cahn: (Default)
cahn ([personal profile] cahn) wrote2019-08-20 09:52 am

(no subject)

This is totally too good to keep to myself: on my "I showed my family opera clips" post, [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard and [personal profile] selenak are talking about Frederick the Great (by way of Don Carlo, of course) and it is like this amazing virtuoso spontaneous thing and whoa

Things I knew about Frederick the Great before a year ago: he was king of... Prussia??

Additional things I knew about Frederick the Great before the last couple of days: [personal profile] selenak informed me last year that he and his dad may well have been at least somewhat the inspiration for Schiller's Don Carlos, and everything that goes with that: his dad (Friedrich Wilhelm, henceforth FW) was majorly awful, he had a boyfriend (Katte) who was horribly killed by his dad

Only a partial list of the additional things I now know about Frederick the Great (henceforth "Fritz") and associated historical figures due to mildred and selenak:
-Fritz and Katte's escape plan (which resulted in Katte's execution) was... really, really boneheaded. As boneheaded as opera plots! :P
-Katte was in the process of destroying 1,500 letters when he got caught (! puts all those letters in Don Carlos into perspective) (ETA: but also see mildred's comment below)
-Fritz wrote opera libretti and so did his sister
-Fritz decided to use himself as an experimental test subject to see if it was entirely possible to do without sleep via the application of coffee WITH PEPPERCORNS AND MUSTARD
-Fritz wrote a poem about orgasm that also reads as if he's never actually, like, had sex (although that was not in this post, it was in the comments to this one)
-FW apparently beat up George II when they were kids
-I am totally not even going to try to summarize the discussion about FW's "rationalized sadism" and sexual hangups and the reeeeeally bizarre Dresden interlude (go down a couple of comments for the really insane stuff)
-Fritz' sister Wilhemina wrote tell-all memoirs about her totally insane family which I am SUPER going to read now, watch this space

Also, there is apparently some subplot involving Russian fanboys that introduces an entirely new cast of people which I am dying to find out about
mildred_of_midgard: (Default)

Re: Detour: Liselotte von der Pfalz

[personal profile] mildred_of_midgard 2019-08-28 06:54 pm (UTC)(link)
"there are not six people here one could love

What she meant was if one could love only people not into m/m sex at the court of Versailles, there would be only six or thereabouts left, so - yes?


[personal profile] cahn, yes, when I was reading this, I had to look at the German to figure out the intended meaning. (My German being just good enough to be not totally a black box, if I have a lot of vocab help.)

[personal profile] selenak, "One could love all but six people here" means that, if there are one thousand people at court, you could love the 994 of them that are not into m/m sex. Which, of course, is the opposite of what she's saying, hence our confusion. "There are not six people here one could love" means at least 995 of the thousand are into m/m sex. Which sounds about right. :P
selenak: (Default)

Re: Detour: Liselotte von der Pfalz

[personal profile] selenak 2019-08-29 05:58 am (UTC)(link)
Got it! Yes, the later was what she meant.