Prussia was a militarist state in which all institutions were subordinated to the army. In 1871, it became the core of a United Germany and its spirit prevailed until 1945. An integral element of Prussianism was that war was invariably forced on Prussia by others. In the Federal Republic none of the constituent Länder (provinces) is named Prussia.
Until 1945 the man who was revered as the patron saint and creator of modern Prussia was Frederick the Great (1712–1786). Hitler kept a portrait of him in his bunker during his last days. However, it would be a gross mistake to think of Frederick as a crude soldier. He was a man of the Enlightenment. French was spoken at his court in Sans Souci, Potsdam, to which he invited Voltaire (with whom he eventually quarreled). He played the flute. He wrote the essay Anti-Machiavell in which he criticized The Prince on moral grounds. He believed everybody had a right to be happy in his own way and his motto was “I am the First Servant of the State.”
In old age, in his role as Der Alte Fritz, he was a crotchety old man, a legend in his own time, and it was a great relief to all those around him when he finally died. His natural inclinations were philosophical and artistic but they were beaten out of him when he was a teenager by his despotic father who was a crude soldier. Until the final defeat of Prussianism in 1945, any educated German could rattle off the names of all the battles in the Seven Years War, which he nearly lost.
But hardly anybody knew that he was the author of the libretto to the forgotten opera by his court composer, Carl Heinrich Graun – Montezuma – which has just been performed by the Festival Theater der Welt in Mülheim an der Ruhr. The production will move from Mülheim to Hamburg, then to the Edinburgh Festival, the Teatro Real in Madrid and finally to Mexico City.
Frederick endowed the last king of the Aztecs, in his eyes a noble savage as described by Rousseau, with what Frederick believed were the essential Prussian virtues, i.e., his own. Montezuma was honest, peace-loving, industrious, willing to sacrifice his life to his people, tolerant, incorruptible and totally devoted to the public good. To Montezuma when addressing his adversary, the Spanish conquistatore Cortez, Frederick gave the line, “How can I believe in a faith that teaches everybody to disdain a person who does not share his belief?”
The production is suitably multicultural. The stage director is the Mexican Claudio Valdés Kuri and the musical director Gabriel Carrido, an Argentinean expert in baroque music. In the third act, Montezuma is high up on a column, a prisoner of Cortez, captive like a bird with clipped wings. His people try to rescue him, but they cannot reach him and he jumps to his death.
In a final scene, Monezuma’s inamorata, by then a cleaning lady, is forced to iron the Mexican flag – not, by the way, the Spanish flag.
The meaning is clear: the noble king was too good for this world.
Eric Koch’s new book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Frederick was also gay, though not camp. So was his brother.
If the Seven Years War was the birth of the German Empire, it created the British Empire right away courtesy of Hawke, Wolfe and others.
I never heard of his brother. Usually one is enough in a family. Frederick is not the father of the German EMPIRE – all he thought about was Prussia, which he put on the map. Bismarck was the father of the German Empire, but not in the sense of a colonial empire, which he opposed, while the Kaiser favoured it.
Is it possible that the COC might be persuaded to consider staging a production of “Montezuma”? In any event, do you know whether there is a recorded version of it?
According to the critics the music is deadly dull which I am afraid disqualifies it.
No, I have not heard of a recording.
I’m not steeped enough in opera to judge the quality of her performance or the score, but here’s Joan Sutherland performing from Graun’s Montezuma:
The critics rightly found the music unendurably boring. At least the one I read! Anyway, I am amazed you found this aria on YouTube. I didn’t try. I assumed nobody had ever heard of the opera because I hadn’t. I need a psychotherapist!
Some of Frederick’s own compositions, OTOH, remain listenable, if not masterful. His flute concerto is here:
But his greatest contribution to the world of music was surely his invitation, in 1747, to J.S. Bach to his court at Potsdam, the result of which was JSB’s “Muikalisches Opfer”. My old edition of Groves says his “important position in musical history … is not founded on his flute playing or on his compositions, but on the fact that he put the Prussian capital back on the musical map of Europe after long period of total nelect; he was, in a small way, a true Maecenas…”