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This is totally too good to keep to myself: on my "I showed my family opera clips" post, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mildred_of_midgard and 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
mildred_of_midgard and selenak are talking about Frederick the Great (by way of Don Carlo, of course) and it is like this amazing virtuoso spontaneous thing and whoaThings 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 dadOnly 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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Excellent question about Olympias, I wonder the same. She strikes me as more of a Catherine than not.
Haha, well, based on what Fritz had to say about Rousseau (Fritz's eyerolly letter is *hilarious*) and how he reacted to his father trying to get him to do anything he didn't want to do, I can't imagine Rousseau having much influence. But even if we assume a non-freethinking lightside FW who doesn't believe in philosophy and is still dragging his family to Pietist church, I just think the key was not to force anything down Fritz's throat.
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True. BTW, should we tell
Wiki reminds me that Heinrich had contact with Hamilton and was under discussion for ruling the new US of A; now that would have been an AU...
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Disagree that he automatically goes with AW for those reasons, but elaboration will have to wait.
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1. Smarter.
2. More strong-willed.
3. Willing to pretend to be Protestant (this is easier when you're an atheist than when you're Catholic and almost all your support is coming from Catholics).
4. Born and raised in Prussia, known by the locals, disinherited at age 18 for not wanting to be abused, as opposed to "My father/grandfather was kicked out for some really questionable politics, and y'all don't know me from Adam, but I still think that makes me king."
5. Mother and sister present. If FW has persecuted them to the point where they don't have the opportunity to form an actual party, that means even more local sympathies. Otherwise, rival party.
Heinrich:
"given the age gap between him (Heinrich) and Fritz, he wouldn't have had many memories of him, let alone those inclined to make him take Friedrich's side
Au contraire! I think the fewer memories he has of Fritz, the *more* likely he is to take Fritz's side! Why did Heinrich hate Fritz so much in RL? Because he had all those memories of Fritz treating him and Augustus Wilhelm like total shit! By the time Fritz died, Heinrich had accumulated so many grudges he needed an obelisk to contain them all.
But consider, AU Fritz has never been in a position of power, and he's the poor woobie who ran away from abusive Dad because he wanted to play the flute but kept getting beaten up. Meanwhile, Sophia Dorothea and Wilhelmine are left behind. They make Fritz into a TOTAL TRAGIC HERO. The message Heinrich gets is "Your poor brother is *just like you*, and that's why you never got to know him, it's so sad."
It's veeeery easy to idealize your tragic hero older brother whom you *never met*. And, as you know, a large part of why Heinrich and Friedrich didn't get along was because they had so much in common that I like to call Heinrich "Friedrich Lite", and of course because Fritz kind of used him as an emotional punching bag to roleplay his traumas from the other side.
Only possible way I see this not happening: FW comes down on Sophia Dorothea and Wilhelmine so hard that they're isolated from the rest of the family. But even then, Fritz managed to get letters to his mother and sister even when he wasn't supposed to, even at Küstrin! I think even if FW takes over Heinrich's upbringing and keeps him away from the women to prevent a Fritz repeat, look what happened every time FW tried to get someone to teach Fritz the error of his ways: the vast majority of people who were supposed to abuse him by proxy were gay/educated/cultured/not totally batshit. Fritz actually (before the Katte tragedy) wrote that prison wasn't as bad as living with his father, because his jailers actually had some sympathy for him.
In conclusion, I think Heinrich comes away with a pretty positive opinion of exiled!Fritz with nothing to contradict it. Then fairness and primogeniture come into play, and maybe Heinrich thinks that peaceful, flute-playing brother would make a better king than Dad-pleasing, uniform-wearing brother.
THEN Fritz comes to the throne, and THEN Heinrich starts to regret his choice, as, as you put it about Wilhelmine, "Thereafter, my moments of WTF, Fritz? Keep increasing." Actually, Fritz with a successful escape attempt, no Küstrin, no forced marriage, and Katte and Keith at his side is maybe less of an all-out asshole to his family, but still not the nicest of people and still needs that therapist.
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Wilhelmine composes an OPERA about her brother the tragic hero, thus anticipating Verdi by some hundred and thirty-ish years. :P
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Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
The brothers, Friedrich and Heinrich:
- 14 years apart in age
- Both Francophiles
- Both educated and patrons of the arts
- Both proficient generals
- Both extremely gay
In recent historiography, there's been increasing emphasis on how Heinrich, living all these years in Friedrich's shadow, might actually have been the better tactician. He waited to engage until he was sure he would win the battle, and then proceeded to win it. Fritz was more prone to winning when he should have lost and losing when he should have won. As discussed above, Fritz got them into the Seven Years' War and then won it through sheer bloody-minded determination and a bunch of non-tactical skills; everyone is agreed Heinrich would have done neither. (I sometimes wonder if Heinrich having absolute power would have changed his tolerance for risk at all, but that's very academic. Heinrich as we know him would have done neither.)
