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cahnAnd including Emperor Joseph II!
from Derek Beales: Joseph II, Volume 2: Against the World, 1780 - 1790:
Joseph's alleged comment to Mozart about the Entführung, "Too many notes", has been taken as evidence of his ignorance. But he probably said something like, "Too beautiful for our ears, and monstrous many notes." It is always necessary to bear in mind, when appraising the emperor's remarks, his peculiar brand of humor or sarcasm. He was usually getting at someone. And he did not use the royal "we". The ears in question were those of the Viennese audience, whom he was mocking for their limited appreciation of Mozart's elaborate music.
(though not gonna lie, I think it is a LOT of notes)
from Derek Beales: Joseph II, Volume 2: Against the World, 1780 - 1790:
Joseph's alleged comment to Mozart about the Entführung, "Too many notes", has been taken as evidence of his ignorance. But he probably said something like, "Too beautiful for our ears, and monstrous many notes." It is always necessary to bear in mind, when appraising the emperor's remarks, his peculiar brand of humor or sarcasm. He was usually getting at someone. And he did not use the royal "we". The ears in question were those of the Viennese audience, whom he was mocking for their limited appreciation of Mozart's elaborate music.
(though not gonna lie, I think it is a LOT of notes)
Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-13 07:22 pm (UTC)So I've been giving this some thought, and this is what I've come up with.
I think we've got several things going on here.
1. There's hoping to be loved by your arranged marriage husband, for emotional/romantic reasons.
2. There's trying to make your arranged marriage husband fall in love with you, for pragmatic reasons.
3. There's wanting to be loved so much that it influences who you choose to marry.
4. There's falling in love with your arranged marriage husband and being heartbroken when he doesn't reciprocate.
5. There's paying lip service to the idea that husbands and wives love each other, because of a societal narrative that says they're supposed to, even if everyone knows in practice it doesn't always work out like that.
1. Hoping to be loved for emotional/romantic reasons
I'm willing to bet AnhaltSophie/Catherine (she who took lovers because she, in her own words, "couldn't bear to be without love for an hour) went into her marriage hoping her husband would love her. I'm also willing to bet Wilhelmine, sensitive and emotionally needy, also hoped for love.
Let's also remember that Catherine's freedom to take lovers was an anomaly, that she wouldn't have expected this going in, and that, like most women, if she wanted romantic/sexual love, she must have assumed that her husband would likely end up her only acceptable option.
2. Trying to make your arranged marriage husband fall in love with you
Given that these women were dependent in every way on their husbands, and that if the marriage failed you knew it was going to be perceived as the woman's fault no matter what, nearly every woman in an arranged marriage who didn't want to be sent back home (hi, Marguerite-Louise), locked up in a nunnery, or otherwise sidelined, had an incentive to want her husband to fall in love with her. Given Catherine's precarious position in Russia, she had every reason to try to make Peter fall in love with her. When she realized that wasn't going to happen, she spent all her energy trying to make herself well liked at court. This eventually paid off, though it did make Elizaveta suspicious and hostile for a while.
Making their husbands fall in love with them worked so well for Caroline of Ansbach, and Philip V's (the frog) two wives, that it's impossible to tell how they themselves felt.
3. Choosing love over power
What Wilhelmine said, in hindsight, that she wanted to do, and what I think we can all agree that Catherine would rather have died than do.
4. Falling in unrequited love
What EC did, what Violante (Gian Gastone's sister-in-law) did, what someone (Ziebura?) said Mina did, what Catherine in her memoirs said she had way too much pride to do.
5. Lip service
I'm not going to be able to think of all the examples off the top of my head, but I have been a little taken aback in my reading in the last couple of years by the sheer amount of expectation that arranged spouses should fall in love after marriage. I've come to the conclusion that a lot of it is saying the right thing.
