Frederick the Great reveal post / discussion post 8

[cahn]

In the last several months, as anyone who reads this DW knows, mildred_of_midgard and selenak and I have been part of this quite frankly amazing Frederick the Great fandom, and I sort of assumed that the two people in this fandom who actually knew anything, mildred and selenak, were going to write fics for Yuletide, and I (who know nothing except what they've told me in the last several months) was going to awesomely enjoy reading them. In fact, mildred wrote a Fredersdorf fic for selenak's prompt which I betaed, but then mildred's medical issues got bad enough to interfere with her writing fic (making the beta edits would have involved a substantial amount of rewrite), and she wrote a post lamenting she wasn't going to be able to produce any yuletide fic. Meanwhile, I had two fics that I was pretty sure were from selenak, and I thought it would be a shame for her to write us fic and for her not to get any :(

So then mildred and I had this (very paraphrased) conversation (mildred_of_midgard has her own account here, and she has promised to reproduce the actual conversation in comments to this post):

me: You know, we should really write something for selenak! Now that I've read what you wrote about Fredersdorf, I think I could take a stab at her Fredersdorf prompt, if you edited and otherwise helped me out with historical stuff and also if you don't mind it being way more about music than something you would write.
mildred: YES GOD YES and also oh you sweet summer child thinking you know enough to write this. [Mildred was far FAR nicer than this in real life.] For starters, here are 3500 words [really!] of things I know for a fact you don't know about Fredersdorf.
me: ...I was clearly overoptimistic. But I can work with this. Um, also, all the creativity-generating bits of my brain are already being used for my assignment, so can you also come up with an idea for the fic and also answer all my historical questions?
mildred: Sure! While I'm thinking about this, have 2k more words of historical grounding! Ok, and here are some ideas too. In fact, here's a whole plot for you!
me: Great! *writes 4k words of the plot*
mildred and me, more-or-less in unison: You did all the hard parts!

Then mildred fixed all my extensive historical errors and was fortunately able in between various medical woes to add various parts like the entire Wilhelmine subtheme and the entire last scene, and we deleted some of my words, and then I wrote some more paragraphs about music at her request and edited some of her stuff. I estimate that I probably ended up writing ~4.5k of the final fic, and mildred ended up writing ~ 2k of it (does that sound about right?) Of course that does not count the... I have no idea how much historical consultantcy stuff mildred ended up writing in the end, but I imagine it was significantly upwards of 10k :P And of course she wrote the detailed endnotes :D It also does not count all the words written in comments to the google document where we argued things like that Fredersdorf should be more zen than mildred wanted to write him and less zen than I wanted to write him :)

Although mildred and I mostly agreed on things, I had final veto power (and I did wield it a couple of times), so any remaining problems should be thought of as mine :) I'm very curious, though, as to how evident the collaboration was, and how evident the seams were, as I think mildred and I have very different writing styles, but it went through enough editing passes and discussion that I suspect much of the differences got at least somewhat smoothed out?

Counterpoint for Two Flutes

Comments

Re: Katte Textual Criticism: Discussion (REPLY HERE)

[mildred_of_midgard]

I just updated the W/T shared innovations post to group the information more usefully and to do some rudimentary quantitative analysis. The numbers support the idea that T is following W closely, but not P at all, and also that W and P have significant common ground to the exclusion of T. W and P connections are consistent with external evidence. T and W remains quite surprising. Even if we've found a possible mechanism via the migration of intellectuals from Bayreuth to Berlin at the right time, the conclusion is still surprising (which is not to say it's not out there somewhere in the vast, vast body of literature on Frederick the Great).

Re: Katte Textual Criticism: Discussion (REPLY HERE)

[selenak]

Detective Mildred, I just idly checked some of the Wilhelmine letters from Trier for those I wasn't familiar with from the Audio, and what do I find?

January 19th 1744: Fritz sends Pöllnitz with plans for the Berlin opera house to Wilhelmine. (As requested by her, since she's planning her own opera house for Bayreuth.) Pöllnitz doesn't return to Berlin but stays in Bayreuth for a while, pleading sickness. Two or so letters later, there's the pissed off "Madam sister" letter about having just learned from Marwitz Sr. that Wilhelmine is planning to marry Marwitz the Lady in waiting to an Austrian. So: we have evidence that Pöllnitz was in fact with Wilhelmine in Bayreuth at the very time she was writing the memoirs and when the enstrangement with Fritz started to heat up in earnest. I'd say the only reason not to assume Pöllnitz knew exactly what she was working on is that he was chronically in debt and knew on which side his bread was buttered. He'd totally have told Fritz, who was the one paying for his living for the last few decades of his life.

Still: want to bet that opera maps weren't all Wilhelmine talked with Pöllnitz about during the winter and spring of 1744 while he was keeping her company in Bayreuth?

Re: Katte Textual Criticism: Discussion (REPLY HERE)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, wow, great find! I honor your keen nose for scholarly gossip, subdetective Selena.

And like you've pointed out, she wouldn't have *had* to tell him that she was working on memoirs; he was the go-to guy for anecdotes. I also wouldn't be surprised if he got some of his material on Katte's personality and looks from her.

Looks he could have gotten from anyone in Berlin; the exact criticisms of his personality look likely to have originated with Wilhelmine. She writes, "il faisoit l'esprit fort et poussoit le libertinage à l'excès; beaucoup d'ambition et d'étourderie accompagnoient ce vice," and he writes, "Il avoit de l'esprit; mais encore plus de présomption, avec peu de jugement; auffi ambitieux...libertin à l'excès."

It's exactly the kind of overlap you'd expect if they were chatting and making notes later, but not reviewing each other's manuscripts, as I'm convinced Thiébault must have been doing with Wilhelmine's manuscript (and you found us a plausible transmission route for that as well).

Still: want to bet that opera maps weren't all Wilhelmine talked with Pöllnitz about during the winter and spring of 1744 while he was keeping her company in Bayreuth?

I think we know exactly what they were talking about. :)

Re: Katte Textual Criticism: Discussion (REPLY HERE)

[selenak]

I have found some neat non-Pöllnitz related things as well, but let me add that Pöllnitz the go to guy for anecdotes also explains why Fritz later, when Pöllnitz is back in Berlin, writes "if I say cuckold, will you get the hint?" re: Marwitz. I was wondering how he knew the Margrave was cheating on Wilhelmine with her, since Wilhelmine doesn't say and it's not the kind of thing which Marwitz herself would have written to her father. But Pöllnitz, author of "La Saxe Galante", would totally have deduced who was sleeping with whom on that court and would have told Fritz upon his return.

Re: Katte Textual Criticism: Discussion (REPLY HERE)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, yeah! That makes sense. Wow, we are ON to these people! I love all the detective work happening in these posts. :DD