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Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!
All Yuletide requests are out!
Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!
-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)
Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!
-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French
-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...
Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links
Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!
-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)
Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!
-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French
-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...
Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links
Re: Oh Brother! More impressions of the Heinrich bio
heeee! but also this is super sweet <3
I can never forget her attention, her amiability and the power of her mind. What remains now is very small, compared to her. Of course, from a political point of view her death is a stroke of luck for us.
HAHAHAHA that is both moving and rather funny.
Catherine to Fritz: Mind if I keep your brother as my personal satrap and make him King of Wallachia? Fritz: YES. NO HEINRICH FOR YOU.
LOL!
Beaumarchais told Heinrich he wanted to work together with a composer working at Joseph's court, to wit: Salieri!
I am dying. That is just too much. (And glad that this... didn't happen? or did it? well, glad anyway that it also became a Mozart opera, because that Beaumarchais-daPonte-Mozart combination/collaboration is in my opinion one of the great things about Western civilization.
...And somewhere, Shaffer!Salieri is shaking his fist in his grave.)
Heinrich: YES GOD YES. You bastard.
Okay, this? This is endearing. <3333333333333 to both Fritz and Heinrich
Actually your whole writeup is definitely giving me "yes, your fave is totally cool" vibes, so I guess Ziebura succeeded <3 :D
Ferdiand: *counts* Twelve years? Counting back from March 1799? You mean, when...
Me: *counts*
Me: checks wikipedia, because super bad at dates
Me: Oh Heinrich. <33333333
OK... tell me more about Lehndorff? So I know from your previous posts that he was EC's chamberlain and Heinrich's friend-with-benefits and had a diary... did he write about Heinrich in his diary??
Re: Oh Brother! More impressions of the Heinrich bio
Me: checks wikipedia, because super bad at dates
Me: Oh Heinrich. <33333333
March 1799 - August 17, 1786 = 12 years, 6 months, some days. Just saying.
OK... tell me more about Lehndorff? So I know from your previous posts that he was EC's chamberlain and Heinrich's friend-with-benefits and had a diary... did he write about Heinrich in his diary??
Extensively, and it's even online...in German...in scanned pages...in Fraktur. *facepalm* Actually, the font is a lot less bad than most such examples, but omfg. Also, I can get copy-pastable OCRed text views, but only a couple sentences at a time without paying. I was looking him up recently for the Fredersdorf quotes.
Anyway, I'll give you what I can from various bios.
"His love life can be followed in some detail through the diaries of Count Lehndorff, who was himself besotted with the prince, as the following sample reveals:
"1 May 1753 the most miserable day of my life, because Prince Henry is leaving; I go to see him, my heart full of grief. I hurry to my dear prince, what a sorrowful meeting! I leave him without a word, I see tears pouring down his face, the dearest in the world, what a man to be worshipped, what a loss for me, I swear eternal devotion. I return to my home in sorrow and cannot sleep, I write my prince a letter.
"2 May I get a letter from him which makes me burst into tears. I jump on my horse and ride to meet him, but when I see his carriage approaching I get off and hide, otherwise my heart would have burst. I did not think that one person could be so devoted to another; in pagan times they would have made him a God.
"The sight of Prince Henry in tight riding breeches and looking 'as beautiful as an angel' was enough to send Lehndorff into erotic rapture."
Also, Lehndorff fell in love with an English aristocrat, Sir. Charles Hotham, and wanted to join him in England. But as a Prussian, he had to ask the King's permission to leave the country. Fritz said no. "I cry, and I cry, and I cry," Lehndorff writes. No reason given for the refusal, but I think we all know the real reason is: "If *I* can't go to England with my lover, *nobody* gets to go to England with their lover."
The Maras: *sigh*
Lehndorff also records a masked party in January 1754 where AW dressed up as a woman as part of some general royal hijinks (with heavy anti-Semitic overtones that Lehndorff and all the Hohenzollern brothers thought was hilarious, and which I will refrain from recounting), and also later in the month, when a Countess Bentick more seriously dressed as a man, "in the forlorn hope that her male attire would win her the attention of the exclusively homosexual Prince Henry." No dice, Countess.
After Heinrich's forced marriage, Lehndorff wrote to him: 'Monseigneur, the king has built a palace for you with admirable arrangements: one may spend one’s life there without ever setting one's eyes on one's wife.'
I should add that on this occasion, Bielfeld referred to Heinrich as a "Potsdamite," saying that even though his wife was of more than mortal beauty, it would do her no good. Oh, those Potsdamites. :P
If I find an accessible translation, I'll let you know, but I doubt there is one, since even my biographers are using the German original, and they usually tell you about translations where they can.
Also, I just want to say that today the OCR + auto Google Translate function in Chrome seem to be behaving themselves, but last time I checked, Chrome persisted in translating "Dreissig Jahre am Hofe Friedrichs des Grossen" as "Thirty Years at the Pants of Frederick the Great," through what I suspect was a confusion between 'f' and old-fashioned 's', leading to "Dreissig Jahre am Hose Friedrichs des Grossen."
It made me laugh so much. So close but yet so far! It's "Thirty Years in the Pants of Frederick the Great's Other Self," Google!
Re: Oh Brother! More impressions of the Heinrich bio
German wiki, btw, mentions, as did Ziebura, that Lehndorf was married (twice) while all this was going on. Not of course unusual for someone in this era even when not being a Royal. He was also really bitter about Fritz never promoting him, realising chamberlain to EC was a dead-end job in that it paid well but really wasn't how you distinguished yourself and got some juicy or glorious promotion, and eventually retiring to the countryside.
"The sight of Prince Henry in tight riding breeches and looking 'as beautiful as an angel' was enough to send Lehndorff into erotic rapture."
ETA: This also proves how far gone Lehndorff must have been, because even when young, Heinrich was never more than avarage looking, and when older, usually people found him downright ugly when first meeting him (Most of them were however subsequently wowed by his charm, which he must have had in considerable degree if he tried - very useful in a diplomat -, so a typical description of Heinrich from French, Russian and Swedes - he visited Ulrike in Stockholm, too - goes "huh, at first I thought, this little dry wrinkly man is the hero of the 7 Years War, but then he opened his mouth and wow! So smart! So charming! So witty! Swoon!"
Re: small, he was literally smaller than the not tall Fritz and both his other brothers. There's a famous anecdote of Heinrich motivating the guys from his first serious command by jumping into the muddy river and saying "men, if I can cross this depite it going to my waist, then so can you!"
Lehndorff
Oh, noes! Oh, you're right, my link says "US access only." And I can only download one page at a time, even though it says it's public domain. Oh, well. Presumably when you get home, you can get your hands on a copy? Your write-ups are always awesome (thank you for Trenck, btw), and Lehndorff seems like he's full of the good stuff.
[ETA: I have asked a friend, but the friend may also not have access. We'll see.]
He was also really bitter about Fritz never promoting him, realising chamberlain to EC was a dead-end job in that it paid well but really wasn't how you distinguished yourself and got some juicy or glorious promotion, and eventually retiring to the countryside.
Yep, I almost quoted this but left it out because it wasn't about Heinrich: "It must have occurred to him that his senior position in the queen’s household was not calculated to endear him to Frederick."
This also proves how far gone Lehndorff must have been
Yes, I was going to say that, but I forgot! Thank you! Yes, Heinrich was no prize physically. Hey, he was Fritz's other self: of course he was short, far from good-looking, and charismatic when he wanted to be. :P
Re: Lehndorff
DMed you.
Salieri and Beaumarchais