Frederick the Great - Symphony in D Major

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The Eighteenth Century was all about order (intellectually speaking), whether ordered liberty in Mr. Jefferson's great experiment (building on Locke and Hume), or the centralizing monarchs like Louis XIV or Frederick the Great.  They had a very different view of the role of the state, but that view was an ordered one.

Music reflected the philosophy of the day, and baroque music was no less fiddly than baroque architecture.  Balance prevailed, and the great bombastic romanticism of Beethoven had to wait for the next century.

Frederick was raised to be a general, and while his childhood was extremely harsh and unhappy, that training stuck.  Despite the wishes of his father, he became quite an accomplished musician, indeed taking his flute with him on his many campaigns.  His talent led to a set of compositions (typically for the flute - after all, write what you know).  This musical creativity was only one facet of what seems to have been one of the finest minds of the day: he spoke six languages (and read Latin, ancient Greek, and Hebrew).  He was friends with Voltaire.  Anticipating Mark Twain, he attempted an improvement of the German language:

... writers pile parenthesis upon parenthesis, and often you find only at the end of an entire page the verb on which depends the meaning of the whole sentence.

And he fought a never-ending series of wars against his neighbors.  Strange what causes someone to be named "the Great".