![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnCome join us in this crazy Frederick the Great fandom and learn more about all these crazy associated people, like the star-crossed and heartbreaking romance between Maria Theresia's daughter Maria Christina and her daughter-in-law Isabella, wow.
OK, so, there are FOURTEEN characters nominated:
Anna Karolina Orzelska (Frederician RPF)
Elisabeth Christine von Preußen | Elisabeth Christine Queen of Prussia (Frederician RPF)
Francesco Algarotti (Frederician RPF)
François-Marie Arouet | Voltaire (Frederician RPF)
Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great (Frederician RPF)
Hans Hermann Von Katte (Frederician RPF)
Joseph II Holy Roman Emperor (Frederician RPF)
Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria (Frederician RPF)
Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf (Frederician RPF)
Peter Karl Christoph von Keith (Frederician RPF)
Sophia Dorothea of Hanover (Frederician RPF)
Stanisław August Poniatowski (Frederician RPF)
Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758) (Frederician RPF)
Yekatarina II Alekseyevna | Catherine the Great of Russia (Frederician RPF)
This means some fourth person kindly nominated Algarotti and -- I think? -- Stanislaw August Poniatowski! YAY! Thank you fourth person! Come be our friend! :D Yuletide is so great!
I am definitely requesting Maria Theresia, Wilhelmine, and Fritz (Put them in a room together. Shake. How big is the explosion?), and thinking about Elisabeth Christine, but maybe not this year.
I am also declaring this post another Frederician post, as the last one was getting out of hand. I think I'll still use that one as the overall index to these, though, to keep all the links in one place.
(seriously, every time I think the wild stories are done there is ANOTHER one)
OK, so, there are FOURTEEN characters nominated:
Anna Karolina Orzelska (Frederician RPF)
Elisabeth Christine von Preußen | Elisabeth Christine Queen of Prussia (Frederician RPF)
Francesco Algarotti (Frederician RPF)
François-Marie Arouet | Voltaire (Frederician RPF)
Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great (Frederician RPF)
Hans Hermann Von Katte (Frederician RPF)
Joseph II Holy Roman Emperor (Frederician RPF)
Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria (Frederician RPF)
Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf (Frederician RPF)
Peter Karl Christoph von Keith (Frederician RPF)
Sophia Dorothea of Hanover (Frederician RPF)
Stanisław August Poniatowski (Frederician RPF)
Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758) (Frederician RPF)
Yekatarina II Alekseyevna | Catherine the Great of Russia (Frederician RPF)
This means some fourth person kindly nominated Algarotti and -- I think? -- Stanislaw August Poniatowski! YAY! Thank you fourth person! Come be our friend! :D Yuletide is so great!
I am definitely requesting Maria Theresia, Wilhelmine, and Fritz (Put them in a room together. Shake. How big is the explosion?), and thinking about Elisabeth Christine, but maybe not this year.
I am also declaring this post another Frederician post, as the last one was getting out of hand. I think I'll still use that one as the overall index to these, though, to keep all the links in one place.
(seriously, every time I think the wild stories are done there is ANOTHER one)
Re: On a lighter note
Date: 2019-10-23 03:41 pm (UTC)Yes, the Shakespeare trash talking was in the same pamphlet, alright. Here's what one of the
young TurkSturm und Drang writers, Herder, replied, according to Katharina Mommsen's essay I have this latest intel from:"Does one have to step forward and exclaim: great man, be silent! You have no idea what you're talking about; you're making yourself ridiculous in the eyes of your fellow citizens and contemporaries; go and scrub your warrior's armor so it doesn't rust, and continue to leave the dust on the books you should have bothered to read first; shame on you, go away!"
(Btw, today's resarch according to the essay knows that in fact a substantial amount of De La Literature Allemande is based on an unpublished pamphlet Fritz drafted during his time in Rheinsberg...thirty years earlier. And as he confessed to Gottsched when he was in his forties, he hadn't read a German book since he was 18. I doubt he'd read any since meeting Gottsched, though presumably someone told him what Götz von Berlichingen was about and that it was blatantly inspired by Shakespeare. That he dusted off this unpublished thing and added a few more insults, though, really speaks for a need to be controversial again. *g*)
(The essay is mostly about German literary matters and not so much about Fritz, but for the record, it's here.
