Frederick the Great post links

[cahn]

More 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 movies because 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)!

Comments

Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition

[mildred_of_midgard]

It's a bit like the Elizabethan age if Elizabeth had insisted on speaking only Latin and reading and watching only medieval morality plays.

Just in terms of him being a throwback, or in terms of quality?

Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition

[cahn]

Not selenak, but, like, when she said that, my mind immediately went to Shakespeare and Marlowe and so on having to (a) write their plays in Latin, which alone (as an English speaker) is kind of freaking me out (to unpack that a little, English can be beautiful and interesting, and it's that exploration that can't be done if you insist on writing in a non-native language), but even more so (b) something like, oh, Hamlet, the characters are entirely too three-dimensional and realistic and why aren't they called Greed and Wrath and Justice, let's kick Shakespeare out of the English lit scene.

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

[mildred_of_midgard]

That makes more sense. Where my mind immediately went was equating Corneille and Racine, Fritz's gold standard for drama, to morality plays, and I had to raise my hand and ask for clarification. Stagnation: yes, absolutely. Loss of everything actually working for German lit: ditto.

Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition

[cahn]

Haha, this is because you know too much :P

It worked for me as I know nothing about Fritz' drama or about Corneille or Racine :D

Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition

[mildred_of_midgard]

Haha. :) I know only slightly more: just enough to wonder if morality plays were really that good or if Racine and company* were really that bad, not enough to have formed an independent opinion on the quality of either.

* Not suggesting Fritz was patronizing anything of that quality in practice, just that he was *trying* to.

Re: War of the Roses, Rokoko Edition

[selenak]

Hey, I’ll have you know morality plays were nothing to sneeze at! :) We got one of the biggest ongoing spectacles of 20th/21st century German language theatre out of them. (Context: fin du siecle writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal it on the idea of writing Jederman, a play modelled on medieval morality plays like Everyman, Max Reinhardt staged it in Salzburg getting the cooperation of the local arch bishop for having every church ringing their bells at a key point, and it has been staged every year since. (Well, okay, not when the Nazis were in charge, but other than that.) (Most German language actors and actresses have “must play Everyman - male - or Lust - female in Salzburg” in their CV.)

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

[selenak]

For context, wiki’s summary serves as well as any:

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

[cahn]

Ah, thanks for this -- as someone who (now) loves opera but not in either a historical or analytic kind of way, I mostly just had this vague feeling of "Gluck is the earliest compser where I really viscerally enjoy his operas!" (As opposed to, say, Monteverdi, whom I admire and have after many years learned to appreciate, but whom I don't have the same kind of feeling about.)

(Although to be fair it's only the late Gluck operas I really enjoy :))