Frederick the Great post links
Sep. 18th, 2019 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnMore Frederick the Great (henceforth "Fritz") and surrounding spinoffs history! Clearly my purpose in life is now revealed: it is to encourage 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
Date: 2019-10-02 12:59 am (UTC)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
Date: 2019-10-02 03:06 am (UTC)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
Date: 2019-10-02 03:09 am (UTC)War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
Date: 2019-10-02 11:17 am (UTC)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
Date: 2019-10-05 01:25 am (UTC)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
Date: 2019-10-05 08:41 am (UTC)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
Date: 2019-10-07 04:56 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2019-10-07 08:39 pm (UTC)Just in terms of him being a throwback, or in terms of quality?
Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
Date: 2019-10-07 10:08 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2019-10-07 10:22 pm (UTC)Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
Date: 2019-10-08 12:19 am (UTC)It worked for me as I know nothing about Fritz' drama or about Corneille or Racine :D
Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
Date: 2019-10-08 12:27 am (UTC)* Not suggesting Fritz was patronizing anything of that quality in practice, just that he was *trying* to.
Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition
Date: 2019-10-08 05:09 am (UTC)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
Date: 2019-10-08 06:12 am (UTC)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
Date: 2019-10-12 02:29 am (UTC)(Although to be fair it's only the late Gluck operas I really enjoy :))
The eagles are coming!
Date: 2019-10-02 11:47 am (UTC)Re: The eagles are coming!
Date: 2019-10-02 02:09 pm (UTC)Re: The eagles are coming!
Date: 2019-10-04 05:15 am (UTC)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!
Date: 2019-10-04 05:17 am (UTC)