A detailed historical essay is found on the George Bridgetower page at AfriClassical.com. Its author is our principal adviser, Prof. Dominique-René de Lerma, http://www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com
Rita Dove
(Baltimore City Paper, Fred Viebahn, Oct. 13, 2014)
(Baltimore City Paper, Fred Viebahn, Oct. 13, 2014)
Joshua Coyne
On June 23, 2014 AfriClassical posted:
When Rita Dove comes
to Howard Community College next Wednesday, the former U.S. Poet
Laureate will be joined on stage by violinist Joshua Coyne. After she
has read a few poems from her latest book, “Sonata Mulattica,” he will
play a classical piece, and they will alternate for the rest of the
evening.
That’s because the book tells the story of George Bridgetower, the biracial violin prodigy who befriended Beethoven and performed with him in 1803 before sinking back into obscurity. Dove will read the poems that imagine the inner thoughts of both men, and Coyne will recreate the music they shared. This back-and-forth is appropriate, for the book similarly swings between Bridgetower’s enraptured music-making and his stumbling efforts to advance his career and woo women in the face of racial prejudice and ruthless competition.
In the poem ‘Concert at Hanover Square,’ for example, Dove writes that Bridgetower and his rivals,
To capture that give-and-take between the public self and the private self, Dove had to adopt an unusual strategy: She had to create a narrative in verse without using the techniques of narrative poetry. Instead of the continuous storytelling we know from Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” or Byron’s “Don Juan,” we get a series of short, discrete lyric poems, each one providing a snapshot of one character’s internal musing.
It’s up to us the readers to make the connections between these frozen moments. ‘Concert at Hanover Square,’ for example, is followed by poems from the perspectives of fellow prodigy Franz Clement, street musician Black Billy Waters, aging composer Franz Josef Haydn, the queen’s wardrobe mistress Charlotte Papendiek, and Bridgetower’s father Friedrich. From this chain of private musings, Dove creates a common sphere. It’s a technique that she has employed previously, most obviously in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, 1986’s “Thomas and Beulah,” a double portrait of her grandparents.
“‘Sonata Mulattica’ is similar to ‘Thomas and Beulah’ in that it tells a story through lyric poems,” Dove says, “like pearls on a necklace. There are gaps between them that we have to jump over. But to evoke the inner life in contrast to the public life and the performing life, you need lyric poetry. The inner life is without words; it’s before language, so that’s the challenge of poetry—that’s why people think we’re crazy. But the poet is saying, ‘I’m going to use this language to make the reader feel that inner life in such a way that the words seem to disappear.’”
Dove first discovered Bridgetower when she was watching the Beethoven bio-pic, “Immortal Beloved,” on TV with her husband, the German novelist Fred Viebahn. In one scene, the composer is walking through a group of musicians, including a black violinist. Dove was so intrigued that she went upstairs and Googled “black violinist Beethoven” and Bridgetower’s name popped up. That tickled a curiosity that wouldn’t quit, and she followed every one of the few threads she could find. She learned, for example, that Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 was originally dedicated to Bridgetower and first performed with him. But after a fight over a woman, Beethoven broke with his new friend and published the composition with a dedication to Rudolphe Kreutzer.
- See more at: http://www.citypaper.com/arts/bcp-immortal-beloved-20141013,0,3959686.story#sthash.i3GsjLAo.dpufThat’s because the book tells the story of George Bridgetower, the biracial violin prodigy who befriended Beethoven and performed with him in 1803 before sinking back into obscurity. Dove will read the poems that imagine the inner thoughts of both men, and Coyne will recreate the music they shared. This back-and-forth is appropriate, for the book similarly swings between Bridgetower’s enraptured music-making and his stumbling efforts to advance his career and woo women in the face of racial prejudice and ruthless competition.
In the poem ‘Concert at Hanover Square,’ for example, Dove writes that Bridgetower and his rivals,
knew hatred
because we could smell it
all around us, it sang in the cool glasses
tinkling over our heads,
the carefully tended laughter
the curious glint
of a widow’s appraisal.
But later in the same poem, she writes,because we could smell it
all around us, it sang in the cool glasses
tinkling over our heads,
the carefully tended laughter
the curious glint
of a widow’s appraisal.
Music set my body a-roil
I was nothing if not everything
when the music was in me
I could be fierce, I could shred
the heads off flowers for breakfast
with my bare teeth, simply because
I deserved such loveliness.
“All of us live with this tension every day, even if in a milder
way,” Dove says by phone from her faculty office at the University of
Virginia. “People ask how you are, and you say, ‘I’m fine,’ when there’s
actually all these complicated things going on inside you. When you’re
walking through life, even when you have meltdowns, you can sense
there’s a part of you that you want to keep intact in the bubble around
you. Poetry gives us that inner life that’s so often hidden from view.
Once someone steps out onto the stage, they add another layer of self,
and we forget the pressure that adds to the inner life. I wanted to
bring that into the story.”I was nothing if not everything
when the music was in me
I could be fierce, I could shred
the heads off flowers for breakfast
with my bare teeth, simply because
I deserved such loveliness.
To capture that give-and-take between the public self and the private self, Dove had to adopt an unusual strategy: She had to create a narrative in verse without using the techniques of narrative poetry. Instead of the continuous storytelling we know from Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” or Byron’s “Don Juan,” we get a series of short, discrete lyric poems, each one providing a snapshot of one character’s internal musing.
It’s up to us the readers to make the connections between these frozen moments. ‘Concert at Hanover Square,’ for example, is followed by poems from the perspectives of fellow prodigy Franz Clement, street musician Black Billy Waters, aging composer Franz Josef Haydn, the queen’s wardrobe mistress Charlotte Papendiek, and Bridgetower’s father Friedrich. From this chain of private musings, Dove creates a common sphere. It’s a technique that she has employed previously, most obviously in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, 1986’s “Thomas and Beulah,” a double portrait of her grandparents.
“‘Sonata Mulattica’ is similar to ‘Thomas and Beulah’ in that it tells a story through lyric poems,” Dove says, “like pearls on a necklace. There are gaps between them that we have to jump over. But to evoke the inner life in contrast to the public life and the performing life, you need lyric poetry. The inner life is without words; it’s before language, so that’s the challenge of poetry—that’s why people think we’re crazy. But the poet is saying, ‘I’m going to use this language to make the reader feel that inner life in such a way that the words seem to disappear.’”
Dove first discovered Bridgetower when she was watching the Beethoven bio-pic, “Immortal Beloved,” on TV with her husband, the German novelist Fred Viebahn. In one scene, the composer is walking through a group of musicians, including a black violinist. Dove was so intrigued that she went upstairs and Googled “black violinist Beethoven” and Bridgetower’s name popped up. That tickled a curiosity that wouldn’t quit, and she followed every one of the few threads she could find. She learned, for example, that Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 was originally dedicated to Bridgetower and first performed with him. But after a fight over a woman, Beethoven broke with his new friend and published the composition with a dedication to Rudolphe Kreutzer.
By Geoffrey Himes
October 13, 2014
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