We may have mentioned that FW was obsessed with collecting tall soldiers, but I don't think we've conveyed all the batshit anecdotes that went with his bizarre fetish. I haven't investigated the historical accuracy of all these anecdotes, some happened and some may be apocryphal, but he was obsessed enough that all of them have been attributed to him by someone thinking, "Yup, yup, old FW would totally have done that."
So he had this regiment called the Potsdam Giants, for which the only qualification was being tall. The taller you were, the better you got paid. It was pretty much FW's goal to have every tall man in Europe in his regiment, voluntarily or involuntarily.
One of the kidnapping stories goes something like this: some tall guy in some country that wasn't Prussia got tricked into lying down inside a chest in a store/workshop/something to settle a bet on how wide the chest was. Bang! went the lid, and the guy was shipped off to Potsdam inside the chest. (I've also heard that he arrived DOA because of lack of airholes, not sure if any of this is true.)
Other things FW's been accused of that I personally always put a mental question mark next to, until I find good evidence:1) Putting soldiers on the rack to make them even taller. 2) Eugenics, breeding tall men on tall women and having his agents keep an eye on any babies born in the realm that looked like they might become especially tall.
FW would have the giants paraded through his bedroom when he was sick, to make him feel better. He's supposed to have said that he was indifferent to the beauty of women, but tall soldiers were his weakness. ("But Ima get rid of all my son's boyfriends, because eww gay.")
Given the King's emotional attachment to them, the Potsdam Giants were way too precious to ever be risked in combat. They were strictly ornamental, to be paraded around for the King's visual enjoyment. This was good, as they were not especially good at fighting just because they were tall. In fact, there are stories that they were one of the less competent regiments. Some of them were likely tall as part of genetic conditions that came with other health problems.
Fritz thought this entire thing was ridiculous, a frivolous, pointless expense, and the moment he inherited he redistributed the giants into other regiments and stopped paying them just for being tall.
Now, how tall was FW, you might ask? Not tall. I've seen numbers ranging from 5'2" to 5'5". For Fritz, I've seen anywhere from 5'2" to 5'7". I'm sure none of this is helped by the lack of standardization of units. Napoleon himself got a reputation for being super short by dint of being 5'2" in French units, which is 5'6" in English units, and for hanging around tall soldiers that made him look shorter by comparison. So who even knows. But neither father nor son was anywhere near 6 feet tall, which I believe was the cut-off for the Potsdam Giants.
Soooo...FW was def compensating for his height, and possibly also very repressed sexual urges. Fritz: "Save money, admit your preferences. :-D "
Now, Fritz had his own costly royal obsession, which FW considered a frivolous, pointless expense, but with which we are much more in sympathy.
Namely, music. I know we've mentioned Fritz's flute-playing, art-patronizing, libretto-writing, musical-performance-dictating inclinations. But I'm not sure we've conveyed the level of obsession here. From the moment he took up flute playing in his teens until in old age he became physically incapable of it*, he played it every single day, barring the occasional acute episode of health that prevented him.
* My sources say it was when his teeth fell out. But I googled that, and everyone says it's possible to relearn to play the flute without teeth? I feel like either you can't get the same results, or else maybe his asthma played a role, because if it had been possible for him to keep playing, he would have. He was devastated when he had to put it away forever. He said he'd lost his best friend. :-(
Every day, he woke up at some ridiculous hour of Dark o'clock and started practicing the flute, did a bunch of paperwork, practiced some more, did more work of various kinds throughout the day, and dedicated the evening to listening to music and frequently performing chamber music for a small and select audience. He took his flute on campaign and practiced just as regularly in war as at peace.
After all this practice, I gather he was considered a quite proficient flute player. At any rate, people seem to have higher praise for his flute playing than his sonatas, concertos, symphonies, and the like, which seem to be considered good by amateur standards but far from anything to write home about. I'm not qualified to comment, but you can find performances of some of his compositions on YouTube and judge for yourself, if you care.
