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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 one-time 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.
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 last week 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, she 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 the Pulitzer Prize. 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 Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater in 2000.
She has served as poet laureate of both the United States (1993-95) and the state of Virginia (2004-06), and has been awarded the National Humanities Medal and numerous honorary doctorates.
As she did in “Thomas and Beulah,” which is about her grandparents’ relationship, Dove engages in a bit of poetic archeology 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.
“The impulse of ’Thomas and Beulah’ was to show ordinary people’s interior lives, and situate them in history,” she said. “Bridgetower — he’s not an ordinary person. Yet we get to see him with his contemporaries — the Prince of Wales, for example. We get to see him in ordinary times.”
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 they 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 historic figures.
“I did feel that the facts, the bone facts, should be true,” she said. “After you honor the past, the facts, then anything goes. Be true to a heart, the zeitgeist of that era; but I did not feel that I had to apologize for making up a scene or that people might be put off by that as disrespectful.”