I watched the clip (thank you), and wow, yeah, Posa is incredibly intense. Props to whoever's playing him. And Philip is so sinister. "But beware of the Grand Inquisitor," omg. It gave me the shivers.
My fandom's parallel here is that Friedrich, in all his copious spare time in between trying to singlehandedly micromanage a country from the top down and waging expansionist wars on all his neighbors (the man apparently slept five hours a night max and lived on coffee*), composed music and played the flute near-professionally and, what is relevant for our purposes, wrote libretti for operas he had commissioned. And one in particular, Montezuma, reminds me of Posa's speech, or at least what little I know about Montezuma does.
I'll just quote one of Friedrich's biographers quoting the relevant parties:
"The greatest work by Frederick and Graun is deemed to be Montezuma: ‘Graun has surpassed himself with the music’, Frederick told his sister. The monarch was adapting it for the carnival of 1754. Frederick worked some of his religious prejudices into a didactic text. ‘What,’ says the Aztec, ‘shall I think of a religion which teaches you to hold all others in contempt … Our religion is more perfect … it commands that we should love all mortals …’ ‘You are right to assume that for Montezuma I am interested in making Cortez into a tyrant,’ he wrote to Algarotti in Padua, ‘and as a result we can unleash, in the music itself, a few jibes at the Catholic religion; but I am forgetting you are in one of the countries of the Inquisition; excuse me, and I hope I shall see you soon in a land of heretics where even opera can serve to reform manners and destroy superstition.'"
So yes, I think Friedrich would have approved of the thrust of this speech. (Regardless of whether he liked Schiller in general, which apparently he didn't. Though I don't know what work(s) he was basing that on, or even if he was basing it on what he had read by Schiller as opposed to an unshakable dislike of German language and literature, and also the fact that his motto, aside from "Sleep when you're dead" was always "If you can't say something nice, say something as vitriolic as you can.")
* Ask me about the time he decided to use himself as an experimental test subject for whether it was possible, with enough coffee, to do without sleep altogether. Fritz, you're crazy, ILU so much.
no subject
My fandom's parallel here is that Friedrich, in all his copious spare time in between trying to singlehandedly micromanage a country from the top down and waging expansionist wars on all his neighbors (the man apparently slept five hours a night max and lived on coffee*), composed music and played the flute near-professionally and, what is relevant for our purposes, wrote libretti for operas he had commissioned. And one in particular, Montezuma, reminds me of Posa's speech, or at least what little I know about Montezuma does.
I'll just quote one of Friedrich's biographers quoting the relevant parties:
"The greatest work by Frederick and Graun is deemed to be Montezuma: ‘Graun has surpassed himself with the music’, Frederick told his sister. The monarch was adapting it for the carnival of 1754. Frederick worked some of his religious prejudices into a didactic text. ‘What,’ says the Aztec, ‘shall I think of a religion which teaches you to hold all others in contempt … Our religion is more perfect … it commands that we should love all mortals …’ ‘You are right to assume that for Montezuma I am interested in making Cortez into a tyrant,’ he wrote to Algarotti in Padua, ‘and as a result we can unleash, in the music itself, a few jibes at the Catholic religion; but I am forgetting you are in one of the countries of the Inquisition; excuse me, and I hope I shall see you soon in a land of heretics where even opera can serve to reform manners and destroy superstition.'"
So yes, I think Friedrich would have approved of the thrust of this speech. (Regardless of whether he liked Schiller in general, which apparently he didn't. Though I don't know what work(s) he was basing that on, or even if he was basing it on what he had read by Schiller as opposed to an unshakable dislike of German language and literature, and also the fact that his motto, aside from "Sleep when you're dead" was always "If you can't say something nice, say something as vitriolic as you can.")
* Ask me about the time he decided to use himself as an experimental test subject for whether it was possible, with enough coffee, to do without sleep altogether. Fritz, you're crazy, ILU so much.