Entry tags:
Frederick the Great post links
More Frederick the Great (henceforth "Fritz") and surrounding spinoffs history! Clearly my purpose in life is now revealed: it is to encourage ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mildred_of_midgard and selenak to talk to me about Frederick the Great and associated/tangential European history. I am having such a great time here! Collating some links in this post:
* selenak's post on Frederick the Great as a TV show with associated fandom; a great place to start for the general history
* I have given up indexing all posts, here is the tag of discussion posts. Someday when I actually have time maybe I'll do a "best of."
Some links that have come up in the course of this discussion (and which I am putting here partially for my own benefit because in particular I haven't had time to watch the moviesbecause still mainlining Nirvana in Fire):
Fritz' sister Wilhelmine's tell-all tabloidy memoirs (English translation); this is Part I; the text options have been imperfectly OCR'd so be aware of that (NOTE 11-6-19: THIS IS A BOWDLERIZED TEXT, I WILL COME BACK WITH A BETTER LINK)
Part II of Wilhelmine's memoirs (English translation)
A dramatization of Frederick the Great's story, English subtitles
Mein Name ist Bach, Movie of Frederick the Great and J.S. Bach, with subtitles Some discussion of the subtitles in the thread here (also scroll down)
2017 miniseries about Maria Theresia, with subtitles and better translation of one scene in comments
ETA:
Miniseries of Peter the Great, IN ENGLISH, apparently reasonably historically solid
ETA 10-22-19
Website with letters from and to Wilhelmine during her 1754/1755 journey through France and Italy, as well as a few letters about Wilhelmine, in the original French, in a German translation, and in facsimile
University of Trier site where the full works of Friedrich in the original French and German have been transcribed, digitized, and uploaded:
30 volumes of writings and personal correspondence
46 volumes of political correspondence
Fritz and Wilhelmine's correspondence (vol 27_1)
ETA 10-28-19
Der Thronfolger (German, no subtitles; explanation of action in the comment here)
ETA 11-6-19
Memoirs of Stanisław August Poniatowski, dual Polish and French translation
ETA 1-14-20
Our Royal Librarian Mildred has collated some documentation, including google translate versions of the Trier letters above (see the "Correspondence" folder)!
mildred_of_midgard and selenak to talk to me about Frederick the Great and associated/tangential European history. I am having such a great time here! Collating some links in this post:* selenak's post on Frederick the Great as a TV show with associated fandom; a great place to start for the general history
* I have given up indexing all posts, here is the tag of discussion posts. Someday when I actually have time maybe I'll do a "best of."
Some links that have come up in the course of this discussion (and which I am putting here partially for my own benefit because in particular I haven't had time to watch the movies
Fritz' sister Wilhelmine's tell-all tabloidy memoirs (English translation); this is Part I; the text options have been imperfectly OCR'd so be aware of that (NOTE 11-6-19: THIS IS A BOWDLERIZED TEXT, I WILL COME BACK WITH A BETTER LINK)
Part II of Wilhelmine's memoirs (English translation)
A dramatization of Frederick the Great's story, English subtitles
Mein Name ist Bach, Movie of Frederick the Great and J.S. Bach, with subtitles Some discussion of the subtitles in the thread here (also scroll down)
2017 miniseries about Maria Theresia, with subtitles and better translation of one scene in comments
ETA:
Miniseries of Peter the Great, IN ENGLISH, apparently reasonably historically solid
ETA 10-22-19
Website with letters from and to Wilhelmine during her 1754/1755 journey through France and Italy, as well as a few letters about Wilhelmine, in the original French, in a German translation, and in facsimile
University of Trier site where the full works of Friedrich in the original French and German have been transcribed, digitized, and uploaded:
30 volumes of writings and personal correspondence
46 volumes of political correspondence
Fritz and Wilhelmine's correspondence (vol 27_1)
ETA 10-28-19
Der Thronfolger (German, no subtitles; explanation of action in the comment here)
ETA 11-6-19
Memoirs of Stanisław August Poniatowski, dual Polish and French translation
ETA 1-14-20
Our Royal Librarian Mildred has collated some documentation, including google translate versions of the Trier letters above (see the "Correspondence" folder)!
Re: Nomination coordination redux
No matter if she'd come to loathe Fritz as a person, she'd have wanted heirs from her own body. And her father, who in fact outlived FW, would have insisted, too. (And considering Joseph's mission to fix his sister's sex life with Louis XVI in rl, you can bet his granddad would have been as intrusive when it came to his daughter and Fritz.)
