(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

[selenak]

Including Russians who are actually German because European royal intermarriage was such a thing that your poor Don Carlo had 4 great-grandparents instead of 8

On that note, talking about all of this, it occured to me that practically every royal in Europe of note in this story, other than the French royals pre-Marie Antoinette, were either German (for a qualification of German that includes Austrians) or half German. I mean, Farmer George was the first of the Hannovers who spoke English as his first language, George I didn't speak a word, and George II only picked it up later.

...but of course, they all wrote to each other in French. :) (Though I find it touching that Fritz, who usually hated the language, actually wrote German letters to Fredersdorf. The quotes in this article sound adorably awkward and tender, I don't think translation can get across how much precisely because the spelling is bad and the grammar is off: "Ich küsse den Docter, wan er Dihr gesundt macht! (...)ich wollte Dihr so gerne helffen, als das ich das leben habe". Let's see, I'll have a go to come up with something: "I kiss the Docter if he be healthy making you! (…) I wish so much to help you as life I have." But that makes Fritz sounds like Yoda in English, which, err, doesn't fit the personality.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Hmm, you're right. A side effect of there being 1 million German principalities of various kinds?

Aww, Fritz. <3 We see you trying.

[cahn]

That is adorable! No, I get the gist of it.

[mildred_of_midgard]

P.S. My passive command of German is juuuust good enough to follow how bad his German is, but thank you for the translation. :) (I can handle German spelling and syntax, it's the vocab where I fall down.)