present stood up with grave faces and burst into ‘Here’s the first’, Lehár was convinced he had heard the Swedish national anthem. And he liked it. Back in Vienna he composed five variations on the theme, so the drinking song now exists in a minor key as a Viennese waltz.

Ironically, the idea of the drinking song as national anthem actually came true. At the Ice Hockey World Cup final in 1957, the Swedish team played against the Soviet Union and defeated them. But the organisers hadn’t taken a Swedish victory into account and subsequently hadn’t brought a gramophone record with the Swedish anthem to play during the prize ceremony. There they were, the winners of the World Cup, represented by the Swedish player Lasse Björn, standing at the top of the prize pool with Czechs and Russians on each side below and no national anthem to be found — what was he supposed to do? He chose the one song he was sure the whole team could sing by heart. And while they sang, the legendary Soviet Marshal Zhukov, who had won the battle of Stalingrad and taken the Red Army into Berlin, firmly stood to attention: sing hup fol-de-rol la la!