(no subject)

[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: Joseph: the RATIONAL fanboy

[selenak]

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".

Re: Joseph: the RATIONAL fanboy

[mildred_of_midgard]

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.