Notoriously open secret gay/asexual Fritz goes through the motions of trying, makes a point of not ejaculating inside her? Plays it off as impotence/sexual hangups? He only has to get away with this for 7-10 years to get elected Emperor. This is the same guy, remember, who, when forced by Dad to go hunting, would write fake upbeat letters going, "Welp, I shot at the animal and missed. But I'm sure I'll have better luck next time!"
There's no way Maria Theresia would have gone for one of Fritz' siblings as heirs presumptative of the Habsburg dynasty. No matter if she'd come to loathe Fritz as a person, she'd have wanted heirs from her own body.
After ~10 years of the above, would she have gone for an annulment of a childless marriage and a marriage to brother Augustus Wilhelm? It's a variation on marrying a sister to AW to appease the Brunswicks. Assume Fritz has been elected Emperor at this time, is pretty clearly not having kids of his own or planning to remarry, is willing to leave her the prestige and nominal power of the titles of the Pragmatic Sanction, but is consolidating power in his own hands and politically sidelining his entire family. In a misogynistic world, with her sense of duty and a more ambitious husband than Franz Stefan, would MT have gone along with this? I don't know her personality well enough. Would the entire Austrian nobility have gone along with this or not been able to stop it?
It's a real stretch: I'm struggling to come up with *any* possible non-catastrophic outcome. Fritz does not play well with others, and MT does not take things lying down like EC, plus she comes with a whole family and country with opinions of their own.
The only other possible path that I can see to a less than catastrophic outcome is if EC got an especially raw deal from Fritz, and Amelia or MT or basically anyone who gave him an "out" from Dad before 1740 would have gotten better treatment, including maybe a willingness to make an effort to beget heirs once a month or something. I mean, when he was plumping for the British double marriage, should we imagine he was intending to completely avoid Amelia sexually even before he became king? I find that difficult to believe, or at least to assume without questioning.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the way I read Fritz's personality, there is a world of difference between an idea that came out of his own head and one that was forced onto him, in terms of how he reacts. And if he decides he wants to be HRE because it's a way to get the upper hand over Dad, and he gets what he wants, then I'm guessing his brain decides to emphasize the way MT and he can bond over music and some literature, and he has some sex with her, at least in the early days. If FW forces him into this marriage because FW is a big fan of the Emperor, then Fritz's brain emphasizes how he despises the long-past-its-glory-days HRE and Catholics and women and possibly the thought of being shipped to Vienna as if *he* were the subordinate partner, and maximum disaster ensues with maximum speed.
The only "Catholic princess marries Protestant prince who is allowed to maintain his religion as part of the marriage deal" example I can currently think of is the most notoriously ill fated of them all - Margot de Valois/Henri de Navarre
Catherine of Braganza and Charles II come to mind, but Braganza != Habsburg, as you point out. And Charles at least had Catholic sympathies. Fritz...did not. I also imagine the Pope having nominal authority over Fritz would have gone over about as well as the Holy Roman Emperor having nominal authority over Fritz went over irl. "Lol wut? I barely took orders from my father when he was alive and locked me in prison, and you think you can tell me what to do from a distance? You and what army?"
Secondly: priorities. Where do they live, Prussia or Austria?
Totally trolling here: after their dads die, Fritz in Prussia, MT in Austria. That's far enough away to avoid the cooties, right? :PP
Once both fathers are dead, does Fritz actually get elected as Emperor or has he by then pissed off various other princes already and they go for the Wittelsbach guy anyway?
1730s Fritz? Sympathies for him personally are still running high, to the point where various European courts are lending/giving him money, he's not as despotic as in later years, and Prussia is starting to be taken seriously thanks to FW's army, which Fritz has inherited by the time of the election. My guess is he gets elected and everyone regrets it *later*. Assuming he's managed to pay enough lip service to Catholicism. If he has and he still doesn't get elected, my guess is that it takes him and MT less than 8 years to solve it in their favor. Which is of course the whole point of this scenario.
My question is, how much does young Fritz manage to piss off his *dad* in the 1730s, particularly if this marriage lands him in Austria? And what are the consequences of *that*?
