cahn | Opera for Beginners (Part 3 of 3)

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Opera for Beginners (Part 3 of 3)

I talked about Opera for Beginners for my family reunion talk and used much of the advice I was given here, thank you! :)

-I brought speakers, because there isn't much use in giving an opera talk if you can't hear the music! The hilarious thing was that I was not the only one who had audio/audiovisual components to my presentation, but I was the only one who had brought speakers. I had been a little bitter about lugging them all around Montana, but less so when they turned out to be broadly useful :) What was more irritating was that after they worked fine when I tried them out in my office, they didn't work at all for a while when I was trying to give the talk. Finally my cousin's teenager, who was acting as unofficial tech support, suggested rebooting as a last resort, and of course that worked. Sigh.

-A couple of people mentioned talking about where one might go looking for opera. My biggest recommendations to a newbie are the following:
1.The Chandos Opera in English CDs, without which I would still hate opera today. I highly highly recommend all the Mozart ones, particularly the da Ponte operas (Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte), and the bel canto comedies (e.g., Barber of Seville, The Elixir of Love), and dis-recommend their Verdi except Don Carlos (for some reason Verdi tends to come out a bit muddled). Their French opera also seems to be very good, and I absolutely adore their Eugene Onegin (which stars Thomas Hampson and Kiri te Kanawa).

2. Met On Demand, which comes with a free 7-day trial. People who know a lot about opera rag on the Met for not being adventurous in its staging and concept, which, fair, but for a beginner, in my opinion, that's exactly what you want, and you can't do better than the Met for gorgeous staging and costumes, great singers, and great videography, which I didn't even know would affect me until I started watching a bunch of these... and... it does actually make a huge difference when watching video. (Watching live is, of course, different.)

-I showed several clips, one of which was a 3-minute clip of Kaufmann/Hampson/Salminen in the auto-da-fe scene from Don Carlo. (Alagna/Keenlyside/Furlanetto is still the whole version of Don Carlo I would recommend, but for auto-da-fe out of context I thought the former was better, not least because it didn't have a giant weeping Jesus in the background.) I explained beforehand the background about how Posa is Prince Carlo's best friend but also has the relationship where he has sworn fealty to King Philip. (I have uploaded the clip here (google drive video clip, ~3 minutes) --

mildredofmidgard, I know music/opera is Not Your Thing but this is the moment in Don Carlo I was talking about, check it out) and my big triumph, as far as I am concerned, is that when the clip ended my cousin cried out, "Oh, that's so sad!" MY WORK HERE IS DONE.

-My other great triumph was that E was curious about what I said about Don Giovanni. Being her, she could not care less about Don G himself -- she was perfectly content with a limited understanding that he was the Bad Guy -- but she was particularly interested in what I said about Don G coming to a sticky end, and asked about it the next day. Once I further explained that there was a singing statue and that in many productions Don G disappeared into flames with the statue at the end, both she and A really wanted to watch it, so that afternoon we all snuggled up on the couch and watched "Don Giovanni, a cenar teco" (this one with Rodney Gilfrey) and they still ask for "the statue opera" on occasion. (That's the only part they have watched or are interested in watching, or that I am interested in playing for them, until they're a lot older. Well, okay, "O statua gentilissima," but that's along the same lines.)

-Since you guys said it was fun for people to recognize music in opera, another short clip I showed was from Thais, because, well, I don't know if it's all Koreans or just my particular family, but all our extended relatives LOOOOOVE Meditation from Thais and all of us cousins who play violin (or piano, if that cousin happened to be near one of the cousins who played violin) have had to play that song approximately six million times, every time a third cousin twice removed came to visit. There was much groaning when the melody was revealed :)

-It turns out my aunt (uncle's wife) really likes opera!!!! We are already making plans to go to Salzburg or Italy sometime and watch opera :D (well, pipe dreams right now... I certainly wouldn't go until my kids are older)

(Part 1 was where I asked for help; Part 2 was an outtake of this post about emoting in opera)

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Wait, I missed that! *rewatches*

Ohhh noooooeesss. :-((( Maaan. These tragic stories.

While we're keeping up the parallels, I maintain that Katte was also, at one point, trying to telepathically get Fritz to understand. (I hope he did. I think he did. IN MY HEADCANON HE DID.)

In summary, around the time he was being condemned to death, Katte started frantically toeing the royal line. He recanted his atheism, starting loudly praying and loudly singing hymns, and wrote a last farewell letter to Fritz in which he urged total submission to the King's will and reminded him that he had always done so and had tried to talk him out of the escape plan.

The key thing to know here is that Fritz and Katte were freethinkers (the former ended up being the most prominent royal freethinker in Europe), and Friedrich Wilhelm was suuuper pious. One of his major contentions with his son and heir was that Friedrich was not falling into line with the specific doctrine FW subscribed to. A lot of Fritz's "rehabilitation" in prison after the escape attempt was an attempt to indoctrinate him into the right religious beliefs.

Well, the moment I read what Katte was doing, I saw a man who was desperately trying to impress the King into giving him a last-minute reprieve, while trusting Fritz to understand (with hopes of being able to explain someday). At least one historian I've found agrees.

Since after Katte's execution, Fritz also went through the motions of doing whatever his father demanded and paying lip service to everything he was told to believe, while privately keeping up a campaign of increasingly successful passive resistance, and when he became king, proceeding to do whatever the heck he wanted, including publicly proclaiming his lack of religion, I maintain that Fritz understood exactly what Katte was up to and only wished it had been successful.

Supported by Friedrich's later words when he was establishing religious toleration: "One can compel by force some poor wretch to utter a certain form of words, yet he will deny to it his inner consent; thus the persecutor has gained nothing. But if one goes back to the origins of society, it is completely clear that the sovereign has no right to dictate the way in which the citizens will think." [emphasis mine]

I'm positive Friedrich had himself in mind, and hopefully his beloved Katte too.

Omg, my boys, now I'm furious all over again. And sad. :-( </3 (Thank you for letting me ramble about my fandom again. I hope it's interesting.)

ahahaha, I am happy to let you ramble on about your fandom not least because it affects mine :D (and also because I can also ramble on about mine, lol)

wowwwwwww yeah those words from Friedrich are quiiiiite telling, I agree with you!

And, ahhhh, another parallel! Carlos and Posa are both super freethinker progressive types (Posa even more than Carlos), and one of the big sources of conflict in the play (and opera) is that King Philip and his advisors are.. not a progressive type (also super Catholic; see also Spanish Inquisition and the part where Protestant rebellions in Flanders were dealt with super harshly). Although the parallel fails in the sense that a) Philip is kind of fascinated with Posa anyway, and b) Posa never recants, he just doubles down on presenting himself as the villain, heh.