So when Horowki says the adorable moppet (Louis XV's child fiance, the one sent back to Spain) was told by her caretakers that Louis would fall in love with her after they married, I doubt they had that much confidence he would. They were trying to reassure her, because teenage Louis was showing zero interest in this six-year-old kid (as you'd expect!), and she was starting to worry. But the point is, this princess was raised being told, and presumably believing wholeheartedly, at least for a while, before she got older and more realistic/cynical, that arranged marriage spouses naturally fall in love and that she should expect this to happen.
I think SD is using the narrative of love being part of marriage to get the arranged marriage outcome she wants. Not because a princess was supposed to choose love over a good marriage, or even that they were supposed to be in love before they were married (the same people who told adorable moppet that her husband would fall in love were scandalized by their counterparts in Spain already being in love and lusting after each other before the marriage), but because a loveless marriage was seen as narratively inferior (again, not necessarily in practice).
In the same way that FW, when Fritz was pushing for the Amalia marriage, was like, "Oh, FFS, you've never even met, there's no way you're in love with her." That wasn't his real reason, any more than it was SD's reason for rejecting Charles as a marriage candidate for Wilhelmine, but the absence of love was part of the ammunition their society gave them for rejecting a marriage proposal.
I think this goes along with what you guys convinced me was Fritz saying the socially right thing rather than the true thing, namely telling Heinrich that he loved his mother more than his sister. Because you're supposed to love your mother the most. And I think that's exactly what SD is doing when she says, unironically, that Fritz is acting like a father to his siblings. She's supposed to tell him that he's doing what he's supposed to do, namely treating his orphaned siblings the way a father is supposed to treat his children. Their own personal experience aside, this is the accepted narrative.
Likewise, I forget where I've read this or what, if any, the primary source is, but I've seen in several places that FW is said to have "shed the tears conventional upon a father-in-law's death" when G1 died. Not because he was personally overwhelmed with grief for G1, but that he's supposed to revere his father-in-law. Just as everyone is supposed to say that he was moved by grief, even if in practice, everyone knows it's an agreed-upon social fiction in this case.
On a personal note, I can still remember being a kid and blurting out to my visiting grandmother once that I'd missed her, then instantly feeling really awkward because I'd only met her a few times, barely knew her, and figured she would know that I was telling a white lie. Because it was that obviously a social fiction. To the point where I wasn't sure she even expected me to miss her. But I still--and this is me, not known for white lies!--felt compelled on that occasion to follow the narrative.
Ekaterina
In conclusion, I've forgotten what Ekaterina has Catherine doing, but if it's some combination of 1, 2, and 5, and not 3 or 4, then I think it checks out. If they've got her acting like she's in unreciprocated love with Peter, or that she'd rather marry Saltykov and give up the throne (as opposed to falling in love with Saltykov and wishing she could marry him, but preferring to keep her position as Grand Duchess), then that's super OOC. (Though if we're pointing out that Wilhelmine is writing with the benefit of hindsight, it's possible that our emotionally needy Catherine fell in unrequited love with Peter at first and was too proud or pragmatic to admit it afterwards, especially after she'd had him overthrown and was widely suspected of having had him killed.)
ETA: I suppose the TLDR here is that expecting to be allowed to marry for love, MT-style, was rare in princesses, but expecting or hoping for love in marriage, including having romantic dreams about it, probably much less so.
Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-14 08:07 am (UTC)- as coincidence would have it, today there's an article in my favourite newspaper about the new publication of the love letters one of the 18th Century Wittelsbach princesses wrote to her brother-in-law through the decades, which looks like it contribute a bit on the subject
- re: expecting to be allowed to marry for love, MT-style, was rare in princesses: And even MT would presumably not have expected to marry FS if he'd not been a Duke with several royal ancestors and relations in his perdigree (remember, grandson of Liselotte and Philippe the Gay). Ditto for daughter Mimi allowed to marry Albert, who might have been a younger son and not a rich one, but was a prince. Now Old Dessauer/The Apothecary's Daughter was a truly class smashing completely unexpected marriage for love, but I'm trying to think of an example where a princess, not a prince, married a non-noble for love in the 18th century and am failing
- in the Renaissance, otoh, you have several high ranking noble ladies after being widowed marrying their stewards for love, who weren't commoners, exactly, but defnitely below rank and thus regarded as unsuitable
Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-14 02:13 pm (UTC)Anything interesting? Is it paywalled?
