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This is totally too good to keep to myself: on my "I showed my family opera clips" post,

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:

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

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And yet that portrait of Joseph looking at Fritz like he can barely stand to be in the presence of so much awesomeness.

Well, to be fair, it was painted by a Prussian painter who never saw either party in their life, commissioned by a Prussian Institution. Also, the historical context is important: Menzel painted it in 1855. He already had drawn the very same scene as an Illustration for Kugel's "History of Frederick the Great" which was published in 1840, mind; it evidently meant a lot to him beyond the commission. But still, you have to consider: by 1855, the Holy Roman German Empire had been over for half a century. The big debate in the German states was: if there was to be a unified Germany, a second Empire, would it be a) one uniting all the German speaking states under Habsburg leadership, or b) one which was excluding the Austrians and led by Prussia instead? (This, obviously, was the solution Prussia favoured.) So a painting in which a Habsburg Emperor openly adores the most famous Prussian King there was has, shall we say, a very political message in this context.

But that meeting did happen, and it was Joseph's idea. I always imagine him reasoning with Maria Theresia on the notes of "I can totally see your point, Mom, and don't worry, he won't get any concessions from me, but HE'S JUST SO COOL". (MT: Fine. Guess I'll go and have another date with his favourite sister.)

Mind you, the other monarch Joseph admired was Peter the Great of Russia, and that usually gets blamed for him travelling a lot. As in, A LOT. He was the European ruler who travelled the most of his time; people into statistics claim that if you put all his travels together, it equals one and a half time around the globe, and six years of his life. He was a big believer in learning from travelling (including learning about the people), and checking out your country's most important foe yourself instead of relying solely on ambassadors makes sense from that pov.

Well, to be fair, it was painted by a Prussian painter who never saw either party in their life, commissioned by a Prussian Institution.

Well, yes, it's not a photograph. I'm only saying it's using hyperbole to communicate something real that is highly surprising, much like me saying Peter III was metaphorically offering Fritz a blow job. :P

Interesting statistics! I was not familiar with those. Fritz did a lot of traveling *within* Prussia for the sake of micromanaging everything that happened within it, and a bit of sightseeing outside his country (attempted incognito, which, we'll just say he was no Odysseus in terms of the quality of his disguises), but he probably would have benefited greatly from more of a "check out your neighbors in person" approach, or maybe "talk to their envoys for more than 5 minutes at the beginning and end of their visits" or "don't physically throw them out" or something.

(MT: Fine. Guess I'll go and have another date with his favourite sister.)

Haha! That would have been an awesome comeback. If only Wilhelmine was still alive at this point.

don't worry, he won't get any concessions from me

Yeah, he def had a mind of his own.

If only Wilhelmine was still alive at this point.

Alas yes. I suppose Maria Theresia could have met Amalie instead, via Trenck arranging it?

And speaking of Sisters: however Joseph's meeting with Fritz went down, I bet he (Joseph) preferred it as memory to his visit in Paris where he had to fix his kid sister's marital sex life. The difference between 18th and 19th century conversation about sexuality is never so glaring as when you read Joseph's letters home to Austria from that trip, describing in detail what the Louis/Marie Antoinette problem was: Louis would get a proper erection, but then would just put it in and pull it out again after a few minutes without coming (or moving)). Leading Joseph to comment: "Maybe somebody should whip him, so that he’d ejaculate out of anger, like the donkeys do’."

OH GOD I REMEMBER THAT. Thank you for the reminder!

I... have no words. I am totally DYING here. OMG.

Bear in mind that Louis and Marie Antoinette not being able to procreate was a serious political, not just private issue. Traditionally, such things led to marriages getting annulled, and the Austria/France alliance was pretty new and revolutionary, as Mildred explained above; there was a lot riding on it. Still, poor Antoinette who'd been 15 when marrying Louis, I think, and thus was only in her early 20s at the point where her mother must have decided she couldn't make heads or tails out of the ambassador's reports as to what the hell the problem was and needed to send brother Joseph to sort everyone out.

Which Joseph did, incidentally. (Not least because he realised there might be a medical issue and had a doctor perform an operation on Louis' penis.) Complete penetration, ejaculation, and subsequent procreation ensued. The other thing Joseph's visit to Paris was memorable for was leaving a Memorandum in which he told both his brother-in-law and his little sister that they needed to get some reforms going or else there was a road to disaster. This, famously, they did not listen to.

...so was the operation or sex training, or both, what was needed?

The other thing Joseph's visit to Paris was memorable for was leaving a Memorandum in which he told both his brother-in-law and his little sister that they needed to get some reforms going or else there was a road to disaster. This, famously, they did not listen to.

I don't know why this made the comment 1000% more awesome, but it totally did.

As far as I recall, both, as in, there had been a medical problem, but also Louis didn't have a clue. Which, yes,is ironic given his grandfather (Louis XV) was one of the most infamous "screws everything which moves" types, and you'd think it didn't Joseph as the Dr. Ruth of Rokoko times to instruct a Frenchman in lovemaking, but evidently, national clichés notwithstanding….

I mean. I get what you say about it all being important for the succession etc. but I have this image in my head of the guy in Amadeus instructing his brother-in-law in how to have sex and I'm just totally dying here.

Such was my sinister intention. :) The Amadeus version would have had Mozart to back him up (in theory), though; remember, Mozart has an argument with a bunch of Italian composers in front of Joseph about love being a German virtue (Italians, saracastic: yeah, sure, we Italians know nothing about love! Mozart: No, you don't!). (Which might even be based on something Mozart actually said or wrote in a letter, because I recall something along that line from a childern's book about Mozart which I read as a kid a decade before Peter Shaffer wrote Amadeus. (Shaffer is one of those writers taking great liberties who still clearly did their research; note that Joseph in his few scenes in the movie is wearing modelled-on-Fritz simple uniform, for example.)

On a less hilarious note, Joseph in the end was a tragic figure, because his reforms were deeply unpopular, and his self composed epitaph read "here lies Joseph, who failed in everything he wanted to do"; then, when he was succeeded by his younger brother who was one of the most reactionary Habsburgs ever, Joseph post mortem became "the people's Emperor" (Volkskaiser), anecdotes from his travels and endeavours abounded, and retrospectively he became beloved. He was certainly hands down the brightest of Maria Theresia's kids. (That memorandum to Little sis and her husband about reforms they should understake in France was over thirty hand written pages. If they'd taken him as seriously about that as they did about sex...)

In your opinion, were those suggestions practicable? Because my French Revolution-fu is weak, and I'm not saying Louis was especially good at leadership, but my hazy memories are that every time Louis did try to change something, he got stymied by the nobility.

My own impression was that Louis mostly paid for his predecessor's sins and yes, he did try some things, but was Joseph was reccommending was, among other things, austerity in life style, and that at least would have helped with the public perception problem which Marie Antoinette had even before the Revolution started. And the whole memorandum actually does contain the sentence: "»Ich zittere jetzt für Dich, denn so kann es nicht weitergehen; la révolution sera cruelle si vous ne la préparez.« - "I tremble now for you, because it can't continue like this; the revolution will be cruel if you don't prepare yourself".

Oh, Marie Antoinette's PR was the one thing I thought about mentioning when this whole discussion about France and reforms started. I grant you that would have been an A+ move.

Well spotted, Joseph.

Just checked his death date: 1790. Wow.

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Joseph: the RATIONAL fanboy

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