Also also, go back to the bit where the King taps Posa with the sword as he makes him a duke: you can see this Posa tense up and wince at that point. (THOMAS HAMPSON. [the baritone who is playing Posa] HE IS SO GREAT. But I digress!)

OMG, that's an awesome parallel! Friedrich had veeeery strong words about Catholicism and the Inquisition. And in the words of one of his biographers, "Frederick cannot have been the first nominally Christian European sovereign not to have believed in Christian doctrine, but he was surely the first to parade his skepticism so brazenly."

Although the parallel fails in the sense that a) Philip is kind of fascinated with Posa anyway, and b) Posa never recants, he just doubles down on presenting himself as the villain, heh

Yeah, the Philip+Posa dynamic seems to be wildly different from the Friedrich Wilhelm+Katte dynamic. I guess you can't copy your sources exactly, have to be creative somewhere. ;)

Also, I'm guessing Posa never recants because he's never condemned to death? Atheism (or Deism) is not a philosophy that lends itself well to martyrdom. The pagan Roman emperors had no trouble getting their atheist subjects to sacrifice to the state gods while mocking the whole affair; when they tried to get Christians to do the same...well, that's where most of the early saints come from.

Also also, Katte's recantation took the form of claiming that he only pretended to be atheist because he moved in circles where that was fashionable and made your conversation seem sparkling and brilliant. I am reminded of Katherine Parr, Henry VIII's sixth wife, about to be arrested by Henry's order for having said one too many things that made it sound like she supported Protestantism. Fortunately for her head, she happened to be walking with Henry when the official came to arrest her, and she talked fast. Specifically, she said that she only said these controversial things in Henry's presence to distract him from the pain of his ulcers, as well as to be instructed by his wise counterarguments. He totally fell for it, chased off the guy who was trying to arrest his wife, and stayed on good terms with her until his death. She was the "lived" in "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, lived."

I wish Friedrich Wilhelm I had been as gullible as Henry VIII. :( Instead, he said things to Katte's grandfather like, "Look, I'm being nice to you and *only* beheading your grandson, because I like you and your son so much. *Really* what he deserves is to be torn apart with red-hot pincers, but I'm merciful."

Also also, go back to the bit where the King taps Posa with the sword as he makes him a duke: you can see this Posa tense up and wince at that point.

I don't have to go back, I noticed it the first time! And again the second time. That is one sad panda. :(

Please ramble on about your fandom, it's fun!

ahahaha oh yes in Schiller Posa has this whole long soliloquy (which is apparently a hugely famous soliloquy if one is German) on being progressive and freethinking and on the side of Freedom and really skirting heresy if not actually being completely heretical. At one point he says something along the lines of "Chance... I mean God... brought me here!" and it's totally clear that he's an atheist who is just barely toeing the party line. (In the first draft of the opera that "Chance... God..." bit is kept, but in revision I think Verdi realized he'd changed Posa enough that it didn't quite fit anymore and he threw it out. Opera!Posa is still a freethinker, in the sense of being a big proponent of Freedom and daring to stand up to Philip and -- oh, here, I can't help but give you another clip, , it's only three minutes and will show you exactly the bit I'm talking about, and Furlanetto and Keenlyside are just brilliant together -- anyway, but I feel in the opera he comes out as much less fanatical/manipulative and more sort of "conventionally" honorable and loyal (and in a way that I'm a complete sucker for).

Yeah, the Philip+Posa dynamic seems to be wildly different from the Friedrich Wilhelm+Katte dynamic. I guess you can't copy your sources exactly, have to be creative somewhere. ;)

Hee, yeah.

Also, I'm guessing Posa never recants because he's never condemned to death?

Ugh, it's much more complicated than that, actually, and I would say that he does consider himself as a Martyr to the Cause, but that cause isn't atheism. In the play, I claim that he just gets lost in all his complicated plots :P So he's totally fanatical about progressivism in general and Flanders in particular, and everything else seems subsumed to that. When it looks like he's screwed up his plotting so that the King is bound to think Carlos is having an affair with the Queen (and thus decide to kill Carlos), he decides the best course of action is to frame HIMSELF as being in love with the Queen so that the king will kill HIM instead. If you think I am sounding frustrated with Posa here, you are correct! This is actually the culmination of several other complicated plans Posa has in the play, which go terribly wrong because he doesn't ever TELL, say, his best friend that he's plotting all this stuff involving him.

Oh, here, I found where I wrote about it: The manipulativeness also manifests in Schiller!Rodrigo also never actually telling Carlos about any of his Sekret Plans regarding Carlos' papers and such. In the play, in lieu of the auto-da-fe, Schiller!Posa actually shows Carlos' papers to the King minus a problematic letter-from-the-Queen, in order to clear Carlos' name with respect to having had an affair with her. He has a whole monologue where he ruminates about how he's being secretive, and things might well have turned out very differently had he actually just bothered to tell Carlos that he wasn't going to give the King the problematic letter. Because Carlos, understandably, thinks he's shown the King everything, and he is thinking along these lines:

CARLOS (lost in deep thought).
And from me
Has he concealed all this? And why from me?

(We all wonder this, Carlos!)

CARLOS.
He loved me—loved me greatly: I was dear
As his own soul is to him. That I know—
Of that I've had a thousand proofs. But should
The happiness of millions yield to one?
Must not his country dearer to him prove
Than Carlos?

It turns out this is not true, or at least not provably true, but Carlos can hardly be blamed for thinking so. (And indeed Posa says later, " I have created in my Carlos' soul/ A paradise for millions!" and one might suspect that if his creation hadn't turned out so well, that he might have not loved Carlos so well...?)

Indeed Posa's secret plans drive all the rest of the action of the play: Carlos, understandably worried that the Queen might be in trouble if Rodrigo is betraying him, goes and talks to Eboli to try to get her to get him in to warn the Queen. Posa, alarmed by this (because he does not trust Eboli), bursts in and arrests Carlos ("He is mad! He raves! Believe him not!" in another bit where the opera version makes Rodrigo look WAY more sympathetic). But it's too late, Posa thinks: Carlos has already told Eboli he loves the Queen. Then Posa basically sees no way out but to frame himself as in love with the queen and get assassinated by Philip. GAH.

