Prussian King, Frederick the Great was one of the most powerful rulers in Europe of the eighteenth century. He was not only an outstanding leader, but also an excellent flute player and music patron as well. The purpose of the study is to examine his contributions as a music patron, composer, and performer. The research focuses on his flute compositions and the musical environment that he created in Berlin. The thesis consists of four chapters, in addition to the introduction. Chapter one is an overview of the Prussian court and Frederick the Great. Chapter two discusses the musical patronage of Frederick the Great and musical activities at the court, including concerts, the enterprise of the Berlin opera house, and court musicians. Chapter three centers on detailed style analysis of King¡¦s flute compositions to which the significant musical characteristics are examined. The last chapter consists of the summary and conclusion. The enthusiasm of Frederick the Great for music based on his loving for flute playing. As a ruler for a nation, music patron, performer, and composer, the King was not only heightened the standard of musical culture for Prussia, but also created an important Berlin school for flute in the history of music. The musical characteristics of King¡¦s flute compositions present the transitional styles between the Baroque and Classical period, in which the refined structure of the flute instrument reflects its features. The compositions of the King provided a vast literature for flute repertoire in the eighteenth century.

Thomas Carlyle’s History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, called Frederick the Great was published in six volumes between 1858 and 1865 and was his last major work. Carlyle had a specific purpose in mind when he began writing Frederick. He believed that contemporary events had left Europe in disarray and the British nation fragmented. In his view, the nation needed to function as a family unit, with the older, more experienced members of the group instructing and educating the young. Carlyle’s attempt to address the situation with the publication of his Latter-Day Pamphlets in 1850 had failed, largely due to their aggressive tone. He adopted an entirely different approach when it came to writing Frederick. Chapter one explores Carlyle’s vacillation over his choice of Frederick as a suitable subject for his history and investigates his soul-searching over whether or not to proceed with the project. It examines the three-way relationship which Carlyle created between himself, Frederick and the reader and explores the various language techniques that Carlyle used to create and maintain this relationship. In chapter two, Carlyle’s style of writing in Frederick is investigated. It argues that Carlyle was engaged in the act of storytelling and explores the various literary techniques that he used to achieve this. Chapter three consists of an in-depth examination of Carlyle’s use of oral techniques in Frederick, investigating the variety of oral devices he employed in order to ‘speak’ to his readers and create a unified readership. Chapters four and five focus on Carlyle’s research methods. They examine the texts which Carlyle used for his research—original manuscripts, printed texts, letters, histories and biographies—investigating how these were incorporated into Frederick and evaluating whether or not Carlyle was true to his source material. Carlyle’s two trips to Germany in order to research material are also investigated. In Chapters six and seven, the contemporary reception of Frederick is explored. Chapter six focuses on the reaction to the first two volumes which were published together in 1858, whilst chapter seven investigates the response to the later volumes, exploring the ways in which the completed work influenced the public’s perception of Carlyle as a historian and ending by examining both Carlyle’s and Frederick’s places in posterity. Despite Carlyle’s labours on Frederick it never received the acclaim of his earlier productions but was regarded by many as a marker which signalled the end of Carlyle’s long and illustrious literary career.

This dissertation fundamentally re-interprets King Frederick the Great of Prussia as military commander and military thinker, and uses Frederick to cast new perspectives on the warfare of ‘his time’: that is, of the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries. It uses the methodology of cultural history, which focuses on the meanings given to human activities, to examine Frederick and the warfare of his time on three levels: cultural, temporal, and intellectual. It shows that Frederick’s warfare (at least in his youth) was culturally French, and reflected the towering influence of King Louis XIV, with Frederick following the flamboyant masculinity of the French baroque court. Frederick was a backward-looking military thinker, who situated his war-making in two temporal envelopes: broadly in the long eighteenth century (1648-1789), which was dominated by the search for order after the chaos of religious and civil wars, but more specifically in the ‘Century of Louis XIV’: the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Frederick embraced French military methods, taking inspiration from generals like Turenne and Luxembourg, employing aggressive French battle tactics, and learning his concept of ‘total war for limited objectives’ from French writers like the Marquis de Feuquières. Frederick also sought to surpass the ‘personal rule’ of the Sun King by commanding his army personally. This work shows the early eighteenth century as a liminal period, which saw the Louisquatorzean paradigm interact with the beginnings of the Enlightenment, developments in scientific methods, and the growth of the administrative capacity of states, all of which would exercise an increasing influence as the century progressed. The combination of older traditions and newer ideas placed enormous pressure on the monarchs of this period, and this was seen in Frederick’s strained relations with his generals. Finally, this work examines how ideas are created. It shows military knowledge in the early eighteenth century as the product of power structures (and often an element within them). Military command was itself an element in the assertion of political power, and Frederick depended on ‘the power of (military) knowledge’ to maintain his authority with his generals. Power, however, is negotiated, and knowledge is typically produced collectively. In the early part of Frederick’s reign, the Prussian war effort was a collective effort by several actors within the Prussian military hierarchy, and ‘Frederick’s military ideas’ were not necessarily his own.

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