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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]

While looking through W's memoirs just now to refresh my memory on a point of chronology, I happened upon her description of Katte's saddle, which reminds me that *she* says he was waiting because he needed a saddle that could hide papers and such, which makes iiiiiinfinitely more sense. I still think there has to be another way to escape than waiting for a new saddle to be made, but if you're already torn on what the right move is and probably not thinking clearly anyway, because PANIC, it might contribute to your delay.

Anyway, when I was about Fritz's age, I tried and failed to come up with a plan to escape from my non-absolute-monarch parents, so I am totally sympathetic to Fritz's failure to escape from the efficient and restrictive military state that was Prussia, and am willing to believe it represented a best effort. Katte was 26, yes, but he was much less invested in the escape, and potentially more interested in dragging his feet and hoping it went away than in coming up with the best plan ever.