Surprisingly, Fritz had some nice things to say about Heinrich's tactical acumen. He didn't have many nice things to say to Heinrich, though. Or his other brother. Or his other, other brother. Hohenzollerns, man. Heinrich resented the hell out of the way all three of them were treated and said so at every opportunity.
He never had anything nice to say about Fritz. Henry wished his oldest brother had never been born and spent Fritz's entire later life waiting eagerly for Fritz to drop dead, then being glad when he did. Because it meant he got to build a memorial for everyone he credited with winning the war that Fritz had started and then mishandled beginning to end, "about whom he says nothing in his fucking memoirs," beginning with dear older brother Augustus Wilhelm.
Now, homosexuality. Heinrich had a serious sex drive and was not shy about having affairs and one-night stands all over the place. Fritz resented this about as much as FW had resented Fritz's love life in his turn. It was not pretty. In addition to general verbal snark and emotional abuse, Fritz engaged in some real abuses of power.
Most notably: "Remember when Dad held me in prison until Wilhelmine and I agreed to get married to people we didn't want to marry? Yeah, now I'm king and it's your turn. Marry or else. No, I know you're homosexual and you're not going to sleep with her. That's fine, I only see my wife for dinner once a year. This is a power trip for me, not some unrealistic expectation that you're going to produce heirs or anything.
"Unlike our other brother Augustus Wilhelm, whom you love but I think is a terrible general, meaning I will humiliate him in front of everyone (hi, Dad, hope you're watching, wherever you are), and dismiss him from service by telling him to go forth and multiply, because that's all he's good for. You're a decent general, so once he dies, please don't grieve him so much it gets in the way of you helping me win my three-front war. Got it? Thanks, kisses, bye."
Way to carry on all those family traditions, Fritz.
Funny story: Friedrich and Heinrich both were lusting after the same hot young piece of male ass once. My secondary sources differ on who got the guy in the end, but both quote Fritz as telling his brother (paraphrased), "Eh, he may have a pretty face, but the body is nothing to write home about, plus he's got an STD." (I still have this theory that Fritz liked looking more than he liked fucking, and we're all pretty clear on the fact that Heinrich liked fucking a great deal.)
Fritz's general attitude toward marriage was that his siblings had to marry who he said, because politics, but none of his friends were allowed to get married. If they did, he'd stop inviting them to parties, because, sheesh, don't you know no one in their right mind would get married by choice??? That's like a personal betrayal of me and my
women don't exist, my dogs bark when they see a woman because they don't know what that ishomosocial court.On a related note, my *favorite* Fritz fic so far is a modern AU where he gets an actual therapist (because they exist) instead of treating his family as his involuntarily conscripted therapists, and it's a lovely fic that makes me cry (because Katte) and part of a huge Hamilton/18th century/19th century historical RPF modern AU series which I am greatly enjoying.
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
...that fic looks Highly Relevant To My Interests :D
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
It's an awesome fic in the midst of an awesome series. I found the million characters confusing at first, but the more installments I read, the more I started to be able to keep track of who was who and to have at least ten favorite characters. ;)
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
This is why my other favorite historical figures are people like Diocletian and Alcibiades, and my favorite fictional characters are people like Denethor and Odysseus. It's horribly hypocritical, but if you can impress me enough with your bastardy, I will overlook any amount of misbehavior that I won't condone in real life and will harshly criticize in anyone else in history or fiction.
And unlike these hypothetical TV show fans, long before I knew about any Woobie Fritz, I was in love with Magnificent Bastard Fritz. Anyone who could write the Anti-Machiavel in 1739 and invade Silesia in 1740 was catnip to my 15-yo self.
Three months after its publication in 1740, King Friedrich II was already violating agreements and invading his minding-their-own-business neighbors for the sake of capturing their resources for his own poorer country (thus forcing him to later get defensive about the Anti-Machiavel and write about how that was a nice ideal for crown princes, but when you're king, realpolitik was a much more important thing).
People were OUTRAGED.
