“PARIS, PANTING” / “WHAT DOESN’T HAPPEN” George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower’s debut—playing a concerto by Giovanni Giornovichi—was one of the last concerts given by a foreigner in the Concert spirituel series before the French Revolution broke out and changed Parisian life forever. The Concert spirituel (1725–1790), one of the very first public concert series, had switched venues from the enormous Salle des Cent Suisses (Hall of the Hundred Swiss Guards) to the equally cavernous stage of the Salle des Machines, both situated in the Tuileries Palace. Built by the great Catherine de Medici and used as a temporary residency by Louis XIV during the construction of Versailles, the Tuileries Palace served mainly as a theater until the Revolution, when the royal family was placed under house arrest there. Napoleon I made it his primary residence, restoring it to official status until its destruction by the Supports of the Commune in 1871.
Before leaving the Continent for England, Bridgetower played at several other venues in Paris—notably the May 27, 1789, concert at the Panthéon, with Thomas Jefferson in attendance.
“MRS. PAPENDIEK’S DIARY (1–4)” Mrs. Papendiek, Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe and Reader to Her Majesty Queen Charlotte, was persuaded by her grandchildren to write down her account of the long last years in the reign of King George III. Her husband was not only head page at court but an accomplished amateur musician (violin, flute) as well, and took an active interest in Polgreen.
“THE MARINE PAVILION, BRIGHTHELMSTON” The Prince of Wales poured a fortune—and most of his adult life—into the creation of his own version of Graceland in the seaside resort of Brighton, where he would spend summers carousing with his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland (King George III’s younger brother). Renovations on the farmhouse fated to become that “masterpiece of bad taste” known as “the Folly at Brighton” began in 1787; the next three and a half decades would see wings added, porticoes plotted, water closets and heating systems installed, stables erected, and rooms re-outfitted to reflect the Prince’s shifting infatuations with French neoclassicism, chinoiserie, and Mogul India.
“THE SEASIDE CONCERTS” Rauzzini’s critique is taken from the December 8, 1789, edition of the Bath Morning Post. Rauzzini doesn’t leave it at that, however; he complicates the effusion by insulting an old friend, the violinist La Motte, in the process, asserting that La Motte was “much inferior to this wonderful boy.” Ouch! That’s gotta hurt.
“JANISSARY RAP” Dressed in the lavish garb of an imaginary Levant—balloon trousers, sashes, and plumed turbans—these African musicians marched through London, flashing tambourines and jingling “Johnny-bells,” a type of glockenspiel festooned with ribbons.
“ABANDONED, AGAIN” The African Prince has gone gaming again. His son flees to Carlton House, London residence of the Prince of Wales—who’s hardly an improvement upon the elder Bridgetower; but at least there’ll be more room to get lost in.
“THE TRANSACTION” Carlton House, 1791. Upon hearing of Pere Bridgetower’s dissolute habits, the Prince of Wales—no Eagle Scout himself—pays the father to leave England and so becomes the boy’s legal guardian. The price? £25—which, lest we become indignant, translates to $4,157.44 in today’s currency. Still.
“BROTHERS IN SPRING” George’s younger brother Ferdinand was a cellist; his name appears on several London concert programs during this time.
“THE SALOMON CONCERTS” George will eventually serve fourteen years as first violinist in the Prince of Wales’s orchestra, performing at the Prince’s home in London and at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton.
“NEW CENTURY AUBADE” According to the Gregorian calendar, leap years are divisible by four and add an extra day (February 29). A solar year, however, is slightly shorter than this calendar calculation (365.25 days); in order to keep in sync with the solar system, yet another adjustment must be made, to wit: Years evenly divisible by 100 are not leap years unless they are also divisible by 400. This would make 1600 and 2000 leap years, while 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not. Ergo: No birthday in 1800 for George Bridgetower; he must wait until 1804 for another February 29.
“THE PETITION” George applies for a leave of absence from the Prince’s orchestra in order to visit his ailing mother in Saxony.
“OLD WORLD LULLABY” All this time, George’s mother Maria Anna has been living in the city of Dresden, on an annual pension from the Prince of Wales.
“FLOATING REQUIEM” Records show George and his brother performing together in Dresden between July 1802 and March 1803.
“LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN’S RETURN TO VIENNA” On doctor’s orders, Beethoven spends the summer of 1802 in the village of Heiligenstadt. That autumn, as he prepares to return for Vienna’s musical season, he writes a letter to his brothers Carl and Johann (known as the Heiligenstadt Testament) in which he despairs over his hearing loss, confesses his aspirations and fears, and puts his affairs in order.