Opera!Posa is just as dumb, though less manipulative and so I love him a lot more: he simply decides he wants to save Carlos' life and Flanders, and sacrifices himself by framing himself as the "traitor of Flanders." (This is actually rather more nonsensical than the play, as it doesn't seem to make up for the fact that opera!Carlo did draw his sword against the King, but whatever, it's an opera.)

Ohhhhh I didn't know that about Katherine Parr! (I knew she was the survivor :) ) That's awesome.

Haha, thanks for letting me ramble on about my fandom!

Edited 2019-08-13 18:19 (UTC)

Oooh, that was a really interesting ramble!

"Chance... I mean God... brought me here!"
aLOL. I could totes see Fritz or Katte saying this.

Thank you for the summary of Posa's nonsensical plots! Omfg, you're right, that is so frustrating. I like manipulative types, but only when they're several orders of magnitude more intelligent than everyone around them. This...does not sound like that.

This is actually the culmination of several other complicated plans Posa has in the play, which go terribly wrong because he doesn't ever TELL, say, his best friend that he's plotting all this stuff involving him.

Oh, Posa, noooooo!! You have to actually tell your BFF about your plots! *facepalm*

Now, I see your fandom's Very Stupid Plot and raise you my own fandom's Very Stupid Plot. :DD

Specifically, the attempted escape attempt that got Katte killed and Fritz imprisoned for years and traumatized for life. This plot was so poorly planned and executed that it stands out to everyone who knows the first thing about Frederick the Great's later life as "How the fuck was this plan devised by the same guy who won a three-front war against three of the biggest European superpowers?"

Now, I'm sympathetic to the idea that we should not expect an eighteen-year-old to come up with an A+ plan for escaping from a lifetime of abuse at the hands of an absolute monarch (which is a level up from your normal abusive father). But the difference in quality is just so drastic that some of his biographers have speculated that it was less of an escape plan than a ploy for attention. Fritz may have wanted to get caught, or at least subconsciously. I think the case for this is definitely plausible, although I think there are a lot of other factors that account for the ridiculously boneheaded plan.

Now here's the boneheaded plan so you can judge for yourself.

First and foremost, Fritz and Katte told practically everyone, well in advance. Between the two of them, so many people knew about this plan that it's only a surprise it didn't reach the King *sooner*. Then everything went comically wrong. Katte was supposed to get permission to leave Berlin. He didn't. So he was stuck there. Fritz decided to make his move anyway. While on a road trip with his father. He made a handful of attempts, none of which made it more than about two feet past the front door? Something like that. He dressed in the most conspicuous manner possible, to the point where everyone knew something was up, even those not in the know, and one guy was like, "*Please* take that off, your father is going to *kill* you if he sees you wearing that."

Reader, he got caught.

Here, look. I have a clip for you! From 21:40 - 22:37. It's taken some creative license with the details, but the spirit of the absurdity should come through. The coat, the getting caught in the front yard, the way everybody knows...

What happened was that one of the many, many people who knew about the plan got cold feet and fessed up to the King, who ordered his son taken into custody.

At this point, Fritz is still dramatically underestimating the extent of his father's batshittery. He taunts him with the fact that he was trying to escape (giving credence to the fact that he may have thought getting caught might get him what he wanted--better treatment--without all the trouble of going to England via France). Then, when asked to name his conspirators, he implicates everyone. (He may have been trying to plea bargain, especially given the fact that no one's tracks were well hidden--more on that later.) He's also supposed to have said something along the lines of "I don't care what you do to me, but I would care very much if something happened to my friends who were involved, whom I have conveniently just named for you."

Friiitz. *facepalm*

Now, once word of the escape attempt got out, it was a huge scandal throughout Europe. Virtually everyone's sympathies were with Fritz (and Katte as an afterthought). Heads of state like Great Britain and the Holy Roman Empire were writing to Friedrich Wilhelm, begging him to please take a chill pill and not kill everyone involved. Katte was apparently mentioned by name by George II.

This is the context in which you should understand that FW's lackey, who was ordered to arrest Katte, in Berlin, was like, "*cough* Katte, I'm coming to arrest you in *cough* three hours. *cough cough*"

Katte: "Yes, yes, getting the hell out of Dodge any minute now."

The arresting official was reported to have been extremely shocked and disappointed that Katte was still there to be arrested three hours later. He had packed and made plans on where he was going to flee to, but in in all that time hadn't actually budged.

Contemporary and modern sources differ on why Katte, with all that warning that his arrest was imminent, dithered until his window of opportunity for escape had closed. My own guess is that he was undecided between whether it was better to be a live dog or a dead lion.

(The third main conspirator, condemned to death, had no such hesitation. He immediately escaped to England, where FW's attempts to have him extradited were unsuccessful, then didn't come back to Prussia until Fritz became king ten years later. Then apparently spent the rest of his life complaining that the money and honors he got from Fritz in gratitude were not commensurate with his sacrifice. Now, Fritz, not known in general for being generous or appreciative on the one hand, but on the other, also probably not impressed by the complaints of the live dog when he was still regularly having nightmares about the dead lion.)

(P.S. I am no making no personal value judgments on the intelligence or courage of the respective strategies. I respect both.)

MEANWHILE. It's also possible that Katte, in addition to maybe not wanting to leave Fritz to face the music all alone (again, my guess, but at least one biographer agrees), may have not had time to escape before destroying all the evidence. There was apparently a shit ton of material evidence of the conspiracy. To the extent that we can trust Fritz's sister's memoirs, she reports herself and their mother--who were both in on the plan--frantically destroying all the incriminating letters and writing new ones. She records that there were 1,500 such letters and they only had time to get to about 700 of them in the three days they had. Yes, you read those numbers right. No, that was not a typo.

Interesting thought: if Schiller was having his characters play games with letters, he may have based that on this episode.

So Katte may have had a bunch of letters of his own to destroy, plus all those valuables Fritz had given him for safekeeping to hide, before he could leave, who knows. This is the theory of some biographers for why he lingered so long when he knew his arrest was imminent.

Then, under interrogation, Katte couldn't very well deny that he was in on the plan or that he hadn't told anyone. He did say that he had tried to talk Fritz out of it, but Fritz was determined to leave with or without him. But then when asked if he would have left the country with Fritz, if push came to shove, he answered yes. He said he loved Fritz too much and couldn't tell him no.

KAAAATTE! That sort of thing is deniable! Especially given that the official death penalty charge was desertion from the army. Just say you wouldn't have gone! Lie a little! Fritz will forgive you.

Sigh.

