The most beautiful cities in Sweden

Sweden is a country of rare beauty, even amid its starkest northern landscapes. Its cities and towns testify to 1000 years of urban life, but there are precious places offering glimpses into even older traditions of human settlement.

Performing arts

Despite outstanding contributions elsewhere, Sweden's greatest impact in the performing arts has been in cinema.

Music

Swedish music did not acquire wide international recognition until the 1970s. The Romantic composer Franz Berwald acquired European reputation only after his death and was forced to work much of his life as a factory manager.

The musician closest to Swedish hearts is Carl Michael Bellman, an 18th century poet and balladeer who lived and moved among the common people of Stockholm and best represented the flavour of his time. Bellman’s 20th century successor Evert Taube continued the folk tradition, playing largely traditional instruments.

ABBA, with Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Stig Anderson as songwriters, took the international popular music scene by storm in the 1970s and a museum about the group’s career is now open in Stockholm.

Musical ensembles

The royal opera Kungliga Operan, with the orchestra Kungliga Hovkapellet, performs at the classic Stockholm opera house at Gustaf Adolfs torg. Also based in Stockholm, in Konserthuset at Hötorget, is Kungliga Filharmonikerna.

Sveriges Radios Symfoniorkester performs at Berwaldhallen on Dag Hammarskjölds väg.

Gothenburg’s Göteborgs Symfoniker is based at Göteborgs Konserthus.

Other orchestras are based in Malmö, Uppsala, Örebro and Norrköping.

Film

Sweden’s filmmakers and actors have made the greatest international impact in the arts.
The towering figure among Swedish directors is Ingmar Bergman, also an actor and screenwriter, whose greatest films include the works known in English as The Seventh Seal, Fanny and Alexander and Cries and Whispers. In a long career that began in the 1940s, he was also the writer of Faithless.

His predecessor Victor Sjöström worked in Hollywood in the 1920s and regarded as the father of Swedish film. Following Bergman’s inspiration were Jan Troell (The Emigrants), Bo Widerberg (The Man from Majorca), Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog) and Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor).

The actors are even better known, and women led the way. Greta Garbo, who began her Hollywood career in 1920s silent films, Ingrid Bergman, Mai Zetterling (also a director), Liv Ullmann (who directed Faithless) are the leading names and Noomi Rapace came to international prominence in the so-called Millennium trilogy.

Max von Sydow followed the path to Hollywood in the mid-1960s and Stellan Skarsgård worked extensively in Swedish films, abroad and in television. Mikael Nykvist starred opposite Rapace in the Millennium films. Krister Henriksson became an international success playing the role of detective Kurt Wallander both in films and for TV.

Literature

The playwright and novelist August Strindberg was part of the Naturalism movement in theatre and considered an innovator. His novel Röda Rummet made a big impact in literary circles and in Scandinavian society. But he never won a Nobel Prize, an accolade that went to his contemporary Selma Lagerlöf (the first woman and the first Swede to win the literature prize), Verner von Heidenstam, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson (who shared the prize in 1974) and Pär Lagerkvist, and the poets Tomas Tranströmer and Erik Axel Karlfeldt.

However the best known Swedish writer is Astrid Lindgren, whose books about the character Pippi Longstocking have been translated into 80 languages. She wrote more than 70 other books. Among other novelists, Vilhelm Moberg stands out for the impact of his books, known in English as The Emigrants and The Immigrants. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy was made into three international hit films in 2009. Henning Mankell’s nine Wallander novels were made into films and a long-running TV series.