A Greeting from the Past

In the early 1970s, Ingmar Bergman moved to an apartment in the building at Karlaplan 10 with his wife Ingrid. In his autobiography Laterna Magica from 1987, he mentions the fact that August Strindberg at the beginning of the 1900s lived in a now demolished house on the exact same spot. Bergman writes: ‘There once stood the Red House where Strindberg lived with Harriet Bosse. The first night I woke up to soft piano music through the floors. It was Schumann's Aufschwung, one of Strindberg's favorite pieces. Perhaps a greeting?’ At another place, the director writes: ‘One night he called and we arranged to meet on Karlavägen. I was shocked and reverent but remembered to pronounce his name correctly: Ågust.’