Re: Nomination coordination redux
How FW would have reacted to a Fritz not just geographically but hierarchically completely out of his control - if Fritz is in Vienna (and assorted other locations all over the HRE which aren't Prussia - as MT's spouse, son-in-law of the Emperor and likely Emperor-in-Waiting is beyond my power to imagine. From the first time his ambassador reports onwards about how HRH had a great time at the public concert last night, playing flute while MT sang, and that's before we get the first letter (in French, of course) saying "Mon cher Papa, have suggested to the Emperor to request loan from our treasury so we can bring the Austrian army up to speed and also build me an extra royal mansion equipped with the latest fashion from Paris, cherio, Fritz".
Charles II/Catherine of Braganza: true, but in addition to not being the heir presumptative of the Portuegese throne she didn't have to convert, and that she was a practicing Catholic was used against her (and him) by Titus Oates et al. (I'm assuming that if they had had surviving children, they'd have been Anglicans, so Catherine's father must have agreed to that in the wedding treaty.
Assume Fritz has been elected Emperor at this time, is pretty clearly not having kids of his own or planning to remarry, is willing to leave her the prestige and nominal power of the titles of the Pragmatic Sanction, but is consolidating power in his own hands and politically sidelining his entire family. In a misogynistic world, with her sense of duty and a more ambitious husband than Franz Stefan, would MT have gone along with this?
Really hard to say. I mean, there's the rl example of her handling Joseph as a co-ruler with great difficulties and by coming out on top more often than not. (
(MT really lucked out with Franz Stefan, because I bet most of the available princes would have at least tried to take power from her since tehy were nominally the Emperor, instead of accepting this was her throne and her rule and doing their own - useful, since he was making cash - thing.)
If FW forces him into this marriage because FW is a big fan of the Emperor, then Fritz's brain emphasizes how he despises the long-past-its-glory-days HRE and Catholics and women and possibly the thought of being shipped to Vienna as if *he* were the subordinate partner, and maximum disaster ensues with maximum speed.
Entirely agreed. Especially if he gets told the way Franz Stefan was that he's essentially there as a stud and if he can't even do that right, what is the point of him? (Again, MT lucked out with Franz Stefan, because seven or so years of "look at that whuss from Lorraine, can't even sire boys, just more useless girls!" might have embittered and thus poisoned the marriage in 8 out of ten cases.)
In that scenario, I see MT going for an annulment at top speed, and if she has to blackmail dad into it somehow, so be it.
(The biography reminds me that in rl, the first vaguely not quite insulting thing Fritz said about her - while she was still alive - was "finally the Habsburgs produced a man again, and it's a woman".)
Re: Nomination coordination redux
How FW would have reacted to a Fritz not just geographically but hierarchically completely out of his control ...is beyond my power to imagine. From the first time his ambassador reports onwards about how HRH had a great time at the public concert last night, playing flute while MT sang, and that's before we get the first letter (in French, of course)
I'm dying, this is hilarious, I can't imagine FW's reaction either. Especially if the marriage was his idea!
"have suggested to the Emperor to request loan from our treasury" Yes, yes, he totally would have done that! LOL
Charles II/Catherine of Braganza: Yup, completely different political waters, agreed. I was just throwing that out there as another example of a Catholic princess being allowed to marry a Protestant sovereign, not as a close parallel.
Side note, it's "heir presumptive" in English.
Really hard to say. I mean, there's the rl example of her handling Joseph as a co-ruler
Agreed. It says a lot about her personality, but mother/son dynamics are completely different than wife/husband dynamics, especially in her place and time.
MT really lucked out with Franz Stefan
Agreed!!
the first vaguely not quite insulting thing Fritz said about her - while she was still alive - was "finally the Habsburgs produced a man again, and it's a woman"
Oh, Fritz! *laughing* Of course you said that.
Yeah, I feel like Fritz is in way over his head politically in this scenario.
To expand a little on this, his forte was not navigating complex interpersonal dynamics. His forte was deciding what he was going to do, entrenching his position, and defending it at all costs. He reminds me of the proverb, "'Take what you want and pay for it,' says God." His default when he felt threatened was the pre-emptive attack. When he didn't have enough power for that, passive resistance. The one time we see him so helpless neither of those was an option is the one time we see him faint.
And I do think that keeping EC at arm's length for life was both a pre-emptive attack (don't let her get any political power) and passive resistance (this marriage was forced on me, so I will undermine it to the utmost). Fritz was capable of keeping up both the pre-emptive attacks and the passive resistance against his father well after FW died. All of which is perfectly in keeping with child trauma psychology.