And even MT would presumably not have expected to marry FS if he'd not been a Duke
I cannot *imagine* her being allowed to marry a non-ducal FS! She had the good luck of falling in love with someone extremely suitable for her. And that was largely because of a perfect storm of political considerations. Namely, she *wasn't* supposed to leave home and marry the highest-ranked guy she could get, in which case she would never have met him, because Europe would never stand for the highest-ranked guy getting the Holy Roman Empire. So she got to marry a lower-ranked guy who'd been hanging out at her court for years, where she could get to know him before marriage. Highly unusual circumstance here.
I'm trying to think of an example where a princess, not a prince, married a non-noble for love in the 18th century and am failing
Both Elizaveta and Catherine are suspected of having morganatically married non-nobles or petty nobles for love--Razumovsky and Potemkin respectively--but they were Tsarinas, and in both cases the alleged marriage was so secret that to this day it's contentious whether it happened at all.
Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-15 06:47 am (UTC)Ha, yes, Razumovsky is the guy who narrates all the "now we will time-jump seven years" bits. He's actually possibly my favorite character in Ekaterina, although he seems a lot more politically savvy in the show than Massie thought he was. And then there's the TV subplot where Elizaveta secretly marries him (yes, sure, secret marriage seems dramatically plausible) and then she says she's decided he's going to be emperor when she's dead and is writing this in her will.
Me: What?
Razumovsky: What??
I've just got to Elizaveta dying, but Peter is yet to be confirmed, and Razumovsky is all, "Will? What will? No will to see here!"
Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-16 01:33 am (UTC)Re the discussion of marrying non-nobles, I should add that Elizaveta had the example of her father, Peter the Great, marrying a Lithuanian peasant (mother of Elizaveta and Peter III's mother), who then became Tsarina after Peter died. Will or no will, Razumovsky could have at least made a bid for power. But one thing the show gets right is that he didn't want to play the game of thrones, in which you win or you die.
ETA: forgot to mention her name. That's Catherine I, 1725-1727.
Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-17 07:47 am (UTC)Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-14 05:54 pm (UTC)Re: Love and arranged marriages
Date: 2022-02-18 03:52 pm (UTC)I will say that Ekaterina mostly sticks with your (1), (2), and (5), and manages not to do (3) and (4), but there's something about the way they paint Catherine as naive/sentimental in the early episodes that kind of grates on me. Like, she asks Johanna, doesn't she love her husband? in one of these episodes, and... idk, even not-very-aware 15-year-old me wouldn't have been as shocked by the answer being "what? are you crazy?" as Catherine clearly seems to be. (The background here is that my parents did not marry for love, they had a quasi-arranged marriage, and sometimes it shows. Now, I think when one of us -- probably my sister, I don't think I would have, and she was and is the sentimental one of the two of us -- asked them a similar question at a similar age, their actual answer was to basically quote Fiddler on the Roof back at us:
For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought with him, starved with him
If that's not love, what is?)
I think I would say that Ekaterina seems to cast Catherine as expecting to be loved (not just hoping to be loved), and that's where I wonder if they are taking liberties. I mean... given the weight of (5), maybe not? And she was 15, and I certainly was a lot more idealistic and sentimental at 15 than at 33! But my sense is that the showrunners are going as far as they can in that direction while still staying in the range of possibility, in order to maximize audience sympathy (well, except for me, I guess) with Catherine and make her turning against Peter in the end more sympathetic.