Rita Dove’s 2009 book-length poem cycle Sonata Mulattica: A Life in Five Moments and a Short Play is an imaginative reconstruction of the biography and career of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1778-1860) a Black British violinist to whom Beethoven almost dedicated a famous sonata.
The volume is a kind of bookend to Dove’s most famous book, 1987’s Thomas and Beulah. That Pulitzer Prize-winning volume is a lyrical narrative about her maternal grandparents, chronicling the African-American experience of the Great Migration. Sonata Mulattica, in contrast, is about a life that’s distant from what’s generally seen as Black history—not set to a soundtrack of jazz or Afrobeat, but classical. Dove plays with that distance, and with the way that stereotypes exist even where you aren’t looking for them—not least in the way that stereotypes help determine who is and who isn’t considered representative of Black experience.
That makes the book sound programmatic or moralistic; it’s anything but. Dove’s touch is light and even rambling as she takes George from his birth in Poland to Hungary (where he’s trained under Haydn). From there he’s shepherded as a child prodigy from Paris to London by his more-than-slightly disreputable father Friedrich, a polyglot of Caribbean background. Dove’s narrative is told from a range of perspectives; the point of view flutters from George, to his dad, to English diarist and music appreciator Mrs. Papendiek, to Black streetcorner fiddler Bill Waters. The latter serves as a kind of downmarket foil for George, an “invisible mirror/shining the truth/straight back.”
That truth is subject to interpretation, not least because the historical record is spotty. Dove imagines George (or would he have gone by the name Polgreen?) as a neglected, exploited child, somewhat lonely, somewhat contemptuous of an audience which sees him as a novelty (because of his age as much as his skin color) and which doesn’t understand his artistry.
She also, in several lyrics, conflates his musical genius with a sensual appreciation of nature and indeed of sensuality—an appreciation she suggests that, as a lyric erotic poet, she shares.
It wasn’t lust…
he felt rising in him once more—
sweat pricking, Adam’s apple convulsed
into hoarse arpeggios,
her ragged sighs lapping his ear…
This is a fond evocation of the kind of young love, or young lust, which lots of people experience in adolescence, tuned to George’s sensitivity. It’s also a primal scene from the racist unconscious, inasmuch as George is Black and the girl here is probably white. That anxiety about intermixing—of romantic partners, of aesthetics—hovers over the book as a whole, and especially over its most virtuoso section: “Georgie Porgie, or A Moor in Vienna,” a short satirical play in the style of Viennese farce.
The farce dramatizes the best known incident in Bridgetower’s life. The 25-year-old travelled to Vienna in 1803, where he met Beethoven—who was notoriously dark-skinned and sometimes referred to as “the Moor.” George performed the composer’s 9th Violin Sonata to great success even though it was barely finished (Dove suggests Bridgetower improvised a crucial solo.) Beethoven named the sonata after Bridgetower initially. But at a tavern afterwords he had an argument with the violinist over an argument about a woman and reconsidered the name.
Dove imagines Beethoven falling ludicrously in love with a tavern server on first sight and reacting with horror and rage when Bridgetower courts her successfully. The dramatization gives Dove a chance to put in Bridgetower’s mouth a boastful signifying quasi-rap:
But I’m a natural man, born under a magical caul,
I’m that last plump raisin in the cereal bowl;
I’m the gravy you lick from your mashed potatoes,
I’m creamier than chocolate, juicier than ripe tomatoes!
I’m older than the ages, yet younger than a minute;
I’ll parade on a pinhead or waltz upon a spinet.
I strung an empty coconut and fiddled my way out of burning Rome—
You thought young Nero done it?
No—’twas yours truly, yours alone.
Hell, if I’d been Oedipus, old Jocasta
would’ve stayed alive just to call me her masta!
There’s a lot more glorious tomfoolery, including a chorus of bad girls singing about Othello to the tune of “My Boyfriend’s Back” and much sighing over George’s smooth moves. The culmination, though, is that Beethoven flies into a rage:
Womanhood is not to be treated like…trash!
This is an abomination! You are an abomination!”
He tears up the dedication page of the sonata; later he would rename it for violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, who hated the piece and never played it. Bridgetower’s chances at fame gone, he left Vienna to return to London to study music formally, marry (we don’t see much of his wife in Dove’s book), and drift into semi-obscurity among a people whose condescension he may or may not have found more or less trying.
…weren’t they
wise and generous and kind, aren’t I grateful?
They were, they were, they were
and I am.
Whether Dove’s flagrantly dancing around anachronism by channeling hip-hop, or quietly imagining the spaces between the story we know and the what-might-have-been, race and racism frame the book’s narrative and the places narrative can’t quite go. To what extent did people at the time define George by his blackness? What did blackness mean to them, and what, by extension, does it mean to us? A few of the poems in the book follow the macabre story of Haydn’s skull—stolen after his death by phrenologists who wanted to examine the bumps on his head for evidence of his musical talent. Proto-eugenics and queasy biological determinism desecrated the memory (and the actual body) of a leading white musician. What affect did it have on a musician who actually wasn’t white?
Dove suggests that George’s father, Friedrich, built on English prejudice in his pursuit of success in the market and the bedroom.
Here, on this Isle, I am
a continent. I am so large
they cannot grasp my meaning.
Contours loom, unmapped;
my lineaments refuse coherence.
I am the Dark Interior,
that Other, mysterious and lost;
Dread Destiny, riven with vine and tuber,
satiny prowler slithering up behind
his doomed and clueless prey.
Friedrich, that satiny prowler slithering, is ungraspable by his contemporaries. But are we now better equipped to see who people are beyond our own assumptions and prejudices? Dove in a prologue imagines a world in which Bridgetower is better known and “rafts of black kids” wanted to be classical violinists rather than (or as well as) jazz musicians and hip-hop artists. Dove (a fluent German speaker married to a German writer) is, you could argue, one of those (grown-up) kids fascinated by and invested in classical music, its performance, and its past. Her alternate history is the history we have, which is always more multiple than we give it credit for.
“I don’t know if your playing was truly gorgeous/or if it was just you, the sheer miracle of all/that darkness swaying,” Dove muses in an epilogue addressed in her own voice directly to her subject. Art, history, identity—it’s hard to tease them out, one from the other. Sonata Mulattica takes that confusion and turns it into music.