(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: Other Fritz fans of note in German history

[selenak]

Thomas Mann never wrote it. He did write an essay in 1914, "Frederick II and the Great Coalition" which tells us how Germany invading Belgium is just like Fritz invading Saxony, and the current enemies of Germany were just like those Fritz faced in the 7-years-war. Most telling sentence:

"The Koalition may have changed a Little, but it is his Europe, the Europe allied in hate, which does not want to endure us, does still not want to endure him, the King, the Europe which has to learn again in lengthy Detail, maybe even through another seven years, that it will not manage to murder him."

("Die Koalition hat sich ein wenig verändert, aber es ist sein Europa, das im Haß verbündete Europa, das uns nicht dulden, das ihn, den König, noch immer nicht dulden will, und dem noch einmal in zäher Ausführlichkeit, in einer Ausführlichkeit von sieben Jahren vielleicht, bewiesen werden muß, daß es nicht angängig ist, ihn zu beseitigen.")

Oh, Tommy, as Heinrich would have said and did say. Just last year, I discovered there's a Fritz novel which is also a Brothers Mann novel, with a great premise: in their exile years, at which point they've long been reconciled (but the past is unforgotten), they decide to write a Friedrich novel together, only it's going to be a Fritz-and-his-brother-Heinrich novel. Guess who gets two write whom? Heinrich is uncertain whether roleplaying feuding Hohenzollern brothers is really a good idea, given, you know, but can't resist, and they start writing chapters, at which point the novelist does a credible parody of both Thomas Mann's style and Heinrich Mann's style, but then, alas, the whole thing collapses and stopped being credible, and I stopped reading.

No, Heinrich didn't send the second letter. They were reconciled in 1922 or 23 (I Forget which), when Heinrich was really dangerously ill and Thomas made a tearful appearance at his hospital bed.

Re: Other Fritz fans of note in German history

[cahn]

wowwwwwww. Oh Tommy indeed.

I got rather excited about the Fritz-Brothers-Mann novel from the first part of your description -- that's really too bad it didn't live up to its premise.