Rita Dove's startling new collection celebrates prodigy violinist

Rita Dove was watching "Immortal Beloved," a fictional biography of Beethoven, in 2005 when the image of a black violinist flashed on-screen.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet knew about George Polgreen Bridgetower, a onetime child prodigy and friend of Beethoven. But after seeing the movie, Dove became transfixed by the fleeting figure who was a footnote in the great composer's life.

She tried to put it to rest with research -- she is the Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, after all.

But the spirit of Bridgetower would not leave her. She wrestled with it until she pinned it down, committing the welter of dreams and emotions to paper.

The result is "Sonata Mulattica," her startling new collection of lyric poetry and dramatic dialogues. Dove will read from the book and discuss it with Kerri Miller of Minnesota Public Radio at the Fitzgerald Theater on May 11 for the final "Talking Volumes" event of the season.

Bridgetower, to whom Beethoven once dedicated what is now known as the Kreutzer Sonata, offered Dove a kind of historic validation.

"I grew up playing the cello, dragging it home to practice and having kids look at me like I was crazy," she said in an interview from her home in Charlottesville, Va. "Entering his world meant connecting with all of these great musicians I revered and was made to understand were not my birthright, so to speak. In the middle of writing this book, I realized that I'd been living my whole life to do this."

Dove has spent a good deal of her life defying expectations and claiming lofty territory. The daughter of a chemist and a homemaker grew up in Ohio and earned degrees from Miami University and the University of Iowa. She won a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany in 1974. (She's fluent in the language and is married to German novelist Fred Viebahn; they have one adult daughter.)

Dove shot to fame in 1987 when "Thomas and Beulah," her third poetry collection, won a Pulitzer. She has also written fiction (the short-story collection "Fifth Sunday" and the novel "Through the Ivory Gate") and drama: Her play "The Darker Face of the Earth" was staged at the Guthrie Theater in 2000.

She has served as poet laureate of both the United States (1993-95) and Virginia (2004-06), and has been awarded the National Humanities Medal and honorary doctorates.

As she did in "Thomas and Beulah," which is about her grandparents' relationship, Dove engages in a bit of poetic archaeology in "Mulattica," a work of "light and shadow, [of] what we hear and the silence that follows."

It is as if she has found a body that has been badly buried and exhumed it. "Mulattica" gives Bridgetower his proper rites.

Bridgetower was born in 1780 in Biala, Poland, to a father described as an African prince and a Polish mother. That biracial heritage proved to be one difficulty for the violin virtuoso, who lived in London but moved freely in a 19th-century European milieu governed by a strict caste system.

Beethoven and Bridgetower met in Vienna in 1803. They became fast friends, and played together at the premiere of Beethoven's Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 9 in A Minor, Op. 47, which Beethoven dedicated as the Bridgetower, in 1803.

But the two men soon fell out -- Bridgetower is reputed to have ogled or insulted Beethoven's love interest -- and when the sonata was published it was dedicated to violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer.

Dove chronicles much of this history in "Mulattica," which includes a cameo by Thomas Jefferson, who would have seen the 9-year-old Bridgetower play during his stay in Paris in 1789. (Dove imagines that Sally Hemings, Jefferson's slave and lover, would have been along.)

There also are references to "Mad King George," "Papa" Haydn and a battery of other historical figures.

In writing the book, Dove found that she still had to overcome what she calls the "stultifying awe" that surrounds history in general and classical music in particular.

"You mention classical music and people adjust their posture -- they sit up straight," she said. "You say that it's a book with Beethoven and Haydn, and they feel like it's got to be hard going and difficult, not at all energetic. But everything I read -- the actual accounts and letters, the farces ... and political cartoons -- were so lively, so full of life. Some of the stuff was way raunchier than much of what you read today."

Past as present

Dove writes about freak shows, the 19th-century version of reality TV ("Hear Ye!") and the obsession with ancestry and blood that she references in poems such as "Capriccio" and "ReNaissance."

"The way we seek fame, the way we want ever more prurient details revealed about people, the way we take an ordinary person and clamor to see them do something weird on television, that feels close to contemporary life," she said. "We're still very much there, in that moment."

She wrote two or three poems, then stopped. "I was too busy," she said. Inspiration welled up in her and came pouring out during an 18-month sabbatical that started in 2007.

She had an initial bout of fear about how to treat historical characters -- how to get into their psyches. She solved it by latching onto the tiniest details. Dove would imagine, for example, "the way the collar feels on the neck" of a character.

"It sounds mystical, but I don't think it really is," she said. "No matter how successful you are, or talented or rich, we all have certain emotions that we tap into, this incredible frustration, a feeling of not being able to realize your potential or to be who you are. I feel that way often."

Dove had not intended to make "Mulattica" a mixture of poetry, philosophical musings and dramatic monologues.

"The genre that makes me feel like I'm leaving my body and leaving this world is drama," she said. "I love writing dialogue. What I don't like is what happens afterwards -- the time it takes to workshop, to produce the play. Being a Virgo, I like letting go. Fine. But [an actor] can decide to just emote and destroy the whole thing when the lights come up."

"All things considered," she continued, "poetry gives me the most pleasure. I love getting down to the bone of the language. The smaller the cage, the more I'm going to sing."

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390