Exploring the life of an Afro-European Virtuoso through Verse and Violin

Sarah Wade, Cavalier Daily Staff Writer
Published: Wednesday, March 18 2009
Human history is as much a product of forgetting as it is of remembering. What actually goes down in the pages of history can be unpredictable and seemingly arbitrary.

Listen to Beethoven’s famed Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47, commonly called the Kreutzer Sonata after the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. It is sometimes assumed that Beethoven originally dedicated the sonata to Kreutzer. In reality, Kreutzer never could perform the sonata.

Instead, he reportedly told Beethoven the piece was “impossible to play” — a notable complaint, given that Kreutzer was considered one of Europe’s top violinists at the time.

But it was not impossible. By this time, Afro-European violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower had already played the sonata, said Creative Writing Prof. Rita Dove, who recently wrote a book about the musician.

Bridgetower was a Mulatto violin virtuoso. His musical talent was so impressive that Beethoven originally wrote the piece for him, not Kreutzer, Dove said. Why, then, did Beethoven rededicate the sonata to Kreutzer, a violinist who refused to play it? Also, why did history subsequently forget George Polgreen Bridgetower?

Dove, a former U.S. Poet Laureate, said she aims to recover Bridgetower’s lost significance in her latest book of poetry. “Sonata Mulattica” dramatizes in lyric verse the life of the violinist and the different factors that led him to historical obscurity rather than fame.
“I wanted to discover [Bridgetower], Dove said, “and poetry was the way I wanted to discover him.”

In a joint concert with Dave Matthews Band violinist Boyd Tinsley, Dove will celebrate the release of “Sonata Mulattica”  Friday evening as part of the 15th Annual Virginia Festival of the Book. The blending of poetry, music and conversation will begin at 8 p.m. in the Paramount Theater.

“[When] Dove mentioned that Boyd Tinsley was cited in one of her poems … we all agreed that it would be fantastic if there could be a joint program,” said Nancy Damon, program director of the Virginia Festival of the Book. Kevin McFadden, the festival’s associate director and a former University student, said he felt that there would be “large interest” in the program, and eventually the festival invited Dove and Tinsley to perform together at the Paramount. Dove used Tinsley’s name in her poem, “The Bridgetower,” describing him as one of today’s gifted people forgotten by time. She said she contacted him after finishing writing “Sonata Mulattica” to let him know he was featured in it.

Dove and Tinsley enjoyed working together on the upcoming event, Dove said. “He works similarly [as] I do … on improvisation,” Dove said, adding that both are artists who experiment with their craft to expand its scope and range of expression. Combining the two crafts of poetry and violin music to share one message is in itself a chance for improvisation.

“It’s been a great process of getting to know one another,” Dove said of her collaboration with Tinsley, who, like Dove, is a Charlottesville resident. Dove added that Tinsley wants people to remember what happened between Beethoven and Bridgetower in 1803. Both Tinsley and her aim to “connect the dots from Bridgetower all the way up to Tinsley,” Dove said.

Damon said she anticipates that the event will be “a very exciting combination of words and music which fits perfectly into [the festival’s] goal of encouraging people to read.” She added that “with any success, the story contained in Dove’s book and Tinsley’s music — the life of George Polgreen Bridgetower — will encourage people to explore what they read more deeply, to examine the personal significance every story offers them.”

Dove said her initial decision to versify Bridgetower’s 200-year-old story happened largely by chance. As a former cellist, she heard Bridgetower’s name long ago but did not give it much thought. That changed years later when she glimpsed a portrayal of Bridgewater’s genius in the 1994 film, “Immortal Beloved.”

By the age of 10, Bridgewater, already a prodigy, was on the road performing.

“That was really interesting — a little boy, half-black and half-white, playing in concert halls across Europe,” she said.

As a young man, Bridgetower came to Vienna, where he impressed and befriended the already legendary Ludwig van Beethoven. The friendship, however, was short-lived.

“The Bridgetower,” which was printed last November in the New Yorker, explains why: In May 1803, Beethoven and his new friend first performed their new sonata together with the German on pianoforte and the Afro-European on violin. The performance moved the composer so deeply that he “leapt up to embrace his ‘lunatic mulatto,’ the playful nickname he had given Bridgetower.

“[But then they had a] falling out over a girl nobody remembers, nobody knows.”

Bridgetower apparently insulted a woman who was one of Beethoven’s acquaintances. In response, the composer chose to dedicate the sonata to another musician. The pair would never renew the friendship.

