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[cahn]

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

Comments

Re: Nancy MItford II

[cahn]

Oh dear, these exchanges are hilarious! Although hard on his children.

Re: Nancy MItford II

[selenak]

It's a very witty correspondance in general which makes you glad you were never anywhere near Evelyn Waugh, especially in his capacity as a father. The correspondance editor, btw, who one other than Charlotte Mosley, aka female Draco daughter of Narcissa Malfoy Diana Mitford Mosley, who evidently didn't let Nancy's feud with her mother stop her. (Since Nancy had, as mentioned, no kids of her own, Charlotte probably inherited as the offspring of the next oldest sister). One of my favourite bits is Nancy reporting the reaction of her Cousin, Winston Churchill's son Randolph (the Churchills were related to the Mitfords via Winston's wife Clemmie, and given the whole Mosley-as-leader-of-British-fascists Thing, it was, well, extra), to Brideshead Revisited: "I shall never commit adultery with the same zeal again!"

Mind you, since Nancy's father did such stuff as keeping his hunting dogs in shape by letting them track his children, her views on parenting (both FW's and Evelyn Waughs') might have been, err, less than informed by anything like a normal Standard.

And lastly, it had to exist: The Mitford Sisters/Harry Potter crossover.

Re: Nancy MItford II

[cahn]

! That fic was extraorder, although I'm sure I'm missing at least half of the references.

...I am going to have to read Brideshead Revisited, aren't I.

Re: Nancy MItford II

[selenak]

Well, there's a reason why it's considered a classic.:) Mind you, Waugh has been breakig Slash fans' hearts since generations by letting the m/m couple break up mid book, never to reunite again as a couple (though there's one more time Charles sees Sebastian, gone to seed and drunkenness in Morocco), with one half of said couple first marrying, then falling for his previous boyfriend's alsao married sister. The prose is gorgeous, Waugh at his best, but just about 99% of the readers disagreed with him with who the main pairing of his novel is.