*"your fellow citizens": truly, the French Revolution is only a mere nine more years away. I doubt anyone in Fritz' youth would have dared to call him a "fellow citizen". ("Mitbürger")
** Also fun is Wieland calling Fritz "den aufgeblasensten aller deutschen Michel" ("the most bloated of German Michaels") in response. "Der deutsche Michel", "German Michael", was a symbolic figure like Uncle Sam later for the US or John Bull for England. He's usually depicted as a sleepyhead with a cap. (Remember, this was before Prussia took over the rest of the German states and we got the collective reputation of being military tough guys; the Michel was the opposite of that.) Is being called bloated or being referred to as the most German of Germans the worse insult for Fritz? Discuss.
Re: On a lighter note
Date: 2019-10-23 07:05 pm (UTC)Oh, Lucchesini! I know him as gentleman of the bedchamber and person Fritz talked to the most in his last years. Should have guessed that would be his reader.
Do you happen to know the names of any of his other readers? Unfortunately, this is difficult to google due to 1) the frequency of the word "reader" in English, 2) Henri de Catt (who floods the search results even when I use "Vorleser").
Is being called bloated or being referred to as the most German of Germans the worse insult for Fritz?
Depends. What does "bloated" mean in this context? Indolent? Something else? Literally bloated, yes, between the digestive issues and the edema, but I don't think that's what was meant. :-P
Btw, today's resarch according to the essay knows that in fact a substantial amount of De La Literature Allemande is based on an unpublished pamphlet Fritz drafted during his time in Rheinsberg
Rheinsberg? RHEINSBERG?! Oh god, this is so in character I'm dying laughing. Oh, Fritz.
we already knew he hasn't updated his literary taste since he was 16
Or his taste in much else. Time kind of stopped for him in the 17th century when it came to the arts. Neoclassicism? What Neoclassicism?! Frederician rococo all the way! (It has been pointed out that not only did he form his tastes early in the 18th century, but he got them from people who were a generation older than he was. And to use cahn's analogy, he was an absolute terrier when he got an idea into his head.)
Okay so very important question for my modern AUs: do you think anything has been created in the last 300 years that Fritz would actually like, if he was dropped by a time machine into the year 2019 with all his memories up through 1786 (or 1728, which as discussed is the same thing :P) intact? Having virtually no artistic tastes myself (tone-deaf, aesthetically blind, probably completely soulless :P ), I can't really judge, but I've been desperately curious for a long time.
Finally, while we're here, I have run across some quotes from people playing devil's advocate re Fritz and German. Some of them are, "Many of his contemporaries agreed, or partially agreed," but hilariously, many are "Well, of course he was terribly wrong, but there were silver linings, because Fritz being wrong was better than most people being right!"
"As Goethe noted, by simply publishing a pamphlet about German literature Frederick gave intellectual debate a momentum which no other living person could have matched. His declared aversion to their culture was paradoxically 'highly beneficial' for German writers, because it spurred them on by provoking a reaction. Goethe continued: 'Moreover, in the same way, Frederick’s aversion to the German language as the medium for literature was a good thing for German writers. They did everything they could to make the King take notice of them.' That Frederick’s remarks about German literature were ill-informed, one-sided and even at times absurd did not matter. What was important was the entry of the King of Prussia to the public domain to take on all comers."
"Paradoxically, this combination of goad and encouragement does seem to have promoted German literature."
"The Prussian writer Leonard Meister...could even find a beneficial side to Frederick’s alleged Francophilia: 'Even his preference for the French seems to have had a beneficial effect on the Germans. Not only did they learn from them, but there also developed a noble spirit of competition, with German intellectuals seeking to be worthy associates of their gifted French counterparts."
"Frederick himself...said to Mirabeau: 'What greater service could I have performed for German literature than that I didn't bother with it?'"