As for Katte's motivations, I don't think he saw himself as a martyr for anything except his love of Fritz. And a reluctant one at that. See: trying to talk Fritz out of the escape attempt, not sneaking out of Berlin when his commanding officer refused him permission to go legally, probably hoping the whole thing would blow over. And then I think he couldn't decide whether to save his skin or stick by Fritz, and made a sort of non-decision that was effectively the latter.

According to Fritz's sister, Katte had said to her before all the shit hit the fan, "I have written to him and clearly stated that I refuse to follow him. If he undertakes such a move, I shall answer with my head. It will be for a pretty cause, but the crown prince will not abandon me." But then Fritz seems to have been a more strong-willed personality than Katte in general, as well as having something to gain from this specific move.

In the end, as you know, Katte died with all the fortitude of a martyr. He made a very conspicuous display of courage and loyalty, and if you ask me, he was playing simultaneously to three audiences. One, doing his family proud (his last letters show him trying to comfort them). Two, sending Fritz the message every way he could that he didn't blame him and wasn't suffering. Three, as we've discussed, trying to get a last-minute change of heart from Friedrich Wilhelm.

All of which is to say, at great length, here lies another major difference between Katte and Posa, the reluctant follower of his friend's stupid plot vs. the enthusiastic deviser of stupid plots involving his friend. But the parallels are just as clear.

Oh! I was going to ramble about the huge contrast with Fritz's later fame as master deviser of less stupid plots. So, of course he was much older, and he had an army, and he had absolute power instead of being under the thumb of someone with absolute power, and all that good stuff. But here's one thing that, in all my reading about the Katte affair, I have not seen anyone comment on, including all the people boggling about how FREDERICK the freaking GREAT came up with that escape attempt, and who are you and what have you done with Frederick the Great?

Well, Fritz later became pathologically secretive about all his plans. Notoriously so. He said things like, "Three can keep a secret if two be dead," and "If I discovered my own skin knew what I was going to do, I would have it peeled off and thrown away," and how he didn't worry about foreign powers spying on him during his wars, because "in order to know my secrets, you need to corrupt me personally, and that isn’t easy." Things like this get quoted everywhere by everyone.

Well, I've seen ONE biographer comment that this probably comes from having to keep so many secrets from his father for so long. And yes, this was the man who, in his twenties, would later sneak all his friends outside the palace and into a wood or cave so they could practice their forbidden chamber music.

But NO ONE has apparently considered that MAYBE the time when he told EVERYONE about his Very Secret Escape Attempt and he was imprisoned and forced to watch his best friend/possible love of his life get beheaded before his very eyes was RELEVANTLY TRAUMATIC. The thing about trauma is that people take away ideas about how the world works from their extremely memorable experiences, often ideas more subtle than this, and then proceed to over-apply those ideas in their most extreme version to everything that ever happens to them for the rest of their lives (or until they get therapy). "Telling people your plans ends in catastrophe for everyone involved" seems like a pretty obvious candidate for this phenomenon.

/ExcessiveUseofCapslock

So, wow, yeah, I kind of wonder how much this particular plot was at the forefront of Schiller's mind.

Ohhhhh I didn't know that about Katherine Parr! (I knew she was the survivor :) ) That's awesome.

It is! It's one of my favorite anecdotes about Katherine. She was, by all accounts, a highly intelligent and strong-willed woman who had a significant influence on her stepdaughter, future Elizabeth I.

Oh, one of the secret-keeping quotes that gets repeated all over the place because it's one of his witty retorts was when he first came to the throne, was planning something (now known to be the invasion of Silesia), and everyone wanted to know if there was going to be a war and where and when.

When one courtier was trying to winkle the truth out of him, Friedrich beckoned him over and took him by the hand. "Can you keep a secret?" he asked, sotto voce.

"Oh, yes, Your Majesty." The guy started to get excited.

"Well, so can I!"

Fritz was a first-rate troll, all his life.

But of course, reading that, all I can think is, "Yes, you learned that the hard way, and then never unlearned it. SOMEBODY GET THIS MAN A THERAPIST!"

Wowwwwww. That is just... Fritz and Katte :((((((( It sounds very much like Friedrich wasn't actually serious about it and mostly was using it as a cry for attention from his dad. Which clearly backfired MASSIVELY. (added later: lol, I skimmed over the paragraph where you said the exact same thing, but caught it on reread. But wow, it's hard to escape that conclusion! I mean, I can imagine there was other stuff going on as well, but wow. What do you think were the other things going on?)

The arresting official was reported to have been extremely shocked and disappointed that Katte was still there to be arrested three hours later.

:(((((( I wonder, like you, whether maybe he didn't want to leave Fritz to deal with his dad alone?

(also, lol the third conspirator. Personally I am totally with the third conspirator, though mad respect for Katte.)

She records that there were 1,500 such letters... Interesting thought: if Schiller was having his characters play games with letters, he may have based that on this episode.

Holy cow. That's... a lot of letters.

Schiller does more with letters (I think there are three intercepted letters? one may be a message rather than an actual letter, I can't remember? there are a lot of letters and letter-related plot) but Verdi's libretto writers definitely honed it down to a single packet of letters, written by Carlo, that are explicitly treasonous (they have to do with the Matter of Flanders). These are the letters Posa takes and frames himself with in the opera (though in the play Posa writes his own framing treasonous I-am-in-love-with-the-queen letter). I always liked the opera version of the letters better, although I always thought it was a bit odd that Carlo is randomly hanging out writing treasonous letters, especially since it is clearly Posa who is the one who is super invested in Flanders. But if Mery/du Locle (the libretto writers) were thinking about this episode with Fritz and Katte, then it makes perfect sense that Carlo is the one who has these letters (since in "source" Fritz-and-Katte canon they had to do with escaping rather than freeing Flanders (*), and that being the treasonous thing) and that Posa bears the brunt of the contents of them. Wow.

(*) Actually it's escaping at least metaphorically in Schiller and Verdi too, of course -- you probably remember that in that clip Carlo says he wants to escape from the court and be sent to Flanders. To which, of course, Philip responds that he is a crazy idiot.

(also, lol the third conspirator. Personally I am totally with the third conspirator, though mad respect for Katte.)

You will never catch me being anything but a live dog, but I love me some dead lions in history and fiction. <3

:(((((( I wonder, like you, whether maybe he didn't want to leave Fritz to deal with his dad alone?

I am surprised more authors haven't proposed this. I've only found one so far. (Admittedly, I'm limited to English sources plus online German sources that can be put through Google Translate. But all the major English sources are working from German sources, so...)

