A Prussian in Poets' Corner

'Austria? Why are you looking at that floor? That's so boring.'

Austria sighed and tried to hold the flower bouquet in his hands more lightly. That was what teachers had to feel like when they visited sites of cultural heritage with a bunch of adolescents. 'Did you just call the 13th century Cosmatesque pavement in front of the High Altar of Westminster Abbey boring? Seriously?'

'On the website, it says that the design of these rectangles and roundels can be seen nowhere else in this scale of complexity and subtlety', added Hungary with a glance at her smart phone. Unlike Austria, she wasn't able to place works of art and music without the use of art guides, but the web usually helped. When the connection wasn't too weak, that was.

'How can a pavement be subtle?', Prussia asked. He had a point there, Austria admitted grudgingly. 'Why are we here anyway? Didn't you visit Westminster Abbey, like, hundreds of times before?'

'As a matter of fact', Austria said, 'I come here every time I visit London. There's someone here to whom I always pay a visit, and I don't want to make an exception for this year's EU conference.' He gestured at the flowers he was holding.

'Like, English kings and queens?', Prussia wondered.

'Hardly. Have you ever heard of Poets' Corner?' Judging from Prussia's puzzled look, he hadn't. 'All right. Come with me, you two.' Austria turned and gestured to the left. 'It's in the southern transept.'

~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~.~

'So. That's where lots of poets are buried, right?', Prussia asked as they stood in front of monuments and marble slabs.

'And remembered', Austria added. 'Not all of the artists who have monuments and marble slabs here are actually buried in Westminster Abbey.'

'But the one you are visiting is', Prussia remarked, shooting him a curious glance.

'Yes. I bet you'll guess who it is. His monument is, um, … not exactly small-scale.'

Prussia glanced at Hungary for help, who started to inspect the floor very closely, despite its not being in Cosmatesque style. The website had already told her to whom Austria was paying a visit. Prussia shot her a grudging glance. Then, he started to walk along the aisle, not knowing what he was looking for. Austria watched him, smiling.

'You did that very well', Hungary whispered to Austria. 'He was getting thoroughly bored. I think you know he's only here because he wants to be with you.'

'I'm aware of that', Austria replied. 'We didn't see much of each other lately. Getting on my nerves is just his way of claiming my attention; I figured out as much some centuries ago.'

'Which doesn't exactly keep you from being on edge, right?' Hungary shot him a saucy look.

Prussia's cheerful 'Ha!' spared Austria an answer. The former country turned to them with a wolfish grin on his face and pointed at the monument above him. 'George Frederick Handel, Esquire, born February 23, 1684, died April 14, 1759', he read out. 'So it's a composer. I should have guessed. Quite high up there on the wall, isn't he?'

'Right', Austria said, 'it's Händel. The statue really looks like him, and displaying him with musical instruments and scores from his "Messiah" was a lovely idea of Roubillac, the sculptor.'

'Typical depiction of a scholar', Prussia remarked. Austria's eyebrow arched up. Art in the age of Frederick the Great. So this was safe ground for Prussia.

'Um, the flowers', Hungary reminded him.

'Yes.' Austria carefully placed the flower bouquet on a marble slab in which Händel's middle name was written as 'Frederic', with 'c' only. Frederick, Frederic — who cared? The one whose body lay beneath that marble slab had been christened as 'Georg Friederich' anyway. 'That bouquet is for you, old friend', Austria said into the sudden silence.

'He was Hanoverian, wasn't he?', Prussia then asked. 'Went to England in order to get away from Elector George, who became heir to the British throne just a few years later. Shit happens.'

'You do know a few things about composers after all', Austria said, smiling. Prussia was so adorable when he tried to please him by talking about culture. 'But no, he wasn't from the Electorate of Brunswick and Lüneburg. Actually, he was born in Halle, which had become part of the Margraviate of Brandenburg just a few years before his birth.'

Prussia's grin widened. 'Ha! He was from Awesome Prussia! That's why he was able to write awesome music!' The fact that this part of Brandenburg wasn't called 'Prussia' at the time didn't seem to bother him at all. But who was Austria to argue? He wasn't Brandenburg, was he?

—

Notes:

Cosmatesque / Cosmati work is a technique of opus sectile ('cut work'), i.e. marble, glass, and other materials cut into thin pieces of differing sizes, arranged in patterns as inlay for walls and floors. Triangles, rectangles, and circles of coloured materials encrusted upon or set into stone are typical for 12th to 14th century Cosmatesque style. It is named after members of a Roman family of sculptors and architects, the Cosmati.

Westminster Abbey, a Gothic church in the City of Westminster, an Inner London borough, is a traditional burial site and place of coronation for English / British monarchs. A section of its southern transept is called 'Poets' Corner' due to the high number of poets and other artists buried and commemorated there. Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759) is the only famous composer entombed in Poets' Corner. Händel's face on the monument by Louis-François Roubillac (c 1702-1762) was modelled from a death mask. — No, '1684' as Händel's year of birth on the tombstone and monument isn't a mistake. In England, from the 12th century until 1751, the legal year began on 25 March, and Händel was born in February. He was indeed christened 'Georg Friederich' in Halle, which had become part of the Margraviate of Brandenburg in 1680. While the Margraviate of Brandenburg and the Duchy of Prussia, which were both ruled by the Hohenzollern family, legally continued to be separate entities even after Prussia had been elevated to a kingdom in 1701, Brandenburg was de facto treated as part of the Prussian kingdom from then on.

Georg Ludwig (1660-1727), from 1698 on ruler of the Electorate of Brunswick and Lüneburg, also called Electorate of Hannover, became heir to the British throne in 1714 and was crowned George I of Great Britain and Ireland. The successor to Brunswick-Lüneburg was the Kingdom of Hannover, established at the Congress of Vienna in 1814.