[Scroll down for an additional treat!]

This is a heads-up for poetry lovers who are also classical music lovers.  Would you be interested in a book of poems that features, among other interesting characters, Ludwig van Beethoven?  If so, Rita Dove has written just the thing for you.  : )

Her latest collection, Sonata Mulattica, is a group of poems (over 200 pages of them!) that concern -- directly or indirectly -- the life and significance of a violin virtuoso named George Polgreen Bridgetower.  He lived (yes, this is a story about real people) from 1780-1860 in Europe, born to a self-educated, multilingual, enterprising black man from the British colonies (who called himself an African prince) and a Polish woman living in Dresden, and by a stroke of fortune (and thanks to his father's enterprising nature) he learned the violin from "Papa" Haydn himself.  How his life unwinds -- and how his path crosses with Beethoven's -- I leave you to discover.  Because Bridgetower's story is so unusual, and Dove's voice in these poems so inviting (the omniscient narrator speaks in a part-lyrical and part-gossipy register and the characters, when speaking for themselves, are often quite engaging) , she actually has created something of a poetic page-turner, if you can believe it.  Here are some lines from a poem ("Vienna Spring") in Beethoven's voice (ironic lines, given the available evidence that the composer himself probably had Moorish ancestry):

A lunatic angel has descended on Vienna!
No sooner had I given up
on the violin as no more
than a tiny, querulous beast
suited solely for dilettante monarchs
and their peg-leg street beggars,

do I make the acquaintance
of George Polgreen Brischdauer,
mulatto musician/magician most monstrous!
After such delicious execution
of an afternoon's program
so decidedly pedestrian,
there's nothing to be done but repair
to a neighboring Wirtschaft
where-noch ‘n Maß, Mädl!-I fear
I must revise my former assessment:

though dipped in ink, this Jacob
has grappled the shining messenger
for a glimpse of heaven
and won the battle: Entirely master
of his instrument, he climbs the strings
agile as the monkeys from his father's land.
Ah, Immortality has a new-wrought,
human face...

Well, classical music fans will know that Bridgetower is not precisely an "immortal" name among performers.  Why he isn't is the remarkable story that Dove discovers (through research) and imagines (when the facts are not forthcoming).  What it means, has meant, that he isn't a name blazing through musical history, she suggests in one of the opening poems:

Then this bright-skinned papa's boy
could have sailed his fifteen-minute fame
straight into the record books-where
instead of a Regina Carter or Aaron Dworkin or Boyd Tinsley
sprinkled here and there, we would find
rafts of black kids scratching out scales
on their matchbox violins so that some day
they might play the impossible:
Beethoven's Sonato No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47,
also known as The Bridgetower.  

Dove presents a compelling "what-if" and a lively tapestry composed of the factual fabric and imagination's embroidery.  I wish I had time to write a bit more about the book's strengths, as well as the things I wondered about after reading it, but a family visit is on the immediate horizon, so I'll have to leave it at this.  Still, I thought these snippets might be enough to entice some of you readers to put this book (higher up) on your summer reading lists.  Additional treat: if you'd like to hear Dove read from the book and talk about how she came to write it, check out this video.  I'd love to hear from anyone who has read or soon reads the collection.  (I also hereby shout-out Regina Carter, violinist extraordinaire, whose CDs are fabulous!)

Peace.