But then I'm finding that biographers tend to be critical of Katte in general, at times when I feel like they should be more critical of their sources. Two of our main primary sources for Katte were people who specifically didn't like him or his influence on Friedrich. Emphasis on how bad-looking he is, for instance, in a way that seems far from dispassionate. So modern sources will just refer to him as a "libertine" or "a bad influence" and I'm like...but what does that mean? Because if you mean gay and atheist, then that's very different than if you mean, say, "squandering his inheritance on gambling" or "disappearing into brothels with total abandon." But no one is ever specific. It makes me very suspicious.

He also gets cast as silly, vain, and ambitious, again based on what I think is inadequate evidence. So for example, it seems that when he and Fritz were BFFs, he ran around name-dropping and telling everyone with great excitement that the Crown Prince confided in him. Our contemporary sources report this with great disapproval. And yeah, he clearly contributed to the vast numbers of people who knew about the fatal escape attempt, and that was not the most street-smart thing to do. And sure, courtiers letting royal favor go to their heads is a thing.

But when our same contemporary sources say that the Prince was carrying on about Katte like a lover with his mistress, and an older, sadder, and wiser Katte at his trial is confessing that he let ambition go to his head...I have another possible interpretation for "Fritz is going on about Katte all the time because he's totally besotted, and Katte is going on about Fritz all the time because he's ambitious." If you look at their actions, they were both doing the exact same thing. Katte painting a miniature of Fritz and carrying it around with him until he died, and not being able to get through a conversation without mentioning how excited he is about him...is consistent with the same infatuation that we attribute to Fritz's behavior! NO ONE (that I have seen) has put this idea forward. It's not necessarily better supported by the evidence than the ambition theory, but ambition doesn't explain being willing to go into exile and willing to stick around and face the music together, either. Nor does spending the last few moments of your life trying to make your prince feel better.

So let's think for about two seconds why Katte may have been casting his actions in the light of ambition at a court martial on which he was on trial for his life, in a place and time where sodomy was punishable by death, oh right because maybe he didn't want to admit he was head over heels in love, right. Also the part where he couldn't exactly say, "I felt sorry for the abusive situation my boyfriend was stuck in and sympathetic to his desires to get the hell out of there." Even the horse's mouth is not a reliable source under these circumstances, is what I'm saying!

So while I realize this is fanon, I do think it's at least plausible that Katte was indecisive about whether it was worth the risk of standing by Fritz, as opposed to the motive that's given in the primary source we have and sometimes blindly repeated by moderns: namely that he wasn't going to flee until his fancy French saddle was done being made, because if you're fleeing for your life, you have to do it in style at all costs. Which makes him look irredeemably stupid. (I do think if there's any truth to this story, it was probably indecisive procrastination. But some authors at least have the decency to speculate that maybe he was busy destroying the evidence instead.)

ETA: I'm not saying no one has ever suggested Katte genuinely loved Fritz. Plenty of people assume that and have positive things to say about his love, loyalty, and courage. It's just that the "and also motivated by ambition" tends to be repeated blindly in ways that I think are just too uncritical.

I mean, I can imagine there was other stuff going on as well, but wow. What do you think were the other things going on?

Haha, well, this is going to have to wait, because I have a looooot of opinions about psychology and trauma in general and Fritz's psychology specifically (which are part fanon, part headcanon), and it's almost midnight here and I must go to bed. But rest assured, my opinions will be expressed in great detail at some point, probably soon. :P

Also, RIP Fritz, d. August 17, 1786, age 74. I'm sorry you never got that therapist and ended up perpetuating the cycle of trauma on others instead. I think you would have turned out a lot more like (a much more musically talented) me in my shoes. (And yeah, a huge part of my fascination and sympathy with him more than with his victims is a strong "There but for the grace of not being born in the eighteenth century to an abusive militaristic father with a big army and then given absolute power go I" feeling.)

Edited 2019-08-18 04:03 (UTC)

What do you think were the other things going on?

Okay, so I have a ridiculously long and detailed set of thoughts about this escape plan and its ineffectiveness, and why it may have been the best plan he was capable of. The obvious differences I've run through in another comment: he was only 18, he was living in a state where his father had absolute power, he didn't have an army at his disposal, etc.

But the core of my reservations about the "cry for attention" is that there is a tendency among humans to attribute purpose to everything they see. Though the term "teleological fallacy" is usually reserved for creationism/evolution debates, I would like to see the term used more broadly, because this fallacy is so widespread in human thinking that it crops up everywhere.

In particular, there is a tendency among people to think that if someone is doing something self-defeating, they must be getting something out of it, they must have some reason, it must be by design. The fact that the outside observer can see that that there are really obvious and apparently easy ways to improve their situation means they must be doing it on purpose.

In the psychodynamics school of thought, this is called "secondary gain." Major example: depressed people must be getting something out of their depression. Attention, not having to work, etc. This is among the most pernicious and methodologically unsound concepts out there in psychology. Depressed people, by and large, don't know how to not be depressed! Even in the cases where they can articulate better ideas in words, they're in too much emotional overload to be able to get the right neurons to fire in the right order.

Society is guilty of this too: troubled teens are "rebellious" and "defiant", not struggling with problems that are too big for them to handle. (I saw someone summarize this beautifully as "We treat teenagers like they *are* problems, not like they *have* problems.")

So I am immediately suspicious when someone breaks out the "bad idea" -> "cry for attention" assumption. Depressed people and troubled teens may well also be crying out for attention. But it isn't necessarily driving their self-defeating behavior.

There are very good reasons to believe that this was the best plan Fritz could have come up with at the time, that he genuinely believed it would succeed, and that it was only with hindsight that an older Fritz, like we ourselves, could look back and say, "Who on earth thought that plan was a good idea?"

One is that he'd been intermittently trying to run away for almost a year, and apparently had not yet set off his father's rage (details are sparse, but the very fact that details are sparse means it wasn't a huge deal on the scale of the final, catastrophic attempt). So either these were escalating attempts to get attention, or he was genuinely trying to get away and failing because it was a difficult problem relative to his resources and skill set of the time.

There's also evidence that his escape attempts correlated with the bleakness of his fluctuating marital prospects. He and Wilhelmine clearly saw their marital future as an escape, literal and metaphorical, from Dad. (In the end, both ended up marrying less desired partners as part of a bargain whereby FW agreed to treat 20-something Fritz a little better.) So, if there was no light at the end of the tunnel called marriage, that was when he decided to look for another escape.

