Wilhelmine von Preußenaus barock

Princess Friederike Sophie Wilhelmine of Prussia, Wilhelmine Margravine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth (* 3 July 1709 in Berlin; † 14 October 1758 in Bayreuth) was a German patron of the arts, composer and opera director.

Life

Born on 3 July 1709, Wilhelmine Sophie Friederike was baptised a Protestant on 12 July. Her godparents were the monarchs Augustus the Strong of Saxony and King of Poland-Lithuania and King Frederick IV of Denmark-Norway, who were present at the so-called Three Kings’ Meeting with Frederick I of Prussia (Wilhelmine’s grandfather) in Berlin.

Wilhelmine grew up at the spartan court of her father, the soldier king Frederick William I, as the eldest surviving child – as her memoirs make clear, in a troubled environment. Even as a child, she became a pawn in political ambitions. Initially, both her parents wanted her to marry the heir to the British throne (her mother Sophie Dorothea was the daughter of King George I of England), which is why the eight-year-old princess was betrothed to her cousin Frederick Louis of Hanover, Duke of Gloucester and 15th Prince of Wales from 1729. As a result, political and family disputes arose, from which Wilhelmine increasingly suffered. Her mother, who had different cultural needs to her husband, the king, consistently pursued her desire for a close relationship with the Anglo-Hanoverian royal family, while her father decided to move closer to the House of Habsburg in order to show his loyalty to the German Emperor (then Charles VI). As a result, Wilhelmine’s first engagement was cancelled shortly before her betrothal and wedding to the Margrave Prince Friedrich of Bayreuth soon afterwards. These familial and diplomatic antagonisms, as well as the physical and emotional traumas suffered as a child at the hands of her governess Leti and as a teenager at the hands of her parents, were drastically described by Wilhelmine in her memoirs.

From 1737, Margravine Wilhelmine began to actively shape courtly musical life by expanding the orchestre with a view to opera performances. After her first cantatas and ballets, she learnt to appreciate Italian castrato singing through Italian singing troupes. For performances, she already used the theatre from the time of Margrave Georg Wilhelm in the secondary residence of Erlangen, where she rehearsed and performed Giuseppe Antonio Paganelli’s opera Dido. In Bayreuth, the theatre architect Giovanni Paolo Gaspari built a Theatre del’opera in the Redoutenhaus, for whose inauguration in May 1740 she composed the opera Argenore, whose plot was also her own and is included in Andrea Galletti’s libretto adaptation. Whether it was actually performed at the time is disputed. Original opera texts by her have survived from the years after 1750, which, like Argenore, she had translated into the vocal language by Italians.

In 1742, a university was founded in Bayreuth, but after a year it was moved to the secondary residence in Erlangen, today’s Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

After the artistic highlight of the celebrations to mark the marriage of her daughter Elisabeth Friederike Sophie to Duke Carl Eugen von Württemberg (1748), when the Margravial Opera House was inaugurated with Italian operas, Wilhelmine soon experienced another: in 1750, the margrave and his wife visited Frederick the Great in Berlin, where they met famous contemporaries such as Voltaire, Maupertuis and La Mettrie at glittering festivities. In Bayreuth, she then began to give lavish opera performances with the participation of international artists. She wrote several opera libretti for them. In 1751, she was accepted by diploma into the Roman Accademia dell’Arcadia, to which Pietro Metastasio also belonged, an international literary academy that was particularly renowned for the creation of opera librettos. In June 1754, her brother made a return visit, on this occasion she composed the Festa Teatrale L’Huomo, which was set to music in Italian by Andrea Bernasconi. The première was one of the most expensive events at the Bayreuth court.

Socrates by court sculptor Johann Schnegg (after 1755) in the park of the Bayreuth Hermitage
Wilhelmine devoted herself to scientific studies, exchanged letters with Voltaire on philosophical topics, developed her musical talents with determination from the time of her arrival in the margraviate in 1732 and perfected her lute playing as an admirer and pupil of the famous Dresden court lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss with his pupil, the Bayreuth lute virtuoso Adam Falckenhagen. Through her influence, lute music experienced a late flowering in Bayreuth.

After Falckenhagen’s death in 1754, the lutenist Paul Charles Durant was appointed. A complete collection of lute chamber music from this period has been preserved in the Augsburg City and State Library, which possibly goes back to the violinist of the court orchestra and lutenist Bernhard Joachim Hagen. It contains lute chamber music by Bayreuth and other composers, including in particular concerti for accompanied lute.

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelmine,_Margravine_of_Brandenburg-Bayreuth