Re: Nomination coordination redux
This is why I think he's in over his head. He doesn't have the same opportunity to isolate and entrench as he did as sole uncontested ruler in Prussia, following in his father's footsteps as sole uncontested ruler.
One could wonder how adaptable Fritz was, i.e. whether he took the isolate-and-entrench approach because it was easily available to him, and whether he would have been capable of developing a different strategy in a different context like Vienna. But considering how little he managed to back down even in the face of someone having absolute power over him (like, he just barely played along to the point where FW *knew* and was constantly complaining that the moment his back was turned, Fritz was getting up to whatever he wanted--Fritz was not capable of or willing to fool anyone, at any time in his life I can think of; the closest he could come was promising something and blatantly and openly breaking his word as soon as it was convenient to do so, which is worlds away from manipulative skills), I kind of feel like isolate-and-entrench was Fritz's innate strategy, and it was amplified by one million by decades of chronic trauma*, and his chances of developing a different strategy in his twenties were slim.
Interpersonal skills were what would have been needed at Vienna, and Fritz was always short on those. I've seen biographers point out that if he'd been willing to play along more often instead of kicking out foreign envoys and refusing to meet with people, he could have been a much greater, more effective, and more famous ruler. To which my reaction is, "Me too. My career would be way more successful if I were willing to interact with people more. I've seen it done by a friend/former boss who's almost exactly like me except for being willing to fake extraversion for the sake of good leadership. And to me and Fritz, it's just not worth it." Take what you want and pay for it.
* Whatever strategy people develop in the face of trauma is the one that they usually carry for life, regardless of how ineffective it is in their post-trauma life, because their limbic systems equate that strategy with survival. Much of effective PTSD therapy is built around helping people develop new strategies for less traumatic environments.
Re: Nomination coordination redux
I keep opening the notification thread in my email to reread this and laugh out loud.
RIP Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia
1688 - 1733
Cause of death: aneurysm
Re: Nomination coordination redux
I also sort of have this attachment to the thought of Fritz and MT in this AU playing music together and bonding over it, even if they didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of other things :) (Well, until Fritz started telling MT how to sing, anyway...)
Re: Nomination coordination redux
War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
MT was fluent, though unlike Fritz, she also was fluent in German, which she spoke with a Viennese accent. There was a joke in Austria at the time re: the Austrian nobility, that they spoke Latin like Cicero, French like a Parisian, and German like their nurse. Which was literally true in that their nurses - both wetnurses and nurses in the toddler years - were the only ones speaking German to the noble kids, and they of course were not nobles. Meaning the German they spoke was literally the language of the people, deemed vulgar by the nobility. Note that Wilhelmine, who could be a snob, is making fun of MT's older cousin the Empress married to the Wittelsbach guy for her Austrian accent and for insisting to speak German, not French. MT, having been raised to be a spouse to European royalty, spoke French just fine and corresponded in French not just with her youngest daughter (Marie Antoinette), but she didn't have Fritz' hangups about the German language. There's an affectionate, playful letter of hers to Franz Stefan from their engagement time where she keeps switching between French, German and Italian and writes stuff like "je vous adore, mio Mausi".
re: the Latin: being taught hardcore old fashioned Catholicism by a Jesuit does have its drawbacks for one's future mind in the of the Enlightenment, but it does provide one with first class Latin.
Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
There's an affectionate, playful letter of hers to Franz Stefan from their engagement time where she keeps switching between French, German and Italian and writes stuff like "je vous adore, mio Mausi".
That is so super cute. MT/FS is basically my OTP for this fandom. Your posts are making me realize how incredibly lucky she was <3
Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
If you're in the market for super cute: you might know this story already, as it's one of the more famous relating to Mozart the wonder child, but when he was six and his father Leopold went on a tour through Europe with little Wolfgang and his sister Nannerl, one of their earliest concerts outside of Salzburg took place in Vienna. Word of mouth got to MT incredibly fast, and the two Mozart children were invited to play for her and her children (twelve at the time tout suite. Young W. showed off, playing blindly, among other things, and charmed the empress by jumping on her lap and kissing her, as father Leopold reports in his letter home to Salzburg in Rokoko German: "Der Wolferl ist der Kayserin auf den Schooß gesprungen, sie um den Halß bekommen, und rechtschaffen abgeküsst." ("Our Wolferl jumped on the Empress' lap, flung his arms around her neck and kissed the hell out of her.") So far, so historical since we have Leopold's letter. In the first biography written after Mozart's death, decades later, the story goes a little bit further, about the Mozart children playing with the arch dukes and arch duchesses, Wolferl falling down and little Maria Antonia, the future Marie Antoinette, who was exactly his age (they're only two months apart), helping him up again, wereupon he says: "Du bist lieb, dich werd ich heiraten!" (You're a dear, I'm going to marry you!"
