Sonata Mulattica: Poems [Hardcover]

Rita Dove (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 2009

In a book-length lyric narrative inspired by history and imagination, a much celebrated poet re-creates the life of a nineteenth-century virtuoso violinist.

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.

Editorial Reviews

From 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.)
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From The New Yorker

Dove’s verse sequence re-creates the life of the biracial violinist George Bridgetower, best remembered for being the first performer, and the initial dedicatee, of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata. (Beethoven replaced his humorous dedication to the “lunatic and mulatto” after quarrelling with him, apparently over a woman.) A virtuosic treatment of a virtuoso’s life, the poems use all registers—nursery rhymes, diary entries, drama—and are stuffed with historical and musical arcana. Yet the book remains highly accessible, reading much like a historical novel. Dove is fascinated by Bridgetower’s life as a black musician and occasionally implies parallels with the world of jazz and rap, but the issue of race does not predominate. She is concerned equally with the status of musicians in a world of precarious patronage—even Haydn, at the Esterhazy estate, has “no more leave / to step outside the gates / than a prize egg-laying hen”—and with “the radiant web” of music itself.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (April 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393070085
• ISBN-13: 978-0393070088
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #508,331 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She has received numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and, more recently, the 2003 Emily Couric Leadership Award, the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1997 Sara Lee Frontrunner Award, the 1997 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 1996 National Humanities Medal. In 2006 she received the Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service (together with Anderson Cooper, John Glenn, Mike Nichols and Queen Noor of Jordan), in 2007 she became a Chubb Fellow at Yale University, in 2008 she was honored with the Library of Virginia's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2009 she received the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal and the Premio Capri (the international prize of the Italian "island of poetry").

Ms. Dove was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. A 1970 Presidential Scholar, she received her B.A. summa cum laude from Miami University of Ohio and her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She also held a Fulbright scholarship at the Universität Tübingen in Germany. She has published the poetry collections The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Thomas and Beulah (1986), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Mother Love (1995), On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth (2004), a book of short stories, Fifth Sunday (1985), the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992), essays under the title The Poet's World (1995), and the play The Darker Face of the Earth, which had its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and was subsequently produced at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Royal National Theatre in London, and other theatres. Seven for Luck, a song cycle for soprano and orchestra with music by John Williams, was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1998. For "America's Millennium," the White House's 1999/2000 New Year's celebration, Ms. Dove contributed -- in a live reading at the Lincoln Memorial, accompanied by John Williams's music -- a poem to Steven Spielberg's documentary The Unfinished Journey. She is the editor of The Best American Poetry 2000, and from January 2000 to January 2002 she wrote a weekly column, "Poet's Choice," for The Washington Post. Her latest poetry collection, Sonata Mulattica, was published by W.W. Norton & Company in the spring of 2009. Most recently she edited "The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry" (2011).

Rita Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she lives with her husband, the German writer Fred Viebahn. They have a grown daughter, Aviva Dove-Viebahn.

More biographical information is available at http://www.people.virginia.edu/~rfd4b/

Customer Reviews

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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How does a shadow shine?, May 23, 2009

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sonata Mulattica: Poems (Hardcover)

Having read so many novels recently written with the sensibility of a poet, I was curious to see what former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove would make of this cycle of 85 poems that together take the form of a novel. A biographical novel about a footnote to musical history: the mulatto violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower. Beethoven (who ought to know) called him a crazy genius ("gran pazzo") and was inspired to write him his most difficult violin sonata. But the two quarreled over a girl and, in a fit of pique, Beethoven rededicated the work now known as the KREUTZER SONATA.

So we have a real-life story, or at least some outlines for the writer to fill in. George's father was a self-styled African Prince brought to the Austro-Hungarian court as part, frankly, of a human menagerie; gifted in many languages, he seems to have had an instinctive nose for that touch of exotic wildness that would secure his place in European society. George's mother was a German woman of Polish descent. George himself, as a boy on the Esterhazy estate, comes to the notice of Joseph Haydn, who develops his musical talents to the point where he creates a sensation at his Paris debut at the age of 9, and thereafter gets adopted by the English court. He is 23 when he visits Vienna, enthralls Beethoven then maddens him, and returns in defeat to England; there, he will serve for 20 years as leader of the Prince Regent's orchestra, wander abroad, and return to die in a London suburb at the end of his eighth decade.

