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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

[cahn]

holy cow selenak I am like 5 pages in:

the two favorites of the prince royal... had no difficulty in corrupting the herat of a young prince... The Prince of Anhalt... feared lest [the prince's wife] might obtain possession of the heart of her consort. To prevent this, he attempted to sow the seeds of discord between them

Welp HI THERE ALVA AND DOMINGO

mildred_of_midgard, in Schiller there are two characters, the Duke of Alva and the priest Domingo, who are the king's councilors and basically keep goading him into distrust and jealousy of his wife and also his son (as they correctly understand that both Elisabeth and Carlos are progressives, and they are not).

the princess royal presented her royal husband with a daughter, who was very unfavorably received, because the ardent wishes of all had been for a prince. I was the child who met with that ungracious reception.

Aw Wilhelmina!

[selenak]

Alva and Domingo indeed. BTW, one of the duo, Grumbkow, also shows up in the Maria Theresia series I linked you two as Prussia's main representative at the Austrian court.

And yep, Wilhelmine wasn't projecting with how her birth was received. (Though she shared that fate, alas, with most princesses of her time, though the others didn't have as neurotic parents…)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Didn't FW say something about all the daughters his wife was presenting him with along the lines of "Can we just drown them like kittens? There's no way they're all going to find husbands, after all."

[cahn]

OK, question for you guys: were Anhalt and Grumbkow actually as horrible as they are portrayed in Wilhelmine's memoirs? The intro said that one of them (I forget whom) interceded for Fritz after the Katte Incident and prevented FW from killing him outright (I haven't got to this point in the memoirs yet), and that seems incongruous with Wilhelmine's assertion that they plotted to kill FW and Fritz.

[mildred_of_midgard]

I'm going to defer to selenak on this one, because I've seen so many contradictory portrayals in passing, without any good in-depth dive into either one, that I've been wondering the same thing.

[selenak]

Will have to look up Anhalt again, but Grumpkow was both very competent (in Administration) and famously corrupt. As in, he took money from both the French and the Austrians, which was one reason why he was against the Hannover marriages for Fritz & Wilhelmine, though not the only one, and actively schemed against it. (His reports to the Austrians on the Prussian Royals still exist, which is how we know he missed a trick because he code-named FW "Jupiter" and Sophia Dorothea "Olympia" - should have been Philip and Olympias, Grumpkow!) Now I doubt he ever wanted any Prussian Royal dead, and Wilhelmine was biased due to him being co-responsible for making her life miserable for a good long while, but then again, she wasn't the only one to despise Grumpkow as a person - the Saxon amabassador loathed him as well and describes him as a vile character. (Again, he's the Prussian in the Maria Theresia series who after Prinz Eugen is of no more use to him leaves the old guy breaking down on the floor and ensures no footmen will enter the room to help Eugen.)

OTOH: he did mediate between Fritz and FW post-Katte. (He also ensured Fritz, who was deeply in debt, would get bribe money from the Austrian court, from the very same Eugen mentioned above. Not that this stopped Fritz invading later, but hey.) And he was extremely helpful to FW in restructuring Prussia and giving it a modern Administration. Presumably, he thought that nearly killing your successor is a really bad idea and not good for the state, and did recognize Fritz might make a good monarch?

[mildred_of_midgard]

He also ensured Fritz, who was deeply in debt

Context: Teenaged and twenty-something bookworm Fritz had to buy his own books (and art and music and such), and no sooner did he buy them than his father found out and got rid of them. (Advanced readers may know that it's more complicated, but this is the entertainment version of history.)

What collateral do you have when you're a penniless crown prince who's not in good graces with the reigning king, trying to borrow from other courts? Well, you have "When I'm king, I'll remember your country with the same gratitude that I remember every other country in Europe that I'm currently using this line on, which will primarily be called the War of the Austrian Succession and then the Seven Years' War, 'cause by then I'll have that treasury of Dad's that I've currently got my eye on, but as long as I only feed you all the first part of this sentence for now, it's all good, right?"

He used to pull this on his wife, too. "Look, I didn't ask to have you or my dad in my life, but I need books to live, and *you're* in his good graces, so *you* get your hands on some money and pass it on to me, k?"

[cahn]

ah, thank you! this makes rather more sense than Wilhelmine's tale of aborted regicide :)