Thank you for all this! My attention span for audio-visual media is very short, so I'm watching only a bit at a time, but I started with the part where you asked me about Keenlyside vs. Katte.
Notes:
1. OOMMMGG SOO SHIPPY THIS IS SHIPPIER THAN THE DEATH SCENE \O/ \O/ \O/ <333
I really like friendships in my fandoms and therefore I was probably the only person who didn't emphatically ship them, but now that I know about the Katte reference I see it's more of a canon ship than I thought...
Yes, sorry, I love friendships too, but canon ship is canon. :P
2. See Simon run! Heee.
3. Rodrigo's reaction to (I started to type 'Fr', lol) Carlo's declaration of love is exactly how I (and most of AO3) imagine Katte reacting Fritz proposing escape. "Betraying your king? Your country? Your oath?? No, no, you're suffering, nothing else matters to me." I really think that one line perfectly encapsulates Katte's struggles over his divided loyalties: Fritz's suffering and Katte's love for him won out over everything else: Katte's oaths, his desire not to let down his own family, his sense of self-preservation, everything. Not without a struggle. But I think every time he went around and around in his head, agonizing over what the right thing to do was, he came back to "Fritz is suffering."
Not sure how you envision Katte, although I (who know not much about him besides what you guys have told me) think of him as a little gentler than Keenlyside plays Rodrigo here.
Weeelll, it's really hard to get a read on Katte. There's so little evidence. I mean, for Fritz we have 76 volumes in his own hand, plus a gazillion eyewitness volumes, and the #1 word most used of him by scholars is "enigma." Katte? We have a few paragraphs here and there, and two of our major sources didn't like him? It's really, really hard to draw many firm conclusions. Most of my growing sense of his personality is a fanon interpretation, one of many possible interpretations, rather than anything I would defend as canonical.
Reasoning backwards from Fritz, I would say that you probably had to have a certain amount of gentleness to get anywhere with him (I can't find the quote rn, but contemporaries said this too), which is not to say that you couldn't also be firm with him on occasion. IF you can trust Wilhelmine's account, Katte wrote in no uncertain terms to tell Fritz that he wasn't going to follow him into exile (but later said he would, so who knows). As discussed elsewhere, I get the impression Fritz was more strong-willed than Katte, BUT, 1) we have a very small data set for the latter, 2) their situations were radically different on that occasion, and 3) if you cherry-picked a data set of the same size from Fritz's life, you could get a picture of a vacillating individual as well.
All of which is to say, I saw nothing in Keenlyside's reaction here that couldn't have mirrored Katte's, although it's also possible to read Katte as someone who would have patted Fritz on the head while silently freaking out in his own head. After all, Wilhelmine's memoirs are, for many reasons, not the same thing as having the letter in Katte's hand saying, "Hell no, I won't go!" (We do have a letter in Katte's hand saying, "Remember when I tried to talk you out of this?" but as discussed, that was meant for a lot more eyes than just Fritz's. I don't think we actually *know* how gentle or otherwise he was about his reluctance.)
I have to say, I loooove how Rodrigo segues from "You're in love with the Queen WTAF??!" to "This is exactly why you should go to Flanders!" I get the impression that if Carlo had announced, "I have developed a sudden passion for collecting giraffes," Rodrigo would have reacted with, "What a coincidence! Flanders is the perfect place to use your newfound freedom of action to collect giraffes to your heart's content, aided and abetted by the grateful people whom you will save!" <-- Not!Katte.
Aaaaalso, I love how during the "fight for freedom" song near the end of that clip, Carlo is staring into space and Rodrigo keeps looking over at Carlo. Also Keenlyside's Determinator face next to Alagna's "I guess" face, haha. So awesome.
Carlo is kind of a failboat, if we didn't make this clear before.
This has been made clear to me, as has the fact that this opera should have been called Posa. :P
no subject
Notes:
1. OOMMMGG SOO SHIPPY THIS IS SHIPPIER THAN THE DEATH SCENE \O/ \O/ \O/ <333
I really like friendships in my fandoms and therefore I was probably the only person who didn't emphatically ship them, but now that I know about the Katte reference I see it's more of a canon ship than I thought...
Yes, sorry, I love friendships too, but canon ship is canon. :P
2. See Simon run! Heee.
3. Rodrigo's reaction to (I started to type 'Fr', lol) Carlo's declaration of love is exactly how I (and most of AO3) imagine Katte reacting Fritz proposing escape. "Betraying your king? Your country? Your oath?? No, no, you're suffering, nothing else matters to me." I really think that one line perfectly encapsulates Katte's struggles over his divided loyalties: Fritz's suffering and Katte's love for him won out over everything else: Katte's oaths, his desire not to let down his own family, his sense of self-preservation, everything. Not without a struggle. But I think every time he went around and around in his head, agonizing over what the right thing to do was, he came back to "Fritz is suffering."
Not sure how you envision Katte, although I (who know not much about him besides what you guys have told me) think of him as a little gentler than Keenlyside plays Rodrigo here.
Weeelll, it's really hard to get a read on Katte. There's so little evidence. I mean, for Fritz we have 76 volumes in his own hand, plus a gazillion eyewitness volumes, and the #1 word most used of him by scholars is "enigma." Katte? We have a few paragraphs here and there, and two of our major sources didn't like him? It's really, really hard to draw many firm conclusions. Most of my growing sense of his personality is a fanon interpretation, one of many possible interpretations, rather than anything I would defend as canonical.
Reasoning backwards from Fritz, I would say that you probably had to have a certain amount of gentleness to get anywhere with him (I can't find the quote rn, but contemporaries said this too), which is not to say that you couldn't also be firm with him on occasion. IF you can trust Wilhelmine's account, Katte wrote in no uncertain terms to tell Fritz that he wasn't going to follow him into exile (but later said he would, so who knows). As discussed elsewhere, I get the impression Fritz was more strong-willed than Katte, BUT, 1) we have a very small data set for the latter, 2) their situations were radically different on that occasion, and 3) if you cherry-picked a data set of the same size from Fritz's life, you could get a picture of a vacillating individual as well.
All of which is to say, I saw nothing in Keenlyside's reaction here that couldn't have mirrored Katte's, although it's also possible to read Katte as someone who would have patted Fritz on the head while silently freaking out in his own head. After all, Wilhelmine's memoirs are, for many reasons, not the same thing as having the letter in Katte's hand saying, "Hell no, I won't go!" (We do have a letter in Katte's hand saying, "Remember when I tried to talk you out of this?" but as discussed, that was meant for a lot more eyes than just Fritz's. I don't think we actually *know* how gentle or otherwise he was about his reluctance.)
I have to say, I loooove how Rodrigo segues from "You're in love with the Queen WTAF??!" to "This is exactly why you should go to Flanders!" I get the impression that if Carlo had announced, "I have developed a sudden passion for collecting giraffes," Rodrigo would have reacted with, "What a coincidence! Flanders is the perfect place to use your newfound freedom of action to collect giraffes to your heart's content, aided and abetted by the grateful people whom you will save!" <-- Not!Katte.
Aaaaalso, I love how during the "fight for freedom" song near the end of that clip, Carlo is staring into space and Rodrigo keeps looking over at Carlo. Also Keenlyside's Determinator face next to Alagna's "I guess" face, haha. So awesome.
Carlo is kind of a failboat, if we didn't make this clear before.
This has been made clear to me, as has the fact that this opera should have been called Posa. :P
I can of course find that one for you as well :P
Yes, please. :P