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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

Nancy MItford II

[selenak]

As to why Nancy, impossible Fritz opinions notwithstanding, is actually worth reading in other regards, there's the earlier mentioned correspondance with Evelyn Waugh.

NM: Darling Evelyn, Brideshead has come (...) - there are one or 2 things I long to know. Are you, or not, on Lady Marchmain's side? I couldn't make out. I suppose Charles ends by being more in love than ever before with Cordelia - so true to life being in love with a whole family (it has happened in mine tho' not lately). (...) I think Charles might have had a little more glamour - I can't explain why but he seemed to me a tiny bit dim & that is the only criticsim have to make because I'm literally dazzled with admiration.

EW: Dearest Nancy, Yes I know what you mean; he is dim, but then he is telling the story and it is not his story. It is all right for Benevunto Cellini to be undim but he is telling his own story and no one else's. I think the crucial question is: does Julia's love for him seem real or is he so dim that it falls flat; if the latter the book fails plainly. (...) Lady Marchmain, no I m not on her side; but God is, who suffers fools gladly; and the book is about God. Does that answer it?

NM: I quite see how the person who tells it is dim but then would Julia and her brother and her sister all be in love with him if he was? Well lov eis like that & one never can tell. What I can't understand is about God. Now I believe in God & I talk to him a very great deal & often tell him jokes but the God I believe in simply hates fools more than anything & he also likes people to be happy & people who love each other to live together - so long as nobody else's life is upset (& then he's not sure).

EW: There is no doubt that God does like dunces repugnant as it is. I think it is like the lower classes - everyone loves the simple gaffer until he starts telling us what he heard on The Brains Trust the evening before. We are all very lower class to God and our cleverness & second-hand scholarship bore him hideously.

Nancy Mitford tried to avoid theological subjects - but that was hard to do with Evelyn Waugh, who had all the fervour of a convert and seems to have regarded tolerance is one of the lethal sins. Occasionally they came up, which led to exchanges such as this:

EW: My dear Nancy, Would it not be best always to avoid any references of the Church or to your Creator? Your intrusions into this strange world are always fatuous.

NM: Don't start My Dear Nancy I don't like it. I can't agree that I must be debarred from ever mentioning anything to do with your creator. Try & remember that he also created me.

Their exchanges were quite often in this Punch and Judy style. See also:

NM: I hear your daughter Teresa is beautiful & fascinating how lucky for you.

EW: My daughter Teresa is squat, pasty-faced, slatternly with a most disagreeable voice - but it is true that she talks quite brightly. She has cost me the best part of 1500 pounds in the last year & afforded no corresponding pleasure.

He must have been horrid as a father; these kind of remarks about his children are quite the rule. Though as he grew older, he democratically disliked everybody. With the French (Nancy lived in France) getting special bile and Americans special condescension:

EW: You see Americans have discovered about homosexuality from a book called Kinsey Report (unreadable) & they take it very seriously. All popular plays in New York are about buggers but they all commit suicide. The idea of a happy pansy is inconceivable to them.

Re: Nancy MItford II

[selenak]

Oh, and cahn, one more Mitford detour: it's one of the theories in Harry Potter fandom I'm utterly ready to believe that JKR modelled the Black Sisters on the Mitfords, as in:

Andromeda - Decca
Bellatrix - Unity
Narcissa - Diana (co-starring Lucius Malfoy as Mosley)

No Nancy equivalent in the House of Black, though.

Re: Nancy MItford II

[cahn]

Oh dear, these exchanges are hilarious! Although hard on his children.

Re: Nancy MItford II

[selenak]

It's a very witty correspondance in general which makes you glad you were never anywhere near Evelyn Waugh, especially in his capacity as a father. The correspondance editor, btw, who one other than Charlotte Mosley, aka female Draco daughter of Narcissa Malfoy Diana Mitford Mosley, who evidently didn't let Nancy's feud with her mother stop her. (Since Nancy had, as mentioned, no kids of her own, Charlotte probably inherited as the offspring of the next oldest sister). One of my favourite bits is Nancy reporting the reaction of her Cousin, Winston Churchill's son Randolph (the Churchills were related to the Mitfords via Winston's wife Clemmie, and given the whole Mosley-as-leader-of-British-fascists Thing, it was, well, extra), to Brideshead Revisited: "I shall never commit adultery with the same zeal again!"

Mind you, since Nancy's father did such stuff as keeping his hunting dogs in shape by letting them track his children, her views on parenting (both FW's and Evelyn Waughs') might have been, err, less than informed by anything like a normal Standard.

And lastly, it had to exist: The Mitford Sisters/Harry Potter crossover.

Re: Nancy MItford II

[cahn]

! That fic was extraorder, although I'm sure I'm missing at least half of the references.

...I am going to have to read Brideshead Revisited, aren't I.

Re: Nancy MItford II

[selenak]

Well, there's a reason why it's considered a classic.:) Mind you, Waugh has been breakig Slash fans' hearts since generations by letting the m/m couple break up mid book, never to reunite again as a couple (though there's one more time Charles sees Sebastian, gone to seed and drunkenness in Morocco), with one half of said couple first marrying, then falling for his previous boyfriend's alsao married sister. The prose is gorgeous, Waugh at his best, but just about 99% of the readers disagreed with him with who the main pairing of his novel is.