Dad, of course, thought flute playing was effeminate and that his son should only be interested in tall soldiers. So he forbade the whole endeavor. Meaning Fritz had to practice in secret. There's one lovely famous story that I think I've mentioned, where Quantz was giving Fritz a private lesson, and Katte was standing guard outside to give them warning as soon as the King approached. Katte and Quantz ended up hiding in a closet together while the King looked for evidence his son had been up to something. (This is why I raised an eyebrow at Mein Name ist Bach to see Quantz acting like he thought comparing Bach père to Fritz's father was bound to give Fritz warm and fuzzies toward Bach.)
At Rheinsberg, Fritz had to get his friends outside into a wood or a cave to practice music where no one could hear them. And once he became king, he recruited all the musicians he could get and never let them leave. (I feel like these facts are related, which is one example of what I meant by him reacting even more to chronic trauma than to Katte's execution.)
Throughout his life, Fritz chose many of his closest companions based on their musical inclinations. He and Wilhelmine used to play together, him on the flute and her on her lute. (As noted, she was a talented musician herself, and, as far as I can gather, the superior composer of the siblings--probably helped by the fact that her time wasn't divided with military campaigns and administrative micromanaging. You can also find some of her work on YouTube.)
One of the things Fritz bonded with Katte over was that they both played the flute. And Fredersdorf (one of the "six I have loved most") was a professional musician for the army, and he used to play the flute for Fritz during his imprisonment at Küstrin. In fact, Fritz's sympathetic jailers were so concerned about the treatment he was receiving that they told FW that they were afraid he would literally lose his mind under the abuse strict regimen he was put under to rehabilitate him after Katte's execution, and reluctantly FW gave them permission to lighten conditions a bit. And the number one way you keep Fritz sane in prison is by letting him have some flute music.
Side obsession: Fritz was a huge bookworm, as we've mentioned, and he kept having to accumulate secret libraries and hide them from Dad, who kept getting rid of them. During the escape attempt, one of Katte's responsibilities, along with "communicate with foreign envoys," "try to get an asylum offer," "acquire funding," and "take care of the Prince's valuables," was "get the secret library out of the country." Cause there's no point in fleeing for your life if you're not also bringing your books. MAN AFTER MY OWN HEART.
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Royal obsessions
Date: 2019-09-22 05:12 pm (UTC)So he had this regiment called the Potsdam Giants, for which the only qualification was being tall. The taller you were, the better you got paid. It was pretty much FW's goal to have every tall man in Europe in his regiment, voluntarily or involuntarily.
One of the kidnapping stories goes something like this: some tall guy in some country that wasn't Prussia got tricked into lying down inside a chest in a store/workshop/something to settle a bet on how wide the chest was. Bang! went the lid, and the guy was shipped off to Potsdam inside the chest. (I've also heard that he arrived DOA because of lack of airholes, not sure if any of this is true.)
Other things FW's been accused of that I personally always put a mental question mark next to, until I find good evidence:1) Putting soldiers on the rack to make them even taller. 2) Eugenics, breeding tall men on tall women and having his agents keep an eye on any babies born in the realm that looked like they might become especially tall.
FW would have the giants paraded through his bedroom when he was sick, to make him feel better. He's supposed to have said that he was indifferent to the beauty of women, but tall soldiers were his weakness. ("But Ima get rid of all my son's boyfriends, because eww gay.")
Given the King's emotional attachment to them, the Potsdam Giants were way too precious to ever be risked in combat. They were strictly ornamental, to be paraded around for the King's visual enjoyment. This was good, as they were not especially good at fighting just because they were tall. In fact, there are stories that they were one of the less competent regiments. Some of them were likely tall as part of genetic conditions that came with other health problems.
Fritz thought this entire thing was ridiculous, a frivolous, pointless expense, and the moment he inherited he redistributed the giants into other regiments and stopped paying them just for being tall.