(This might or might not be true as well; Peter Shaffer uses it in Amadeus when he lets Joseph mention to the courtiers - when adult Mozart first shows up at his court and promptly infuriates Salieri by improving on his greeting march - that they've met before, when Joseph was a teen and Mozart was a Wunderkind.)
Now, MT gave the Mozarts a hundred gold ducats for this event, which was more than Leopold earned at his job as leader of the orchestra for the Prince Bishop of Salzburg in a year, to give you some relation. That the kids were presented at court and a success also meant they were booked out in Vienna afterwards, and only left because young Wolfgang got sick. That tour took three years, all in all, and they covered most German states as well as France, most Italian states and England. Young Goethe, a teen at the time, and his sister Cornelia (ditto) saw the Mozarts playing in Frankfurt, for example. There was one notable exception - no concerts in Berlin (or Sanssouci, for that matter). Why not? At a guess, because Fritz was famously thrifty. At any rate, I doubt little Mozart could have charmed him... and there's the sad fact Fritz managed to miss out all the geniuses of the age (other than the Bach encounter) because of his anti-German hangups.
(Seriously, Fritz: founded an academy in Berlin modelled on the Academie Francaise, wanted to be like Louis XIV, managed to miss utterly Louis encouraged the writers, scientists and philosophers of his own realm, apparantly. When the Prussian academy invited Lessing, one of the most important writers of German literature pre Goethe and definitely the best one of Prussia, Fritz was so displeased that he changed the rules to "no German writers" and got Lessing excluded again. German mathematicians just about made the cut, but he paid Euler so badly that when Catherine made a higher offer, Euler moved to Russia like lightning. And when the academy wanted to invite Wieland (second best of the pre-Goethe generation) for a guest lecture at least, Fritz made it known they weren't supposed to offer what French writers got, whereupon Wieland said "Fuck you, I'm staying in Rome". (Until he was invited by Fritz' niece the new duchess of Weimar to teach her kid Carl August.) It only got worse with time; Fritz notoriously complained about German literature being not literature and singled out young Goethe's drama "Götz von Berlichingen" as especially bad (that was when his niece co-founded a journal about German literature and contributed essays, in German) and chided the rest of the young poets for not using French models. (Reaction from young German writers: French drama is boring, Shakespeare is the man!) Meanwhile, the German literary scene exploded with creativity - seriously, this was the golden age - so by the time Madame de Stael wrote "De L'Allemagne", ten years or so after Fritz died, French writers literary toured to the German states to meet them. It's a bit like the Elizabethan age if Elizabeth had insisted on speaking only Latin and reading and watching only medieval morality plays.
The only one who managed to have a vaguely honest converstion with Fritz about this was Gottsched, who only was a so so writer himself but a great reformer of the theatre, and who told Fritz that the nobility cutting itself off from the people by literally speaking another language only (instead of additionally) was no good, and couldn't produce more culture, and Fritz replying: "There is some truth in that, for I haven't read a German book since I was a boy, but now I'm 43, and I don't have the time to learn again."
Composers and Writers
I feel like I should have known that story about Euler (having also been a math nerd as a child) but I have no memory of it, and my history was sufficiently bad that if someone had told me something like that, I would not have recollected any of the monarchs in question anyway :)
Which is to say, this is all super fascinating :D Oh Fritz. I like that comparison to Elizabeth, it really brings out the visceral OMG NO reaction in me :)
Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
Just in terms of him being a throwback, or in terms of quality?
Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
Basically, everything that made Shakespeare Shakespeare (and Marlowe, and heck, William Byrd and Thomas Tallis, and...) would have been cut out. I mean, presumably we would have gotten some nice Latin medieval morality plays out of it... that no one would care about or read or put on, compared to how we feel about Shakespeare. So I assume what selenak means is, Fritz basically was encouraging stagnation in terms of artistic technique, and was against all the things (including the German language itself) that were actually at the time working to make German literature great.
Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
It worked for me as I know nothing about Fritz' drama or about Corneille or Racine :D
Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
* Not suggesting Fritz was patronizing anything of that quality in practice, just that he was *trying* to.
Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
Okay, but seriously now, [Bad username or unknown identity: “cahn”] put the problem very well. Bear also in mind that Racine and Corneille were already a century old in Fritz’ youth; he wasn’t into Beaumarchais now, was he? And by blindly following Voltaire’s doctrine that Shakespeare (or any of the Brits) wasn’t any good, he didn’t himself any favours, either. (The young Sturm und Drang poets of the 1770s going through a Shakespeare craze and coming out inspired to do their own stuff also started the German love affair with Shakespeare that later, when the 1800s turned more and more nationalistic, went to such ridiculous extremes as scholars trying to prove Will really had been German. Such idiocy aside, though, that love affair never ended, and both Goethe and Schiller would not have become the writers they did if they hadn’t been full fledged participants. It wasn’t that they disliked Corneille and Racine, or didn’t know their work well, btw, Schiller tried his hand at a Phedre translation, and Goethe had Cid discussions with visitors. But good old Shakes was their passion.)
Back to Fritz: while I had known about his refusal to acknowledge German literature, I hadn’t known, until reading the Fritz & music book and catching up with more recent biographies, that he wasn’t much better with modern (to his day) composers. I mean, he was anti-Gluck, for God’s sake. (Don’t even ask whether the existence of Haydn or young Mozart registered.) He liked Hasse well enough, but anything later was bad, and Gluck’s opera innovations were of the devil. (Well, the vaguely deist equivalent thereof.)
Now reforming your country’s laws etc. is all very well, but if you really want your country to become leading in culture, than that’s not how to do it. (His nephew wasn’t a genius - nor was he the utter idiot Fritz saw him as, following his father’s tradition of humiliating the crown prince in public - but he did much better in terms of encouraging the arts, and it was then that Berlin started to be home to salons, writers and painters.)
ETA: for contemporary contrast, what Catherine did in Russia: write comedies in Russian, to encourage others to write in Russian. Bear in mind that Russian hadn’t been her native language, or indeed the language of the court (which was French, as everywhere else in Europe).
Aside: Gluck’s opera innovations
Gluck had long pondered the fundamental problem of form and content in opera. He thought both of the main Italian operatic genres, opera buffa and opera seria, had strayed too far from what opera should really be and seemed unnatural. Opera buffa had long lost its original freshness. Its jokes were threadbare and the repetition of the same characters made them seem no more than stereotypes. In opera seria, the singing was devoted to superficial effects and the content was uninteresting and fossilised. As in opera buffa, the singers were effectively absolute masters of the stage and the music, decorating the vocal lines so floridly that audiences could no longer recognise the original melody. Gluck wanted to return opera to its origins, focusing on human drama and passions and making words and music of equal importance.
The practical results from this in Gluck’s operas and later in everyone else’s were:
far less repetition of text within an aria, no da capo arias
little or no opportunity for vocal improvisation or virtuosic displays of vocal agility or power
no long melismas
no ritornellos or shorter ones
a more predominantly syllabic setting of the text to make the words more intelligible
a blurring of the distinction between recitative and aria, declamatory and lyrical passages, with altogether less recitative
accompanied rather than secco recitative
simpler, more flowing melodic lines
an overture that is linked by theme or mood to the ensuing action.
Or, as Gluck himself put it to Burney in his old age: It was my intention to confine music to its true dramatic province, of assisting poetical expression, and of augmenting the interest of the fable; without interrupting the action, or chilling it with useless and superfluous ornaments; for the office of music, when joined to poetry, seemed to me, to resemble that of colouring in a correct and well disposed design, where the lights and shades only seem to animate the figures, without altering the out-line.
What Fritz’ beef with this was: have returned the book to the library, so can’t quote directly, but he thought it was robbing opera of its heroic quality. Also, he may or may not have held it against Gluck that he was a Habsburg protegé. (Gluck taught Marie Antoinette singing, which was why she later as Queen brought him to Paris where he took French opera by storm. MT’s other kids were also fans - brother Leopold directed one of Gluck’s compositions at a court concert.
Re: Aside: Gluck’s opera innovations
(Although to be fair it's only the late Gluck operas I really enjoy :))
The eagles are coming!
Re: The eagles are coming!
Re: The eagles are coming!
Since my Frederician noms are already in the spreadsheet, I'll wait to comment on the other fandoms until some time when it's not bedtime :) But it's now officially IN.
Re: The eagles are coming!