It is a rocket of a story with a long dying fall. Poetry doesn't narrate the upward trajectory -- for that you need the chronology and racy notes at the back -- so much as punctuate the ascent with starbursts of wonder: "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." But poetry excels prose in its ability to meditate on those plotless later years. Some poems cry out in anger, as here in RAIN when George takes leave of the cultural cacophony of Vienna: "Because we're wading through wreckage, we're | not even listening to all the crash and clatter -- | chords wrenched from their moorings, smashed | etudes, arpeggios glistening as they heave and sink. | Ciphers, the lot of them. Their money, their perfumed stink." Others are almost unbearably poignant, as in HALF LIFE: I'm a shadow in sunlight, | unable to blush | or whiten in winter. | Beautiful monster, | where to next -- | when you can hear | the wind howl | behind you, the gate | creaking shut?"

This reference to George Bridgetower's race is of course of interest to Dove, who is of African descent herself. But despite the title, SONATA MULATTICA is about many sorts of ways of reducing a person's individuality, even while feting him for some extraordinary success. There is little difference between the prodigy George, his African showman of a father, or the real life negro busker Black Billy Waters, who makes several ribald appearances. Even the great Haydn chafes at being treated like a chattel. Here is George at 9, in recital with another child prodigy: "Two rag dolls set out for tea | in our smart red waistcoats, | we suffered their delight, | we did not fail our parts -- | not as boys nor rivals even | but men: broken, then improperly | mended; abandoned | far beyond the province | of the innocent."

I would mention three other things that poetry does extremely well. One is to play with form and style. Dove's range is extremely wide, taking in sonnet and rondeau, popular nursery rhymes and street songs, many types of free verse, some concrete poetry, and even a short verse play. The effect, as she skips from the 18th century to the 21st and back, is rather like what Peter Maxwell Davies does with popular music in his brilliant EIGHT SONGS FOR A MAD KING, simultaneously capturing the period and anatomizing it. But poetry and music are indeed close; that is my second point. Poems like POLGREEN SIGHT-READING, in which the violinist, half by sheer intuition, struggles with Beethoven's manuscript are amazing evocations of the extraordinary in music: "I've been destined to travel these impossible | switchbacks, but it's as if I'm skating | on his heart, blood tracks | looping everywhere...". Finally, poetry can be intensely personal. One of the most moving poems of all is the last, THE END, WITH MAPQUEST, where Dove comes back to visit the very ordinary suburb where Bridgetower died, ending with a confession: "Do I care enough, George Augustus Bridgetower, | to miss you? I don't even know if I really like you. | I don't know if your playing was truly gorgeous | or if it was just you, the sheer miracle of all | that darkness swaying close enough to touch, | palm tree and Sambo and glistening tiger | running circles into golden oil. Ah, | Master B, little great man, tell me: | How does a shadow shine?"

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece!, April 5, 2009

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Amadeus (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sonata Mulattica: Poems (Hardcover)

I was blown away by this -- for poetry rather voluminous -- collection. Rita Dove manages to bring to life surprising aspects of a vibrant and untidy Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century, in the process setting the record straight on a famous musical composition (the so-called "Kreutzer" Sonata). The story of George Bridgetower and his all but forgotten, but no less influential encounter with Ludwig van Beethoven has been summarized elsewhere on this page. What's so amazing about this story is not only the apparent ease and success with which a mixed-race violinist -- black father, white mother -- could move about in the high societies of Paris, London and Vienna 200 years before Barack Obama, but the ingenious art of shifting perspectives Dove employs in her sometimes narrative, sometimes lyrical, always beautifully crafted poems. Here, the author easily surpasses her Pulitzer Prize-honored volume Thomas and Beulah; while Thomas and Beulah was more like a novella, Sonata Mulattica is a full-blown novel in verse (with a hilarious farce in the middle).

I'd go out on a limb and say that together with Allen Ginsberg's Howl, much of Sylvia Plath, James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, Derek Walcott's Omeros and many Seamus Heaney poems, Rita Dove's masterpiece comprises the greatest accomplishment in English language poetry since Auden and Eliot. One can only hope that the jurors of this year's major literary awards (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize) will also recognize this. And isn't it about time for a female American poet to be honored by the Swedish Academy?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Bridgetower Sonata, February 28, 2011

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sonata Mulattica: Poems (Paperback)

This long narrative poem by the former United States Poet Laureate Rita Dove tells the story of the brief relationship between George Bridgetower a virtuoso violinist and Ludwig van Beethoven. Bridgetower (1780 -- 1860) was the son of an African/Carribean father known as the "African Prince" and a German/Polish mother. Bridgetower thus was a mulatto. He was a child prodigy on the violin and gave his first concert in Paris, just before the French Revolution, at the age of nine.