Now, it's immediately obvious to everyone that this is exactly what Machiavelli would have recommended he do. Voltaire snarked that Fritz wasn't smart enough to understand that, and that he had just genuinely reneged on his principles once he got a taste of power. 15-yo
35-yo me is reluctantly compelled to concede that, yeah, it doesn't look all that deliberate, and Fritz actually was more like if Gandalf had taken the Ring of Power, and that's why I don't believe in autocracy as a system of government. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. None of that stops 35-yo me from wanting to fly back to Germany so I can spit on FW's grave, pay more respects at my still-ultimate-historical-fave Fritz's, possibly put a potato on Katte's because they should have something to link them, and shrug at Heinrich's and tell him he has to find his own defender, because, "Sorry, I'm taken, and I'm only here at Rheinsberg in the first place because Fritz used to live here and I need to check out the grounds as part of fic research."
But at least I recognize that my fandom is a place where I get to be unfair, and that if I'm summarizing events for other people, I have to acknowledge that, while the cycle of abuse is a thing, you have to blame perpetrators and not victims for their actions.
(35-yo me also needs to reread the Anti-Machiavel, because the last time I read it, at 16 or 17 or so, I had read The Prince, but not the majority of Machiavelli's work, and certainly not a fair bit of modern Machiavelli scholarship, and I now consider myself qualified to have opinions not only about Machiavelli but about other people's opinions about Machiavelli, and I strongly suspect Fritz was shortchanging M's actual thinking, because almost everyone does.)
(To my embarrassment, 15-yo me, once I learned about Woobie Fritz, could not understand why you would faint when watching someone else get beheaded, and had remarkably little sympathy for that part. 15-yo me also could not read novels with realistic characterization, because I did not understand humans, not even a little bit. 35-yo me still sometimes feels like a Martian anthropologist who slowly came to understand humans through the medium of books, study, and conscious thought rather than through similarity of psychology.)
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
(Icon displaying my favourite fictional MB in all tv world, Arvin Sloane in Alias)
But at nearly 50 years of age, I've seen a lot of fandoms. Hence my observation about the prospect of loyalty switching among a sizable amount once it's clear where Fritz is headed. Not least because imo, a lot of fans are conservative in that they're stuck on initial impressions. It's also why fanfiction sometimes feels weirdly AU without intending to be so if it's based on first season characterisation while show and characters have moved on in a completely different direction. (Of course, if one is lucky, there are also new fans who came on board later, write with the later season characterisations and are a bit bewildered why character X still bursts into tears at the drop of a hat in other people's stories when they know X mostly as the guy reducing Y and Z to jelly. :)
ETA: sorry for all the edits, I haven't been able to figure out how to disable the autocorrect on this computer yet, and it keeps capitalizing words!
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
See, you understand me. :D Yay.
It's also why fanfiction sometimes feels weirdly AU without intending to be so if it's based on first season characterisation while show and characters have moved on in a completely different direction.
HAHAHA, been there and done that. Sort of in reverse of your example, because Lucius Malfoy, despite being a Nazi analogue, was fictional enough that I could latch onto his Magnificent Bastardy in books 2 and 3, and then when later books came along, I started complaining to my partner. "Did he become evil?" she asked. "No, it's worse than that! *outrage* He became a wuss! (He was already evil, sheesh.)" :P
ETA: sorry for all the edits
No worries, I edit like mad whenever I think of a better way to phrase something. I've accumulated like 10 edits I would make to the Seven Years' War summary if there weren't already replies. :P
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
"The real Lafayette and Adrienne's families wanted to arrange a marriage between them, but they were concerned that their children might rebel at being forced into it. So instead, from early childhood onwards, they arranged casual meetings and and various 'whoops, hey, look who that is?' encounters. Without ever telling them. By their teens, the two of them were determined to get married NO MATTER WHAT ANYONE SAID. I like to think the parents went: 'Oh no. Well, if you must.' Then drank champagne."
OMG it's good parenting OMG!
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
re: other brother Augustus Wilhelm, loved by Heinrich and loathed & humiliated by Fritz, we should also mention he was FW's favourite kid (no. 11 of 14, thus also much younger than Fritz) and the only one FW was sort of decent to. Which evidently had much to do with Friedrich's Feelings. (I mean, what's worse, having an abusive parent who can't be other than abusive, or one who can and just isn't towards YOU?)
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Fritz's take on this was "NO, you're WRONG. Dad's army wasn't cool at all. Only MY army is cool. And you and your oldest son [future Friedrich Wilhelm II] are going to get in major trouble for not adequately respecting the cool factor of MY army."
FW 2, who also got mistreated by Fritz, was the one who, the moment Fritz was safely dead, was like, "Fuck you and your dogs and your burial at Sanssouci like a Roman philosopher, Uncle Fritz, you're getting buried in a CHURCH. With POMP and CIRCUMSTANCE. Next to your DAD!"