“FIRST CONTACT” On April 16, 1803, Beethoven runs into Count Prichowsky on the street and spontaneously invites him and his walking companion (Johann Held, a physician from Prague and amateur musician) to Schuppanzigh’s rooms, where some of the composer’s piano works that had been transcribed for string quartet were to be rehearsed. According to Dr. Held, among the musicians present (and presumably taking part) were Wenzel Krumpholtz, Johann Nepomuk Möser, and “the mulatto Bridgethauer.”
“BEETHOVEN SUMMONS HIS COPYIST” Ferdinand Ries (1784–1838) came from Bonn to Vienna in order to study pianoforte with Beethoven. He rapidly became an unofficial amanuensis, copying out scores whenever the regular copyist was not available (which, thanks to the composer’s last-minute inspirations, was often the case), alternately serving as an impromptu walking companion, surrogate son, and eventually, inadvertent biographer.
“AUGARTEN, 7 AM” The Augarten concerts were held every Sunday throughout the summer months—an opportunity to catch a whiff of green, to see and be seen: “Now the season of music had arrived.” (Julius Wilhelm Fischer)
“GEORGIE PORGIE, OR A MOOR IN VIENNA” The Austrians are notorious for their delicately warped humor—occasionally obscene, sometimes coarse, always outrageous. No icon, beloved or feared or revered, was exempt; social satire flourished in an unremitting stream of farces one could file under the rubric Travesties of Great Literature. (Think Punch and Judy, with human punching bags and much better puns.) In the first half of the nineteenth century alone, Vienna theaters mounted multiple parodic versions of works by Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Rossini, and Mozart—just to name a few of the more international figures—with Hamlet, Othello, and The Sorrows of Young Werther taking top honors.
The Prater, Vienna’s famed recreational area, had already become a favorite escape from dust and city traffic; but the park’s most famous landmark was still to come: Hubert Cecil Booth erected his Riesenrad (giant wheel) in 1897.
“RAIN” Vienna: June 1803. Beethoven has retracted his dedication to Bridgetower. By this time he really can’t hear much of anything. What is the sound of one raindrop falling?
“TAIL TUCKED” His prospects in ruin, our upstart hero turns tail on Vienna. Beethoven, noted for his intransigence, would not recall his repudiation of the brilliant violinist who had saved the composer’s hide by improvising the cadenzas in the new sonata. Bitter? You betcha. And all because young George had put the moves on some Skirt. As if Big B. would’ve had a snowball’s chance in the matter.
“THE COUNTESS SHARES CONFIDENCES . . .” The legendary beauty Countess Giulietta Guicciardi arrived in Vienna in 1800. Of course Beethoven fell in love with her, even though the difference in their social status ruled out all hope. Three years later she married Wenzel Robert Gallenberg, a mediocre composer but a bona fide Count. After a swift assessment of the marriage, the freshly anointed Countess von Wallenberg remained true to class by managing a love affair with a prince. At least we got the “Moonlight Sonata” out of the bargain.
“CAMBRIDGE, GREAT ST. MARY’S CHURCH” As the crowning achievement in fulfillment of the Bachelor’s degree in music, GPB’s own composition is performed at Great St. Mary’s Church.
“PANOPTICON” The Panopticon, designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1791, became the blueprint for penal systems, providing a unique and unsettling solution for optimal monitoring of inmates. Cell blocks were arrayed in stacked octagons, with each building forming a phalanx that radiated from a central tower, like a giant pinwheel; guard lookouts were situated at the hub of each octagon, with the warden’s office posted at the very core of this macabre flower. Construction on Millbank Prison (on the left bank of the Thames, near Vauxhall Bridge) began in 1812.
“MOOR WITH EMERALDS” The sculpture known as Moor with Emerald Cluster is part of the treasury display in the famous Green Vaults of Dresden’s Residence Palace, the Zwinger. A collaboration between Baroque/Rococo sculptor Balthasar Permoser (1651–1732) and court jeweler Johann Melchior Dinglinger (1664–1731), the wooden figure is twenty-five inches tall, encrusted with silver, gold, rubies, sapphires, topazes, garnets, and carries on a tortoiseshell tray the largest emerald cluster in the world. True to his vocation’s credo of excess, goldsmith Dinglinger married five times and had twenty-three children.
“BIRTHDAY STROLL ON THE PALL MALL” After an unseasonably mild winter, the birds have returned early. Is it February or March? 1822 is not a leap year, so technically it’s March 1—which means poor George has no real birthday to celebrate.
“STAFFORDSHIRE FIGURINE, 1825” The founding father of the Brighton Museum, Mr. Henry Willett (1823–1903), may have earned his fortune through astute management of the family brewery, but his true passion—collecting—would earn him a place in posterity. He believed that “the history of a country may be traced on its homely pottery”; his Collection of Popular Pottery features over two thousand ceramic pieces covering aspects of British nineteenth-century life, including figurines of George III and George IV, Queen Caroline, Lord Byron, Mr. Pickwick, African Sal, and Black Billy Waters.