In 1803 while in Vienna, Bridgetower was introduced to Beethoven (1770- 1827) who at the age of 33 was ten years Bridgetower's senior and already possessed of a large reputation as a composer. Beethoven was taken with the young man's virtuosity and passion on the violin. He briefly interrupted work on his monumental third symphony to compose a sonata for violin and piano in which Bridgetower would play the violin and Beethoven the piano. The sonata in A major, opus. 47 Beethoven's ninth for violin and piano, was performed to great acclaim on May 24, 1803. Beethoven intended to dedicate the sonata to Bridgetower, for whom he had written the work. But the two men had a falling-out over a woman, the precise details of which remain obscure. In a fit of anger, Beethoven withdrew the dedication to Bridgetower and dedicated his sonata instead to Rudolphe Kreutzer. Kreutzer was probably the most famous violinist of his day, and Beethoven knew him slightly. Kreutzer disliked the sonata Beethoven dedicated to him and never played it. But the work is one of Beethoven's grandest, and the dedication made Kreutzer's name immortal. George Bridgetower, although he would live a long life, became relegated to obscurity, known only passingly to those who study Beethoven and his music, when Beethoven withdrew his dedication.

Dove's poem tells the story of George Augustus Pegeen Bridgetower, from his flamboyant early life of promise to his obscure latter years in "Sonata Mulattica", a long narrative poem which consists of about 80 short poems in varying forms and styles. The work is divided into five sections of "movements" together with a short, climactic play called "Georgie Porgie: A Moor in Vienna" which offers a dramatised version of the rift between Bridgetower and Beethoven. The work begins with a meditative prologue of two poems and concludes with an epilogue.

Dove's poem captures the near-religious passion that music inspires in composers, performers, and those who love the art. Besides portrayals of Beethoven and Bridgetower, Dove's musical characters include Haydn, who recognized Bridgetower's prodigous talent, Ferdinand Ries, Beethoven's copyist and a composer in his own right, Johann Peter Salomon, a promoter who organized Haydn's trips to London, Franz Clement, the violinist to whom Beethoven dedicated his only violin concerto, and Black Billy Waters, a London Street musician. Dove also includes a poem in the words of Guilletta Guicciardi, one of Beethoven's many hopeless loves. Beethoven dedicated his "Moonlight" piano sonata to Guicciardi. In her poem in the book, "The Countess Shares Confidences over Karneval Chocolate" Dove captures well Beethoven's manner of playing the piano and his stormy, wild character. The Countess, now a married woman, recollects:

"He insisted on a light touch. He himself
was a wild man, ripping the music
from my stumbling fingers
and stomping about as the pages
fluttered sadly earthwards,
like the poor pheasants dropped over
the hunting fields of the Prater.
Rest assured I soon learned to play
more lightly!"

Besides focusing on music, Bridgetower and Beethoven, Dove's poem describes well life in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, as Thomas Jefferson makes a cameo appearance at an early Bridgetower concert, and Dove devotes several poems to the young libertine Prince of Wales who becomes Bridgetower's guardian when his father wanders away. The poetic voice ranges from serious and reflective to irony and sarcasm. Some of the poems are in the form of dramatic monologues while others are narrated. Of the many different poetic styles and meters used in the work, I was most struck by "Black Billy Waters, At his Pitch" which is composed in the highly structured form of a vilanelle. The play, in which Bridgetower loses his dedication and Beethoven's friendship, is swiftly performed and features a chorus of "Bad Girls" who sing a caustic song to the tune of the much later classic, "My Boyfriend's Back".

Dove reflects on Bridgetower's loss of the dedication and its possible significance. In her opening poem, "The Bridgetower" she things on the possible consequences of a work by this name rather than Kreutzer's.

"Then this bright-skinned papa's boy
could have sailed his fifteen-minute fame
straight into the record books -- where
instead of a Regina Carter or Aaron Dworkin or Boyd Tinsley
sprinkled here and there, we would find
rafts of black kids scratching out scales
on their matchbox violins so that some day
they might play the impossible:
Beethoven's Sonata No. 9 in A major, op. 47,
also known as The Bridgetower."

And in her concluding poem, "The End with MapQuest", Dove, visiting the site of Bridgetower's death, reflects upon the violinist's life:

"Do I care enough George Augustus Bridgetower,
to miss you? I don't even know if I really like you.
I don't know if your playing was truly gorgeous
or if it was just you, the sheer miracle of all
that darkness swaying close enough to touch,
*** *** ***
Master B, little great man, tell me:
How does a shadow shine?"

Lovers of music and of the "Kreutzer" sonata and readers interested in the forgotten story of an early Black violinist will be fascinated by Dove's narrative poem: Sonata Mulattica".

Robin Friedman