I love that last one. "I didn't micromanage it! What more do you want?" :P (I mean, I don't think that's what he meant, but that's what I'm taking away from it as the real silver lining here.)
Re: On a lighter note
Date: 2019-10-24 04:40 am (UTC)Not by heart, and my Fritz bios are back at the library by now.
"Bloated" in this context means mostly chest-thumpingly arrogant, but I wanted to get the physical imagery across which "aufgeblasen" has in German. Puffing up your cheeks, literally.
Okay so very important question for my modern AUs: do you think anything has been created in the last 300 years that Fritz would actually like, if he was dropped by a time machine into the year 2019 with all his memories up through 1786 (or 1728, which as discussed is the same thing :P) intact?
Impossible to answer, since we don't have any date for him actually having read and listened to anything post 1728 or thereabouts. (Well, other than his and Wilhelmine's compositions.) It's not just literature, as I said in the other post. Beyond him putting her and Heinrich's boy under arrest for a while, another beef Elisabeth Mara/Gertrud Schmeling had with him that he wouldn't let her sing any Gluck but stubbornly kept to the old Metastasio-inspired stuff, and if you're a singer living in an era where opera goes through a major major shift and lots of exciting new composers are around, that's got to be frustrating even if he pays you very well.
And as one biographer asked: "Friedrich enjoyed Moliere's Le Bourgois Gentilhomme, but if he'd enjoyed Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm, if he'd actually read or watched it, is highly doubtable." The point of comparison here is that much as Moliere poked fun at the customs and hypocrisies of his day, Lessing (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,dramatist and philosopher, friends with Moses Mendelssohn, embodiment of the German Enlightenment as its best, also notoriously the one whose electon to the Academy made Fritz change the rules to NO GERMAN WRITERS ALLOWED) poked fun and, um, actually critisized, in a comedy manner, the Prussia of his day. I.e. Fritz' Prussia.
Minna von Barnhelm is set right after the 7-Years-War. Our titular heroine (a Saxon) is a rich heiress who fell in love with and gotten engaged to our hero, Major von Tellheim (a Prussian), mid-war. But then she hasn't heared from him until finding him in the inn the play takes place, absolutely broke and dismissed in disgrace. Why? Because Tellheim, who is an honorable man, has thought the war taxes he as a Prussian officer was supposed to raise from the occupied (by Prussia) Saxons were too much and too unfair for the part of Saxon population he was in charge with, lowered them and partially used his own fortune to make up the difference. This ended up being construed as bribery and got him kicked out of the army. As he's adherring to the Prussian code of honor he feels he can't possibly tell Minna about this or make her marry a man without fortune and in disgrace, hence his disappearance.
Cue the usual comedy stuff, since Minna is a sensible and clever heroine, with a streak of ruthlessnesss (her way of getting Tellheim who when seeing her first pretends to not love her anymore to tell her he does love her is simply by pretending to have lost her fortune as well, and be crushed he now turns his back on her that she's in distress; cue him saying no, if that's the case, of course he loves and adores her, he just thought, etc., and then she corners him with her question if this is honorable and loving behavior for him - helping her if she's poor - why not for her?. You also get the usual 18th century comedy structure of upper class Minna and Tellheim being mirrored by her lady's maid and his footman (the only of his servants who remained with him, unpaid, and refuses to leave; Tellheim spent the last of his money to pay his other servants' salaries before they left back when he was dismissed from the army). Saxon common sense and charm triumphs over Prussian stiff neck and pride, with a little help from the off stage wise King (i.e. Fritz), a la Louis XIV deus' ex machina appearance in Moliere's plays, who has realised the truth of what Tellheim did (i.e. that he didn't let himself bribed by Saxons but on the contrary spent his money to help them and meet the demands of the Prussian army at the same time) and reverses the dishonorable discharge.
