cahn | Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

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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

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

Well, then, you know the story! I didn't know there was an opera covering all this. I just glanced at Wikipedia and had to share the WTFery.

So I guess if you're not going to read the cautionary tales, Gustav, you can yourself become the cautionary tale for opera lovers? I can see the value in having the cautionary tale encoded in several different genres, so as to reach the widest audience possible. :P

From:

cahn

Tried to edit my comment but you'd already replied :D

selenak suggested I link you -- here are my reactions to watching Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), which also double as a synopsis, more or less. In the comments zdenka also links to a synopsis from her DW, which is a better synopsis and probably funnier as well :)

Basically, the plot is actually the history you have delineated in this thread, except that Verdi added a love triangle with a best friend (who is obviously my favorite! :D <3 ), who ends up joining the conspirators.

Also, Gustav in the opera is (apparently at least somewhat intentionally) written as totally bi, although I didn't clue into that when I first watched it (the direction didn't really make a thing of it).

From:

selenak

There are actually several operas, though Verdi's won the test of time. I mean, if a King - one famous for his scandals, his opera love and opera financing, no less - gets assassinated - well, shot at - in the opera during a masque ball, you don't expect composers to resist, do you? Poor old Verdi and his librettists had to change their script several times, though, as by the 19th century censorship was very tetchy about the depiction of assassinations involving royalty. So Gustav first got demoted from Swedish King to Duke of Pomerania, and then, when censorship still wasn't satisfied and demanded the entire action to be transferred to another continent, he ended up as "Riccardo, Governor in Boston". Bet you didn't know the early Puritans partied like that, did you?

(These days, the opera is produced in both the rewritten and the original draft version.)

(This problem kept happening to Verdi. It's also why Rigoletto, which is based on Victor Hugo's novella Le Roi S'Amuse, got transfered to Mantua, with King Francis I. ending up as the anomymous Duke of Mantua. (Who doesn't die, but there is an assassination attempt. Like I said - tetchy censorship was tetchy.)