Another reason is that Fritz does not strike me as one of those neglected children/teens who will do anything to get a reaction out of indifferent parents, even if it means getting punished. (Neglected children are one of the few cases where I accept that people are, very consciously in most cases, acting out to get attention.) He was getting abundant positive attention from his mother and older sister for doing things he enjoyed. He craved his father's approval, yes, but he was getting so much punishment and was under the royal paternal microscope so much that it's hard to believe he wanted more attention. At best, a halfhearted escape attempt may have been a game of chicken where Fritz thought, "If I show him I'm serious and I won't take this, maybe it'll force his hand even without me going all the way to England." But I kind of think he thought that after it failed (and before the consequences turned catastrophic), not before.

Another reason is that, as part of the plot around the final escape attempt, he sent a note to one of the conspirators (Katte?) right as he set off on the road trip with his father where he planned to make his escape, and the note read, roughly, "We've accounted for everything, this is our best laid plan, no way is it going to gang agley."

This note reads amazingly similarly to me to what Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his diary in Antarctica as he and the last of his surviving men lay freezing and starving to death. "We accounted for everything. We just got unlucky, and we have to accept that." Meanwhile, you need more than two hands to enumerate the mistakes he made that his contemporary and rival Amundsen avoided, which allowed Amundsen to beat Scott to the Pole by several weeks and bring all his men home safely, as opposed to every single one dying.

But Frederick the Great was smarter than that!

Not necessarily. One, abuse victims are notoriously bad at escaping from their abusers. In many cases, this is because most of the resources in their brain are being commandeered by the amygdala, which screams really simple things like, "Run away! Fight! PANIC!", as opposed to the more elaborate plans that calmer and more sophisticated parts of the brain can come up with if left alone.

Two, there is a real case to be made that Friedrich has historically been mistaken for a tactical genius, when really what was going on was that he had great talents at various aspects of war that weren't battlefield tactics. It is very easy to look at the number of battles someone won and attribute that to their personal tactical acumen.

Now, I personally haven't scrutinized this claim that he won most of his battles through means other than the famed and possibly overrated oblique order. But my impression is that it does seem to be based on more thorough examination of the documentary evidence than the usual approach I see of drawing a diagram of the battle field, describing the movements of the troops, and concluding that the winner's tactics were superior. The last time I personally scrutinized Friedrich's tactics, 1) it was using sources that employed the latter approach, and 2) I was 15-16.

BUT. Evidence for underestimating his opponents, scapegoating his officers and troops, and general lack of self-awareness is so incontrovertible that it's acknowledged even by his diehard fans, and this behavior would seem to be consistent with the lack of self-awareness that went into "this is the best plan ever, it's going to work great, we have nothing to worry abou--OH SHIT."

It's clear that he underestimated his father's reaction when he was caught and started talking and giving out names. It's just as clear that he spent the rest of his life underestimating person after person, and army after army.

One of his biographers says on the one hand that the escape plan was so "hamfisted" that it's very plausible he meant to be caught, and then, many chapters later, argues that adult Friedrich was completely overrated as a tactician and strategist, and does this without ever noticing the possibility for consistency between the eighteen-year-old runaway and the fifty-year-old general.

So...I would say that it's obvious he didn't see getting caught as the catastrophic outcome it turned out to be. So he may not have taken the precautions he would have had he anticipated his father's reaction. And having been caught, he reacted the same way he reacted to every major power in Europe at one time or another, and often at the same time: piss everyone off with the non-stop snarking, even when not in his or his country's best interests.

But was he not making a serious attempt to get away? Was it a subconscious, half-conscious, or conscious cry for attention? There are definitely other possibilities, imo.

Actually it's escaping at least metaphorically in Schiller and Verdi too, of course -- you probably remember that in that clip Carlo says he wants to escape from the court and be sent to Flanders.

Yep! And this is the part where I was going to talk about the political aspects of the escape attempt (it wasn't all just running away from abusive Dad, which is part of the reason Dad overreacted so much), but then Selenak kindly went and did it for me, yay.

In short, I'll just say that his dawning discovery of the involvement of foreign powers was what pushed FW over from "God, my fucking son again," into paranoid insistence that *technically* Fritz, Katte, and Keith were *deserters* and *technically* that's the death penalty and *technically* it's important to always go by the letter of the law and maximum penalty because high-sounding ideals like *justice*, even when you on a different occasion allow your most favorite son to talk you into sparing some less important deserter.

Me: *imagines the state of your inbox today* haha

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cahn - 2019-08-20 01:39 (UTC) - Expand

All of which is to say, at great length, here lies another major difference between Katte and Posa, the reluctant follower of his friend's stupid plot vs. the enthusiastic deviser of stupid plots involving his friend. But the parallels are just as clear.

Well, to be fair to Schiller's Posa, one big reason why he starts the overcomplicated intrigue with the letters business is because at that point, Philip is already very suspicious of his son (through no fault of Posa's; Carlos has been denounced by Eboli who's in unrequited love with him), and also, Posa thinks Carlos has just made the mistake of trusting Eboli again with a full confession (he hasn't, and Eboli is already regretful of her actions, but Posa can't know that, whereas he does know Eboli was the one to tell Philip his son and wife are carrying on behind his back). So from Posa's pov there is need for urgent action, especially since simultanously, the situation in the Netherlands is going from bad to worse, the Duke of Alba is about to be dispatched there, and Posa wants Carlos to free the Netherlands, which can only happen if either Philip entrusts his son with the command instead of Alba (fat chance; Carlos tries that earlier and fails) or Carlos gets to the Netherlands and leads the rebellion himself (which is the secondary plan Carlos and Elisabeth are still following in the play's last scene, when Philip and the Inquisition catch up with them).

Incidentally, if we go back to Schiller using the Fritz-Katte-Friedrich-Wilhelm tale for historical inspiration, it's worth remembering that one of the reasons for Katte's death sentence FW explicitly names in his letter to the tribunal is "as Katte plotted treason with the rising sun, and conspired with the legates and ministers of foreign powers"; the major reason for all those letters Wilhelmine and her mother were burning, too, because they did carry out negotations and plottings with the British government not just behind FW's back but explicitly against his will (since he had nixed the idea of a double marriage between Wilhelmine and her cousin the British Crown Prince while Fritz would marry said prince's sister; FW was in general backing away from the British alliance and his wife, who was King George's sister, still pushing for it was a major reason for marital strife and had been for years).