But around the rom com plot, you also get a pretty sharp picture of the 7 years war aftermath, with not just Tellheim and his footman Just but a lot of other former soldiers not knowing what to do, being out of money, and the civilian population still shaken and barely recovering. It's a contemporary play which doesn't bother with allegorisation or mythical disguises, or a fictional location, but features contemporary characters, in the author's present, and a very specific setting. (It is, in fact, the very first play of later to be canonical German literature which deals with with the 7 years war.) I don't think the biographer in question was maligning Fritz when doubting he'd been able to laugh and say "point taken", or even to realise that Lessing was in fact doing the same thing Moliere had done, that the way to follow the example of a classic playwright wasn't by imitation but by adopting those satirical methods to your own surroundings.
(Especially if one of the results is "yeah, the Prussian code of conduct, for men especially, is really somewhat ridiculous and inherently self damaging", and "women are more sensible than men, by and large".)
Anyway: one thing that happens in the Fritz/Wilhelmine letters more than once is this kind of exchange:
W: Congratulatons on founding the academy in Berlin and switching from being Mars to being Apollo at your court! Seems the muses are leaving France and coming to the Germans, yay! We're entering a golden age, I just feel it.
F: Nope, nope, nope. No way are the muses deserting France. They got several new plays and operas out just this year when the Dauphin married, and have we got? Dreck I'm not reading or watching. We're barbarians" (he does say "we", not "they") and all my artists are French or Italian because I have taste.
So for Fritz to enjoy anything produced in the last 300 years would require him to make the major, major concesssion he never did in his life time of actually being able to listen to it/read it/watch it instead of refusing to and clinging to the stuff that he liked when he was young. Mind you, the change of circumstance might make it happen - because a Fritz transported into the present via time machine would no longer be able to create his own world around him and shut out (most of) anything he doesn't want to acknowledge. He couldn't count on people indulging him. And he might be frustrated enough by everyone talking about things he has no idea about to actually tackle at least some of them.
A cunning plan might be to start with Mozart's "Figaro's Wedding" (hey, it has an Italian libretto! Based on a French play! He'll recognize the traces left by the Comedia Dell' Arte archetypes) and Rossini's "Barber of Sevilla" (aka the prequel, same reasons as before). It's post Gluck (and how) so has all the innovations he was against and then some, but both are so beautiful that I just can't imagine anyone with the slightest love of music truly listening and not loving them.
I would at some point risk traumatizing him again by either Schiller's Don Carlos directly or Verdi's opera version, but not early on in the game. I would risk one of Schiller's poems, Die Bürgschaft (that's the one about Damon you asked me about several entries ago), because not only is it an ode to male friendship, but this time one of the friends is able to save the other one from execution by tyrant in the end and even the tyrant is impressed. And like all of Schiller's word arias, the language is gorgeous; hard to maintain German sounds terrible when listening to it.
Whether he'd enjoy any of the great 19th century novels, of any country, lord knows. There were of course Baroque novels, but the 19th century novel was a very different beast. I would, however, introduce 20th century music by presenting him with Leonard Bernstein's version of his pal Voltaire's novel Candide. Bernstein's music incorporates several operatic and musical styles, and Fritz would thus be presented with something both familiar and utterly alien.
ETA: Oh, I know another one to which Fritz' reaction might at least be... interesting. The Three Penny Opera by Brecht and Kurt Weill. He'd spot it being based on The Beggar's Opera, of course (well, I assume, I have no idea whether he knew The Beggar's Opera, but it was contemporary to him and pre-Gluck, so he might have), but Brecht's in your face cynicsm mixed with lyricism strikes me as acutally rather Fritzian in personality. What he'd make of the Canon Song I'd really like to know! Can equally see him laughing and be indignant.
Re: On a lighter note
Date: 2019-10-24 05:36 pm (UTC)However, it did make me think that perhaps flute might be a good way to get his attention. I know nothing about flute literature, but I know Mozart did a lot of beautiful woodwind stuff (yes, you can tell I'm a string player), and Fritz might get interested from that end, at which point maybe introducing him to Figaro might work. I wonder what he'd think of Romantic flute music. Again, maybe introduce some solo or even a capella flute music and get him gently used to that before adding in anything else.
