Many thanks, Joe Offer. Appreciate you taking it seriously.

Ah, the royal family ...
and those Archdukes of Saxe, Gotha, and Altenberg,
from which branch Prince Albert blossomed,
and who eventually renamed themselves Windsor.

My ongoing labor of love away from the Mudcat
is research into the lyrics of the German Lied,
especially eighteenth and nineteenth century.
A hopping time, with the likes of Goethe holding forth,
the Napoleonic wars, the uprisings in 1848 ...

and wouldn't you know, some of those Archdukes
were dilettante artistes themselves.

Take Prince Albert's big brother Archduke Ernst.
So help me, he composed an opera,
and managed to pull enough strings to have
this up-and-coming establishment
called the Metropolitan Opera
in faraway New York City stage a production.
I think the subject was the goddess Diana
(whoa! premonition?)

The music critic for the New York Times got out his meat cleaver
and disposed of the Archduke's music with a few well-aimed whacks.

Ah, but then there is Ernst and Albert's grandfather August Emil Ludwig, I think it was, also an Archduke.
Poetry and prose were his thing.
When he died at an early age,
all the press turned out for his funeral and interment.
Much was made of the four-part mixed choral setting
of one of his poems
that was sung at the graveside. (composer was F. H. Himmel)

While the poet Archduke did father a daughter in his first marriage,
who would be the mother of Ernst and Albert,
he was also an enthusiastic transvestite
whose idealization of Arcadia of the classical Greeks
inspired him to dress up,
not as a shepherd, but as a nymph in diaphanous draperies.

(what can you say)