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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

[mildred_of_midgard]

Today's anecdotes (you can tell the anecdotes are tapering off) from FW's A+ parenting:

On the one hand, he did the over-the-top parenting thing with executing Katte in front of Fritz's eyes for the express purpose of breaking Fritz's heart and hoping to inspire a reversion to religious orthodoxy (seriously, his orders were "Head falls, my son watches, chaplain steps into his cell ready to comfort him and lead him back to the faith"; what they got instead was 3 days of Fritz screaming hysterically and refusing to eat*), which we all know about.

* How long this would have gone on, we don't know, but somebody finally reminded Fritz that his mother and sister would be pretty darn upset if he starved himself to death, and then he consented to eat, and the rehabilitation process began. (Which his jailers had to beg FW to allow them to tone down at one point, because they were seriously worried Fritz was going to lose his reason under the kind of treatment he was being given.)

On the other hand, FW engaged in less-well-known and much more standard homophobic parenting as well. Boyfriend-before-Katte, Peter Keith, was caught doing...something...inappropriate with Fritz when they were about 16/17. Since he was a lieutenant in the army, FW promptly stationed him somewhere far, far away. Like, 300 miles away.

Now, this is relevant to our story, because Keith was that third conspirator during the escape attempt that I told you about. Unlike Katte, who was stuck in Berlin, the heart of FW territory, Keith was stationed right near the border with the Netherlands. So when he got word that their cover was blown, he darted without hesitation across the border to safety, then for good measure from there into England, where FW tried to have him extradited, and the response of the English was basically, "Screw you, and also WTF was that with Katte?" As I mentioned, Keith, after a 10-year stint in the Portuguese army, went back to Prussia after Fritz inherited, and sadly they seem to have quarreled.

Keith: was originally a page for FW, used to report his doings to Fritz and warn him of anything bad coming his way. Was hanged in effigy in front of his regiment after FW couldn't get him extradited.

Katte: has a very famous anecdote, which is in all the fics on AO3 and a bunch of the bios, in which he was standing guard outside Fritz's room while Fritz did some illicit flute-playing inside. When Katte heard FW's footsteps approaching, he came running to warn Fritz, then helped him hide all the evidence, while Fritz changed quickly into uniform, and Katte hid in a closet alongside Fritz's flute instructor. Unfortunately, Fritz's fancy French hairstyle gave away that he'd been up to something, and his fancy French dressing gown (and I think French books) was found by his father and burned, but Katte and Quantz were not found in their hiding place. That must have been a stressful day.

Keith and Katte: have just arrived safely in England with Fritz in one of my many fix-it WIPs. ;) Keith is a little jealous of Katte's new place in Fritz's heart, but Katte is busy smoothing things over, and everyone's going to live happily ever after.

[cahn]

ahahaha, I have just got to this part (Keith) with Wilhelmine, who emphatically Does Not Approve of Fritz' boyfriends, lol.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yep! This is one of the historiographical problems. Some of our main primary sources who knew Katte while he was alive didn't like him, Fritz would barely talk about him and not write at all that I know of afterward, and then you just get the people who were impressed at the manner of his death (and you get several slight variations on the sequence of events, to the point where we're not quite sure how *exactly* it happened). I think I pointed out in an earlier comment that it's very hard to trust some of the things that were said about him.