18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

[cahn]

More diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!

January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!

Comments

Re: Leopold Mozart about meeting Amalie in Aachen

[cahn]

Otoh, Lehndorff also reports Amalie's spontanous deeds of generosity in the war like giving the jewelry she was wearing to Madame de Maupertuis so the later could travel to her dying husband

Amalie! <3 Gosh, I need to get back to German practice and read Lehndorff...

and he's facing far more serious consequences if he isn't able to pay the innkeepers than the sister of the King IN Prussia who will hardly get arrested.

Hee. I must say I laughed at this.

One word: Gluck.

RIGHT. Fritz, why must you be this way?

and so to a younger person like Eckermann the realisation Goethe had seen Mozart as a child (when he, JWG, was fourteen) was like you'd feel if a contemporary casually mentions having met Churchill.

Me: Goethe met EVERYBODY!

neither Goethe nor Eckermann had access to the internet or even the Frankfurt newspaper archive so they could look up when exactly child!Wolfgang was in Frankfurt, how old he was and how old young Goethe was. And yet this statement is correct - Goethe was fourteen, and Mozart seven when the Mozart family gave that concert in Frankfurt am Main.

That IS impressive, and I wonder if that means that it made a really deep impression on Goethe.

(Goethe, btw, adored Mozart's music, especially "The Magic Flute", and his standard reply when asked whether he could see "Faust" becoming an opera was to say only Mozart could have done it, but alas...)

Ohhhhh now I really want this :P