No, unless Selenak knows something I don't, I don't think he specifically did this to spite Fritz's atheistic principles and to rub in the part about abusive Dad, I suspect his thinking was that that's what you do with kings and Grandpa was a pretty great king himself, but still. Fritz's last wishes definitely took second place to doing things the Right Way. (Mind you, this was another of those awesome family traditions: Fritz had ignored *his* father's wishes about the disposal of his remains, albeit I think less blatantly.)
Also FW 2: "Shit, we gotta do something about all that homoeroticism at Sanssouci too, that's embarrassing. Plus he didn't like me being ultra-het, so there. Karma is a bitch, Fritz."
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Now, Antinous was the boyfriend of the Roman emperor Hadrian. Antinous died under mysterious circumstances when he was still young and beautiful. Hadrian was devastated and deified him and commemorated him all over the place. Among the possible explanations for his mysterious death was that he was a human sacrifice as part of some religious ritual meant to prolong Hadrian's life.
It has been speculated that "naked statue of guy who died young and may have sacrificed himself in order to save his boyfriend the emperor," placed near Fritz's selected future grave site and in view of his bedroom/study window (yes, his grave is quite near his bedroom/study, memento mori I guess), was Fritz's silent tribute to one Hans Hermann von Katte.
I WANT TO BELIEVE.
The statue is now called "Praying Boy" (it having been acknowledged by responsible art historians that it actually predates Antinous), and a copy is back at Fritz's grave, the original being in a Berlin museum. I super wish I had known this when I was in that museum, dammit! (Or when I was at his grave.)
Mostly I was excited, though, about finding the Velletri Pallas (Athena) bust acquired by Fritz (Velletri Pallas being my all-time favorite work of art, and I had a plaster copy in my own study until it began to disintegrate; I'm still angry about that and planning on finding a more durable one once my disability situation sorts itself out and I can afford it again), because Athena is one avatar of this Mary Sue character I've had in my head all my life, and in my mental Mary Sue bio, there's one whole volume devoted to her and Fritz, because if you think Athena would not have been ALL OVER Frederick the Great, you should reread the Odyssey. ;)
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Booo, I want you to see this opera! Do you know if they went with the "ritual sacrifice" story?
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Fun fact: one of the more popular 20th century German historical novels is about this Wilhelmine, not to be confused with Fritz' sister, called Die schöne Wilhelmine" by Ernst von Salomon. I read this when I was ca. 12 or 13. At which point I was already familiar with the tragic tale of Young Fritz and Katte, but it took me a moment or two to realise that Snarky Old Uncle Fritz at the start of this novel was the same guy. He's not a villain by any means, btw, and Salomon lets him encounter Casanova ("you're a good looking man", observes Fritz) and flirt a bit in between being sarcastic towards his nephew. Said nephew is not the brightest but well-meaning; Wilhelmine, Berlin street child determined to make it to the top and stay there, is the heroine in whose pov we mostly remain.
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Omg. ULTIMATE INSULT.
Casanova ("you're a good looking man", observes Fritz)
Historically accurate opinion of Fritz's after their meeting, iirc?
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
I know, right? It's also, shall we say, an iiiinteresting comment given his own marital circumstances. Quoth Fritz, in his memoirs:
"The husband, young and without manners, was daily unfaithful to his wife. (…) The princess who was at the prime of her beauty was insulted by the lack of attention paid to her charms, and was provoked to avenge the injustice done to her."
(German Version of quote which I had looked up: "„Der Ehemann, jung und ohne Sitten, […] brach seiner Frau täglich die Treue. […] Die Prinzessin, die in der Blüte ihrer Schönheit stand, fand sich von der geringen Aufmerksamkeit, die man ihren Reizen zollte, beleidigt, fühlte sich angestachelt, sich für das Unrecht, das man ihr angetan hatte, zu rächen.“ )
Now, future FW2 had managed to get a divorce because his wife was pregnant with a kid that really could not have been his (as they didn't have sex with each other, only with other people), so Fritz HAD to give his okay for said divorce they both wanted, or allow an obvious non-Hohenzollern into the succession, but he was extremely disgruntled about having to do this and immediately insisted on FW2 marrying another princess. What really slays me is the the Feminist Fritz pose here. I mean… do you really want to talk Princes not paying attention to the charms of their wives, Fritz? Really?
(Still not FW2 made Uncle Fritz officially recognize Wilhelmine Encke as his Maitresse en titre, though, officially, in 1777. With a yearly rent paid by the crown and a house in Charlottenburg. This was probably the most impressive battle he ever won in his life.)
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Re: Our Insane Family: The Next Generation
Indeed. I mean, they mostly talked about taxes and the lottery, but he did make that comment according to Casanova. Incidentally, if you visit Sanssouci in the summer months today, you can experience a restaging of that encounter: Voila.