Frederick II, King of Prussia, was much more than a military and political leader, writes Christopher Morley.

Bullied and beaten by an autocratic father who had a constant suspicious watch kept on him in order to divert him from his artistic leanings, the well-born young man attempted to flee but was brought back home and forced to witness the decapitation of one of the friends who had assisted him.

That young man was named Frederick, later to become Frederick II, King of Prussia, and generous patron of the arts and sciences as well as fulfilling his father Frederick William the First’s intentions that he should become a great military and political leader.

This year marks the tercentenary of the birth of this strong-minded individual who eventually became known as Frederick the Great, and there is much to celebrate in the artistic achievements of his enlightened court in Potsdam, near Berlin.

Frederick II’s palace of Sans Souci (“without care”) became a great mecca for many of the most glittering artistic and philosophical minds of the mid-18th century.

After sharing a lengthy correspondence with Frederick, the great French writer and philosopher Voltaire became a house-guest there between 1751 and 1753, though his relationship with Frederick ended in a massive falling-out.

Though the Prussian throne did not become his own until 1740, Frederick had already assembled an impressive entourage of musicians (to whom he paid spectacularly generous salaries) around him as an antidote to his activities in the military sphere and in statecraft.

Once he became king his ambitions were allowed to flower, resulting in liberalising governmental reforms and newly-founded cultural institutions, including the establishment of the Berlin Opera.

The nucleus of the opera company was assembled by Frederick’s well-paid music director Carl Heinrich Graun, who was sent on a lengthy tour of Italy trawling some of that country’s finest singers.

Graun himself was noted as an operatic composer whose methods of writing seem to anticipate those of Mozart: “He invariably neglected his operas until the last moment, composing them then with the utmost rapidity,” wrote Johann Friedrich Reichardt, one of Graun’s successors as Frederick’s Kapellmeister.

“He first finished the individual arias, either in his head or at the clavier, and afterwards wrote them out in clear copies without changing a single note; his first score was also the one used at the performances.”

But Reichardt also paid tribute to Frederick himself, who was a keen author of opera libretti, writing in French as well as German, and composing arias as well: “Several arias composed by the ‘great and inspired author of the history of Brandenburg’ – (in other words, Frederick) – were incorporated in the opera Demofoonte by Graun, and among these one gave evidence of great talent.”

Also prominent in Frederick’s circle was the flautist Johann Joachim Quantz, flute teacher to the king who, in fact, developed into an expert performer under his tutelage.

Quantz was the author of Essay of a Method for Playing the Transverse Flute, a compendious manual published in Berlin in 1752 not just concerned with flute-playing but also with performance practice and contemporary forms and styles.