Interview with Rita Dove: Part 1

This interview was conducted Sunday, June 29, 2008, via phone between College Station, TX, and Pennsylvania (as Rita and Fred Viebahn, her husband, were driving from Virginia up to Rochester, NY, to visit their daughter).

ROWELL: How did you come to the subject of Sonata Mulattica? What led you to this story, the life of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower?

DOVE: It was one of those things that seemed to be waiting for me: This book was waiting for me. I think my background had a lot to do with it—because I am a classically-trained cellist, because there’s always been a special place in my work for people who drop out of history. I came upon Bridgetower’s story by a fluke: In 2003 I had just finished my last poetry collection, American Smooth, and was taking a break, slacking off by watching movies and reading crime novels while copy-editing the new book. One night Fred and I rented a movie on Beethoven called Immortal Beloved which wasn’t supposed to be very good, but we decided to watch it anyway, just for the music. There’s a scene in the film—just a brief moment—where Beethoven walks through a room and you see a black violinist. I looked over at Fred and said, “What’s that?” Was this some kind of “politically correct” colorblind casting, or what? I ran to the Internet and found out that indeed, at one point there had been a black violinist in Beethoven’s life, and so I began to research George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower. I soon realized that I had known the rudimentary story long before that movie pointed me in this direction but that I had passed it by because I hadn’t been ready for it yet. Now the fascination with this oddity began to grip me, so I jotted down some notes in my notebook, thinking I might write a poem about this character who had had a role in musical history and then pretty much vanished. At that point I wasn’t ready to write the poem; I had notes, I had scribbled a few lines, and that was it. A year later, I was busy going on the road with American Smooth, and every once in awhile I would come across my Polgreen notes, as I called them, and say to myself, “No, I’m just not there yet.”

Finally, in the spring of 2005, after Carnival in Venice where we attended several balls with faux Renaissance scenery and costumes, and after five weeks of traveling around Australia in a motor home where I gained not only geographical distance to daily life but distance of the mind, I began to write a few snippets and do more and more research; the deeper I delved—every time I turned a corner, so to speak—another fascinating tidbit would emerge. So I dedicated an empty notebook to him and to everything about that time period. Part of me was terrified because not only was I going to have to deal with this mulatto violinist, but with the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century, England, Vienna, and of course Beethoven and Joseph Haydn: the Big Boys… you know, the marble busts standing on your piano.

Then, in the summer of 2005, Fred and I were invited to Martha’s Vineyard to spend a week at Peter Norton’s house in Oak Bluffs, and we were looking forward to a completely relaxing time. The day we arrived, Peter greeted us with his bags packed. He had to go back to New York for a couple of days and was very apologetic. “Please, just make yourselves at home,” he said—and left us alone in his gorgeous house for three days. Suddenly there was this little pocket of time I hadn’t planned for with no obligations, not even social ones—nothing but a beautiful wrap-around porch and a table where I sat down and looked through my Polgreen notebook. This unexpected free time pushed me deeper into the story, and by the time Peter returned from...