| Sonata Mulattica: Poems |  | Author: Rita Dove
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  5 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition. 1 in number line
Pages: 240
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 0393070085
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780393070088
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
How does a shadow shine? May 23, 2009
Roger Brunyate (Baltimore, MD)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
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?"
A masterpiece! April 5, 2009
Eugene Schrock (USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
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?
A great poet and a great work of poetry! June 17, 2009
Sacramento Book Review (Sacramento, CA)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This latest book from one-time U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove is a labor of love. Known for the musicality of her own work and poems, Rita Dove takes on as her subject a musical prodigy, violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780-1860). A peer of Beethoven, Bridgetower sets himself apart as an exceptional violinist, especially remarkable to his audiences at the time because of his brown skin--just one part of his inheritance from his "African prince" of a father.
Rita Dove delves into just about every aspect of Bridgetower's public and private life and reveals each one to us through exhaustive poems and through the words of different narrators. The poems in this volume channel the voices and intimate perspectives of Bridgetower, his father, his musical contemporaries, and those who came in contact with him and had something to say, good or bad.
Rita Dove's book is a commentary on race relations in Europe two centuries ago. However, her book is very relevant today, in a world that is slow to change--a world that is still inexplicably surprised (shocked) by the beauty and talents of the brown-skinned individual. This book testifies that great gifts, visible or invisible, are to be expected in all individuals, regardless of skin color, ethnicity, or nationality.
Reviewed by
Viola Allo
beautiful symphony of poetry May 28, 2009
Dan Barclay (Washington, DC)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I love this book. I played symphony violin for 9 years and I truly appreciate the extensive research Rita Dove has done to make the book musically oriented. The book also employs preics terminiology to paint the picture of that time period. While some parts are a bit dense, the overall flow from poem to poem is beautiful music, plain and simple.
An elegant and charming set of poems December 12, 2009
Monica B. Morris (Los Angeles, CA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Having seen Rita Dove recently at the Downtown library in Los Angeles, I was determined to purchase her latest volume, Sonata Mulattica. This is a most unusual set of poems, including a small play! There is nothing forbidding about Dove's poems. She reaches her reader with every word.It is not surprising that she has been a Poet Laureate This is a most appealing work, even for those not familiar with poetry. I appreciated receiving a used copy through Amazon. It was in "as new" condition, pristine - and about half the price of buying it at the bookstore. As a writer, myself, I sometimes feel a bit guilty about buying at such a discount. The writer gets so little from books, anyway, and when books are sold at deep discounts, the writer often gets nothing at all.
Still, for those of us who love books, Amazon offers additions to our personal libraries that we could not otherwise afford, would not otherwise buy.
Monica B. Morris
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