Also, if this is an AU where Katte lives (aren't they all?) then I think it's very possible Katte might be interested in some of this newfangled stuff, and that might be an avenue to introduce it to Fritz.
(Also, Minna von Barnhelm sounds awesome -- both the play and the heroine :D )
Re: On a lighter note
Date: 2019-10-24 07:40 pm (UTC)Yes. Yes they are.
then I think it's very possible Katte might be interested in some of this newfangled stuff, and that might be an avenue to introduce it to Fritz.
That's exactly what I'm getting at. In all my modern AUs, Fritz is ranting about newfangled X, Y, and Z, and Katte is sighing to himself while gradually introducing Fritz to newer things. I'm just trying to figure out *what* Katte is introducing him to. Good witty comedy? What about *films*? Surely in the set of all films produced in the last hundred years, a modern Fritz comes around to liking at least one!
The other reason I think about this is that I think a less traumatized Fritz is less aggressively close-minded. He's still very opinionated, but...okay, I'm not trying to oversimplify here, but I do think his chronic trauma affected the way he related to things like the arts. It's just so radically in character with the way he reacted to everything else in a way that makes sense in light of his personality intersecting with PTSD. (It's never just PTSD. As
For example, I don't think Fritz's exaggerated antipathy toward German and love for French, even relative to his contemporaries for whom French was the language of the nobility and intelligentsia, was solely due to FW burning/getting rid of Fritz's French books and forbidding anyone to let him speak or read or write anything but German at Küstrin, but I don't think it's irrelevant either.
So if Katte's around (and I said "time machine" for the sake of simplifying my question, but my actual mechanism is reincarnation, which introduces whole new kettles of fish), and therapy is around, and also other things I have introduced into this complex, never-to-be-written-and-posted universe, I feel like Katte is having fun exploring everything that happened in the last 300 years, while coaxing his grumpy boyfriend into dipping his toes in the water.
Re Don Carlos and Die Bürgschaft, I would give him major detailed trigger warnings first and let him decide. :)
Katte and Fritz reincarnation
Date: 2019-10-28 03:57 pm (UTC)Katte might introduce him to films, but he is *definitely* going to introduce him to flute music, right?! :)
Re: Katte and Fritz reincarnation
Date: 2019-10-28 04:15 pm (UTC)You mean new-to-him flute music? By the time Fritz & Katte meet in their twenties (yes, I'm evil and like to make my characters *work* for their happy ending), Fritz is already a professional chamber musician (and yes, a grumpy one) and pretty familiar with the repertoire of the last 300 years, and yes he has to play things he doesn't like for his job. Like selenak said, it's hard when you're not king and can't have everything your way. He considers it a price he's willing to pay to be a professional musician (which is part of the fix-it aspect for me). :)
But Katte has been doing a lot more exploring of everything that happened in the last 300 years, in multiple languages/cultures, and has a lot more breadth and a lot less resistance to new things (I have opinions about Fritz's resistance, and a lot of it comes down to personality meets chronic trauma). So he definitely gets to be the one who tries to get past Fritz's resistance gently with things he might like.
Re: Katte and Fritz reincarnation
Date: 2019-10-28 08:29 pm (UTC)So in that case I think it would be fairly easy for Katte to say, hey, Mozart ALSO wrote these cool operas, come see them with me! Verdi might be a harder sell but after being warmed up by Mozart operas it might work. /is projecting at this point from my own experience
Re: On a lighter note
Date: 2019-10-28 11:25 pm (UTC)Not by heart, and my Fritz bios are back at the library by now.
Have turned up some names of more people I knew about but didn't know/hadn't realized they were his readers: La Mettrie (man, *he* should have written some memoirs) from 1748 until his death in 1751, then Abbé de Prades, then after his falling out with Fritz a few years later, Catt. Then Lucchesini. So that takes us through most of his reign. Will keep an eye out for the early 1740s. :D
I'm finding varying dates for Darget as reader, the earliest being 1746-1752, and the latest being 1749-early 1750s. So he may have overlapped with La Mettrie, not sure.
Almost there!