Thank you for expanding on the complicated plots in Schiller! That does make sense. This thread continues to be very educational.

I actually had "talk about the conspiring with foreign powers" aspect of the plot on my list of things to talk about today, so thank you for summarizing that so I don't have to. :D Among other things, there's some evidence that Friedrich's ability to tolerate what his father was putting him through vs. his desires to run away fluctuated in sync with the changes in his marital prospects.

Also, due to vague wording in my sources, I had been under the impression that the 1,500 letters were the incriminating letters between Friedrich and Wilhelmina relating to the escape attempt. If that number also included the foreign correspondence and anything related to the double marriage negotiations, that makes far more sense. (I admit to not memorizing the dozens of pages of chronology related to all those marriage negotiations before and after 1730, omg.)

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(I am mostly just reading your and

mildred_of_midgard's exchanges with great glee. This is MOST EXCELLENT.)

Well, but it's even more complicated than that, right? Philip is super suspicious, yes, but Posa doesn't decide he has to frame himself with his (made-up) letter until Posa thinks Carlos is making a full confession to Eboli, true, but Posa only thinks this because Carlos has gone to Eboli to ask her to warn the Queen -- because Posa started this whole thing of showing Philip the letters in the first place, and never told Carlos that he was doing this OR that he wasn't showing the King a particular semi-incriminating letter from the Queen. Posa, could you just tell someone your plans?!

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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.

The speech is much longer in Schiller!

Yeah, I reeeeeally love the singers in that one. Posa is the baritone Simon Keenlyside who I fairly often go off on how much I love his singing and acting :) Philip is the bass Ferruccio Furlanetto whom I also think is totally amazing (though I haven't watched him in as much stuff).

And I forgot to mention, I watched that clip of Friedrich, wow, yeah, that was... rather ineffective-looking :)

What was the result of his experiment??

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mildred_of_midgard - 2019-08-18 03:14 (UTC) - Expand

*waves*

cahn alerted me to your conversations.

re: Katte's protestations of Protestant faith in his last weeks, I would argue that while hoping for clemency from Friedrich Wilhelm might have been one big reason, another was his own family, specifically his own father, to whom hearing Katte died a good Protestant would be a comfort. And one can't exclude the possibility that Katte actually did fall back on the faith of his childhood as he came to realize he would, indeed, die. The descriptions of his death by eyewitnesses (including the most extensive one by Major von Schack) all mention he died praying "Lord Jesus, Lord Jesus". The relevant quote from Schack's report, which was written directly after the event (and thus can't be accused of too much hindsight or loss of memory):

Then, he gave his wig to my boy, who gave him a cap, had his vest removed and his neck bandage opened, tore his shirt off himself, free and easy, as if to prepare himself for a serious affair, walked and then knelt down in the sand, pushed the cap above his eyes and started to pray out loud: "Lord Jesus I live for you". Since he had told my boy earlier that he was supposed to blindfold him, but then decided to pull the cap down his eyes himself, the fellow, who was dreadfully upset, still wanted to blindfold him until von Katte waved him away with one head and shook his head. Then, he started to pray again: "Lord Jesus etc." which was not yet over when his head flew away, which my fellow picked up from the ground and put back at its place.

I cannot admire his présence d'ésprit enough. His steadfastness and courage, I will not forget to the end of my days, and I learned a lot by the way he prepared for his death, which I will not want to Forget ever."

The translation into English is my own. If you want to employ Google translate, Theodor Fontane's take on Katte, which originally was published as part of his "Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg" (a travel guide with historical anecdotes, and the extensive Katte sequence comes inevitably when Fontane arrives at Küstrin, where Katte died) is online, here. Fontane, who wrote in the late 19th century, quotes a lot of historical documents which were available by then, and wrote the first Katte-centric take on the tale ever (including full length quotations of various Katte-and-parent letters, as well as Friedrich Wilhelm's full length letter to the judges who'd wanted to spare Katte a death sentence etc.), for, as he said in his preamble, all the previous descriptions of the event had been Friedrich-centric for the obvious reasons, yet to him (Fontane), Katte was the hero of the story. Incidentally, the text I just linked isn't a complete excerpt from Fontane's take on the Katte tragedy but stops short of his remarkable conclusion, which is put online here and guaranteed to infuriate you because Fontane doesn't think it was just sadism or monarchical injustice on Friedrich Wilhelm's part (bear in mind here that Theodor Fontane was by no means an uncritical fan of Prussian monarchs in general or the Prussian System - his novels are sharply critical of both) and takes the King at his word when it comes to the way Friedrich Wilhelm's letter re: the death sentence ends, which is a message the King wanted to be given to Katte:

"When his death sentence is read to Katte by the army tribunal, he's to be told that his royal Majesty is sorry; but that it was better for him to die than for justice to leave the world."

(in the original 18th century German: »Wenn das Kriegs-Recht dem Katten die Sentence publiciret, so soll ihm gesagt werden, daß es Sr. Königlichen Majestät leid thäte; es wäre aber besser, daß er stürbe, als daß die Justiz aus der Welt käme.")

(Incidentally, no, I'm not with Fontane to the extent that I buy Friedrich Wilhelm wasn't motivated by vengefulness re: his son as well, but I do think that wanting Katte to be told that "his royal Majesty is sorry" goes against the idea of FW the gleeful sadist being all "die, boyfriend of my son! Die die die!")

Edited 2019-08-18 07:15 (UTC)

*waves* Hi! Happy to see you contributing to the discussions in my small fandom. :D

re: Katte's protestations of Protestant faith in his last weeks, I would argue that while hoping for clemency from Friedrich Wilhelm might have been one big reason, another was his own family, specifically his own father, to whom hearing Katte died a good Protestant would be a comfort.

YES. Somewhere in some comment I said he was playing to 3 audiences, and I mentioned comforting his family as one of them. I do think that he was trying to present himself as a really good Protestant, which that last letter to his father makes really clear. And I meant everything about his last moments, including the "Lord Jesus."

Plus my initial reading, before I saw the "I only said it because it was fashionable!" argument, was "there are no atheists in foxholes." I.e. his philosophical questioning of Christianity may not have been strong enough to withstand the prospect of imminent death, or at least he may have been immersed in Christianity enough to be hedging his bets. (Now, I don't personally believe there are no atheists in foxholes, but I do believe that Pascal's Wager can kick in under moments of stress, depending on the individual in question.) It's still entirely possible. I just don't think we should take his protestation that he was never an atheist at face value, is all, or that he wouldn't have gone back to being an atheist in 1740 if he'd gotten that reprieve.