How might racial categorization both in and beyond classical music be different if Bridgetower’s fame had survived the first round of history’s cuts? How many more figures like Bridgetower might there be today if their names were better remembered? His own mulatto identity literally bridged African and European cultures, and his technical abilities surpassed even those of the famous Kreutzer. Beethoven’s sole reason for renouncing Bridgetower had nothing to do with music and everything to do with emotion. But because of a chance combination of factors, Bridgetower “has kind of dropped out of history,” Dove said. Remembered here and there, maybe, but more as an interesting detail than as anyone historically influential, she added.

For Dove, obscure stories like Bridgetower’s history point out the shortcomings of history and the need for something beyond it that can be used to remember human life.

Around every famous historical figure, there are countless other people — “living, breathing people,” Dove said — who were just as significant. Perhaps these nameless contributors would be the ones in history books instead if a few circumstances had worked out differently.

For those select few that history does remember, it seems to do so incompletely, which offers the world only small, scattered windows into past lives as vibrant as the ones that people are living now, Dove noted.

“What has always fascinated me [is] the realization that we all have interior lives,” Dove said. “What history does is to point out, rather graphically, just how little of that interiority can be passed down through generations.”

This is one of Dove’s main reasons for writing poetry, she said. She aims to acknowledge and explore that interiority with the intent to expose the personal, emotional side of history.

“History … tells us what happened. It doesn’t tell us why it was worth it,” Dove said. “That’s the job of poetry.”

via Cavalier Daily.

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Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama paid tribute to his hero, Abraham Lincoln, at a celebration for the reopening of the theater where he was slain.

“Despite all that divided us — North and South, black and white — he had an unyielding belief that we were, at heart, one nation, and one people,” Obama said last night at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. “And because of Abraham Lincoln, and all who carried on his work in the generations since, that is what we remain today.”

Obama, the nation’s first black commander-in-chief, often invokes the name and symbols of the assassinated president who ended slavery and brought the U.S. through the Civil War. Both men rose from the Illinois state legislature to the highest office in the land and both built reputations as skilled political orators.

The reopening of Ford’s Theatre after an 18-month refurbishment coincides with a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth. Obama, 47, who took the oath of office on Lincoln’s bible, will travel to Springfield, Illinois, today to mark the bicentennial.

Obama and his wife, Michelle, joined politicians and Ford’s Theatre donors to watch a series of songs, readings and speeches performed by celebrities such as Ben Vereen and Kelsey Grammer.

The theater also unveiled a videotape, to be shown at its museum, in which the four living past-presidents — George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — recited Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, accompanied by Matthew Brady’s Civil War images.

Empty Presidential Box

The Obamas watched from the front row alongside House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. None of the nation’s leaders have sat in the presidential box since John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln there during a performance of “Our American Cousin” on the evening of April 14, 1865.

The event was a retrospective of Lincoln’s life, from his humble beginnings described by James Earl Jones’s baritone to Vereen’s impassioned reading of the Emancipation Proclamation without the prompter, which broke mid-show.

The highlight for the audience of about 650 was classical violinist Joshua Bell’s “Variations on Yankee Doodle,” which was by turns playful and mournful.

Broadway singer Cheryl Freeman gave an electrifying rendition of a song from the play “The Civil War,” followed by Audra McDonald, Jessye Norman and Joshua Bell for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which earned a standing ovation.

Host and actor Richard Thomas called the facility the most-famous theater in America, which had morphed from a scene of tragedy into a symbol of Lincoln’s legacy.

Lincoln Medal

The gala event included the presentation of the Lincoln Medal given each year to someone whose work, accomplishments and attributes “exemplify the lasting legacy and mettle of character embodied by the most beloved president in our nation’s history,” Ford’s Theatre said. This year, the recipients were filmmaker George Lucas and actor Sidney Poitier.

In the aftermath of the assassination, the government bought the theater, which dates to 1861, from Ford for $100,000 and gave it to the War Department for use as storage space and an Army Medical Museum.

At one point, the interior collapsed, so now only the exterior walls are original. In the 1960s, the theater was rededicated as a memorial to Lincoln, and the National Park Service used historic photographs and contemporary accounts to reconstruct the box and the theater as it looked that night. Almost a million visitors pass through every year.

Red Upholstery

The theater has just 658 seats, done up in red upholstery. Lincoln’s box sits just above stage left. On the balustrade is one of the few surviving artifacts from that time, an engraving of George Washington.

The renovation was part of a larger $50 million fundraising effort known as the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Campaign that’s also supporting the building of a new education center. The campaign benefited from a $5 million donation from Exxon Mobil Corp. and $2.5 million from the State of Qatar, the theater said.

Other donors included AT&T Inc., BP America Inc., General Dynamics Corp., Toyota Motor Corp., AMR Corp.’s American Airlines and Lockheed Martin Corp., according to Ford’s Theatre.

Bloomberg.com: Arts and Culture.