Now, how tall was FW, you might ask? Not tall. I've seen numbers ranging from 5'2" to 5'5". For Fritz, I've seen anywhere from 5'2" to 5'7". I'm sure none of this is helped by the lack of standardization of units. Napoleon himself got a reputation for being super short by dint of being 5'2" in French units, which is 5'6" in English units, and for hanging around tall soldiers that made him look shorter by comparison. So who even knows. But neither father nor son was anywhere near 6 feet tall, which I believe was the cut-off for the Potsdam Giants.
Soooo...FW was def compensating for his height, and possibly also very repressed sexual urges. Fritz: "Save money, admit your preferences. :-D "
Now, Fritz had his own costly royal obsession, which FW considered a frivolous, pointless expense, but with which we are much more in sympathy.
Namely, music. I know we've mentioned Fritz's flute-playing, art-patronizing, libretto-writing, musical-performance-dictating inclinations. But I'm not sure we've conveyed the level of obsession here. From the moment he took up flute playing in his teens until in old age he became physically incapable of it*, he played it every single day, barring the occasional acute episode of health that prevented him.
* My sources say it was when his teeth fell out. But I googled that, and everyone says it's possible to relearn to play the flute without teeth? I feel like either you can't get the same results, or else maybe his asthma played a role, because if it had been possible for him to keep playing, he would have. He was devastated when he had to put it away forever. He said he'd lost his best friend. :-(
Every day, he woke up at some ridiculous hour of Dark o'clock and started practicing the flute, did a bunch of paperwork, practiced some more, did more work of various kinds throughout the day, and dedicated the evening to listening to music and frequently performing chamber music for a small and select audience. He took his flute on campaign and practiced just as regularly in war as at peace.
After all this practice, I gather he was considered a quite proficient flute player. At any rate, people seem to have higher praise for his flute playing than his sonatas, concertos, symphonies, and the like, which seem to be considered good by amateur standards but far from anything to write home about. I'm not qualified to comment, but you can find performances of some of his compositions on YouTube and judge for yourself, if you care.
Dad, of course, thought flute playing was effeminate and that his son should only be interested in tall soldiers. So he forbade the whole endeavor. Meaning Fritz had to practice in secret. There's one lovely famous story that I think I've mentioned, where Quantz was giving Fritz a private lesson, and Katte was standing guard outside to give them warning as soon as the King approached. Katte and Quantz ended up hiding in a closet together while the King looked for evidence his son had been up to something. (This is why I raised an eyebrow at Mein Name ist Bach to see Quantz acting like he thought comparing Bach père to Fritz's father was bound to give Fritz warm and fuzzies toward Bach.)
At Rheinsberg, Fritz had to get his friends outside into a wood or a cave to practice music where no one could hear them. And once he became king, he recruited all the musicians he could get and never let them leave. (I feel like these facts are related, which is one example of what I meant by him reacting even more to chronic trauma than to Katte's execution.)
Throughout his life, Fritz chose many of his closest companions based on their musical inclinations. He and Wilhelmine used to play together, him on the flute and her on her lute. (As noted, she was a talented musician herself, and, as far as I can gather, the superior composer of the siblings--probably helped by the fact that her time wasn't divided with military campaigns and administrative micromanaging. You can also find some of her work on YouTube.)
One of the things Fritz bonded with Katte over was that they both played the flute. And Fredersdorf (one of the "six I have loved most") was a professional musician for the army, and he used to play the flute for Fritz during his imprisonment at Küstrin. In fact, Fritz's sympathetic jailers were so concerned about the treatment he was receiving that they told FW that they were afraid he would literally lose his mind under the
abusestrict regimen he was put under to rehabilitate him after Katte's execution, and reluctantly FW gave them permission to lighten conditions a bit. And the number one way you keep Fritz sane in prison is by letting him have some flute music.Side obsession: Fritz was a huge bookworm, as we've mentioned, and he kept having to accumulate secret libraries and hide them from Dad, who kept getting rid of them. During the escape attempt, one of Katte's responsibilities, along with "communicate with foreign envoys," "try to get an asylum offer," "acquire funding," and "take care of the Prince's valuables," was "get the secret library out of the country." Cause there's no point in fleeing for your life if you're not also bringing your books. MAN AFTER MY OWN HEART.