I also think that if he was constantly singing hymns and praying out loud, that was not only religious ostentation, but a way of mastering the fear by giving himself something to concentrate on, something soothing. (I tried to work this into a fic, but it hasn't clicked yet.) He was really clearly doing everything he could to keep from breaking down, and I think that was very much for his own sake too. As much as forcing Friedrich to watch was horrifically traumatic for Friedrich, I see no reason not to accept Katte's statement that it was a great consolation for him in his last moments.

Incidentally, no, I'm not with Fontane to the extent that I buy Friedrich Wilhelm wasn't motivated by vengefulness re: his son as well, but I do think that wanting Katte to be told that "his royal Majesty is sorry" goes against the idea of FW the gleeful sadist being all "die, boyfriend of my son! Die die die!"

I honestly think that several things were going through FW's head. One was a real fear of plots. One was gleeful sadism (telling Katte that "his royal Majesty is sorry" is not, imo, much better than telling Katte's grandfather that "he deserves to be torn to pieces with red hot pincers, but I'm so 'merciful' I'm just beheading him"). And another was legalistic rationalization. Also, there's vengefulness for past acts, yes, but more than that I think there's evidence for a campaign to break his son's will for purposes of future compliance. And that's where I think the rationalized sadism comes in. (Rationalized because I'm sure he really believed this was in Prussia's best interests as well as the immortal soul of his son; sadism because of things like being very emphatic with everyone at Küstrin that he wanted Fritz with a "broken heart.")

guaranteed to infuriate you because Fontane doesn't think it was just sadism or monarchical injustice on Friedrich Wilhelm's part

I've seen these arguments, and more than that I think I've seen this specific passage (I did put a lot of Fontane through Google Translate). It honestly doesn't infuriate me as much as the "It's a good thing FW did what he did, because that's what turned Frederick the Effeminate Flute-Player into Frederick the Great Prussian Expansionist!" arguments, grrr. Or the people who think FW was justified in his abuse of his son and get mad at Friedrich for trying to escape or hoping his father would die. Especially the ones who give young Friedrich and Wilhelmina a hard time about keeping an eager eye on their father's declining health, and then are totally sympathetic to Henry wanting Friedrich dead asap later in life. One or the other, people! Either it's justifiable or it's not.

Anyway. In general, I have spared cahn a comprehensive take on all my thinking on the issues at hand and their basis in the evidence in these comments, otherwise they would be so long no one would ever finish them, and she is already being nice to let me go on these long rambles and reply to them. :D But I'm glad to have the chance to expand a little (not completely, I need to go write some Katte fic) in chatting with you.

And that's where I think the rationalized sadism comes in. (Rationalized because I'm sure he really believed this was in Prussia's best interests as well as the immortal soul of his son; sadism because of things like being very emphatic with everyone at Küstrin that he wanted Fritz with a "broken heart.")

That's an excellent summary of what was likely going on in the King. I would also speculate on some internalized sexual hang-ups in that, let's face it, Friedrich Wilhelm was never happier than in male company and absolutely awkward and uncomfortable with women. (And not just when they were presented nude to him a la what August the Strong did in Dresden when FW and Fritz were visiting.) I would say "internalized homophobia" except that FW loathed heterosexual profligacy a la his father or August intensely as well, hence all those rants against mistresses (and he wasn't much happier with Fritz flirting with the Countess Orzelska in Dresden than he was with anything else, instead of going "yay, at least the boy shows heterosexual interest!). Otoh, all those children he and Sophia Charlotte had demonstrate that he wasn't impotent. So you have someone to whom any sexual outlet other than marriage is taboo, whose marriage has degenerated into constant emotional warfare, who might or might not feel drawn to men sexually as well as emotionally anyway - and I wouldn't be surprised that the sight of his son in love with anyone, especially (but not exclusively) a man, was just rubbing it in and additionally made him furious.

I have seen the "FW as repressed homosexual/bisexual" theory, have countered with his resentment of Fritz showing any heterosexual interests either, and in short agree with you about the generalized sexual hang-ups that we really can't untangle from this distance. It can be incredibly hard to tell apart homophobia, misogyny, and general sexual repression due to Christianity, and I think FW is one of those cases where I don't feel comfortable drawing conclusions more specific than "not a happy man." His Kinsey score will have to remain a mystery as far as I'm concerned.

I wouldn't be surprised that the sight of his son in love with anyone, especially (but not exclusively) a man, was just rubbing it in and additionally made him furious.

Wouldn't surprise me at all.

(Have also encountered the FW as woobie take, albeit not in fiction. I am torn between trying not to be a total hypocrite on the "Fritz was an abuser because he was abused and so we sympathize with him, but FW was just an abuser and so we hate him!" front, but also the many reasons it's complicated and their situations and reactions are not exactly equivalent, and also this is just my fandom and I can be wildly unfair if I want. I'm not condoning any behavior, voting anyone into power, or supporting anyone who harmed anyone living today. I'm just writing fic that no one will read about my lifelong problematic fave. :P)

Related: I think it's impossible to untangle "Fritz had an inherently low sex drive because some people do" from "Fritz had sexual repression traumatized into him" from this distance. It can be hard enough for people actively working on the question in therapy to arrive at a definitive answer for themselves, and a lot of people go back and forth! I just find myself hoping it was the former. We also don't know how much of the sex that was attributed to him he actually had, of course, so there's that.

Quite. So your take on Fredersdorff/Fritz? One German historian referred to Fredersdorff as "the Prussian Pompadour" (meaning not just favourite, but "favourite who at first has a sexual romance with the King which later fades away but remains emotionally important throughout the King's life, and is politically involved in ruling the Kingdom till death"). And Fritz did name him as one of the six people in his life he truly loved.

On a less serious and more "bizarre episode in the lives of German Royalty" note, the whole Dresden interlude is so bizarre that I feel we have to acquaint

cahn with it. Since according to Wilhelmine, it went down roughly thusly:

"And then there was the time Dad and Fritz went on a state visit to Dresden when Fritz was 16. King August got them drunk, showed them around and then presented them with a naked beauty. Dad went scarlet and covered Fritz' eyes with his hands. Wasn't very effective. The naked beauty turned out to be the Countess Orzelska who was August's illegitimate daughter and his mistress. She also slept with one of her half brothers. And with Fritz, whom she deflowered during that visit. And here you thought we were the most dysfunctional German royals of our time! P.S. I'm not publishing this until years after my death."