Sonata Mulattica

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Sonata Mulattica (Reprint) Pub. Date: 9/27/2010 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
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Sonata Mulattica Pub. Date: 4/6/2009 Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.

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Overview

The son of a white woman and an “African Prince,” George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780–1860) travels to Vienna to meet “bad-boy” genius Ludwig van Beethoven. The great composer’s subsequent sonata is originally dedicated to the young mulatto, but George, exuberant with acclaim, offends Beethoven over a woman. From this crucial encounter evolves a grandiose yet melancholy poetic tale. A New Yorker's A Year's Reading; Booklist Editors Choice Award.

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Publishers Weekly

This 12th collection from the former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize recipient is her third book-length narrative poem: it follows the real career of the violin prodigy George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1780-1860), "a former pupil of Haydn, as well as the grandson/ of an African prince," or so his promoters and teachers in England said. Moving to Vienna during the Napoleonic Wars, the violinist met and befriended the famously moody Beethoven, who was prepared to dedicate his famously difficult "Kreutzer" Sonata to Bridgetower until a rivalry for the same woman drove them apart. Dove tells Bridgetower's story, and some of Beethoven's and Haydn's, in a heterogenous profusion of short poems, some almost prosy, some glittering in their technique. In quatrains, a double villanelle, what looks like found text, short lines splayed all over a page and attractive description, Dove renders Bridgetower's frustrated genius: "Music played for the soul is sheer pleasure;/ to play merely for pleasure is nothing/ but work." Dove does not always achieve such subtleties-those who loved her early work may think this book too long: few, though, will doubt the seriousness of her effort, her interest at once in the history of classical music and the changing meanings of race. (Apr.)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393070088
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 4/6/2009
Pages: 240
Product dimensions: 6.20 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Rita Dove, former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and musician, lives in Charlottesville, where she is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

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emily-dickinson-fan

Posted June 20, 2009

If you read only one new poetry book this year, this one should be it!

Dove, already known as one of our greatest contemporary poets, has surpassed herself with this amazing feat. In a series of carefully crafted poems, she recreates the life of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, son of a black father and a white German-Polish mother, who grew up in the late 18th century on the Esterhazy estate in Hungary, where the estate's resident composer and "bandleader", Franz Joseph Haydn, recognized the child's talent on the violin; Bridgetower was just 5 years old at the time. At the age of 9 his father took him to Paris (mere months before the Revolution), where he became an instant sensation; even Thomas Jefferson attended one of his concerts (fact), and Dove, in her moving poem "What Doesn't Happen", imagines Jefferson being accompanied by the teenage Sally Hemings (fiction, most likely). Bridgetower Sr., who bills himself as an "African prince" (he descended probably from black Caribbean slaves), then tries his and his son's luck in England, where little George comes under the tutelage of the fun- and arts-loving Prince of Wales (later King George IV.). In Dove's poems London (and Bath and the seaside resort town of Brighton) of the late 18th century really come alive, and I bet many of the poems, like the villanelle (kind of) "Black Billy Waters at His Pitch", would also be appreciated by readers who are not terribly versed in reading verse (excuse the pun). In 1802/1803, George Bridgetower -- now by all accounts an extremely good-looking young adult of mixed race -- takes leave from the English court to first visit his mother and brother in Dresden (!), and then to continue his travels on the Continent by looking up Ludwig van Beethoven in Vienna. Beethoven, who is about to go deaf, is taken with Bridgetower's talent on the violin. He interrupts his work on the "Eroica" and, in red-hot inspiration, writes one of his greatest shorter masterpieces for his new friend: the Sonata No. 9 in A major, op. 47. Bridgetower premieres it in a morning outdoor concert, with Beethoven at the piano, to great acclaim on May 24, 1803; Beethoven, at one point, even jumps up from the piano to embrace his "lunatic mulatto". What happens then -- the falling out between the two -- has only been recorded as a "saucy remark" George, apparently a success with the ladies, makes over a girl. Ludwig, infamously unlucky in love, takes offense, severs his friendship with the young man he had just called his "dear fellow", tears up the sonata's original dedication and rededicates it to the violinist Rudolphe Kreutzer, who actually despises and never plays it. Dove, in an ingenious stroke, treats the end of the relationship with a verse play in the middle of the book, which gives the tragic moment a farcical twist that works remarkably well. Bridgetower, his "tail tucked", returns to England, where gets a degree in music from Cambridge and plays the violin in the royal orchestra while living to the ripe age of 80. (He dies in poverty, though.) Amazingly, even after her hero's great moment in Vienna, Dove manages to tell the rest of his life and times in gripping, beautiful poems, followed by 7 (seven!) stunning epilogues, the last one ("The End, with MapQuest") her own contemporary reflection, in which she addresses both Bridgetower and Beethoven and asks the latter: "Ah, Master B, little great man, tell me: How does a shadow shine?&

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Sonata Mulattica

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If you read only one new poetry book this year, this one should be it!