“Begin at the beginning,” the King said very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
per il Mulatto Brischdauer
gran pazzo e compositore mulattico
—Ludwig van Beethoven, 1803
If was at the Beginning. If
he had been older, if he hadn’t been
dark, brown eyes ablaze
in that remarkable face;
if he had not been so gifted, so young
a genius with no time to grow up;
if he hadn’t grown up, undistinguished,
to an obscure old age.
If the piece had actually been,
as Kreutzer exclaimed, unplayable—even after
our man had played it, and for years
no one else was able to follow—
so that the composer’s fury would have raged
for naught, and wagging tongues
could keep alive the original dedication
from the title page he shredded.
Oh, if only Ludwig had been better-looking,
or cleaner, or a real aristocrat,
von instead of the unexceptional van
from some Dutch farmer; if his ears
had not already begun to squeal and whistle;
if he hadn’t drunk his wine from lead cups,
if he could have found True Love. Then
the story would have held: In 1803
George Polgreen Bridgetower,
son of Friedrich Augustus the African Prince
and Maria Anna Sovinki of Biala in Poland,
traveled from London to Vienna
where he met the Great Master
who would stop work on his Third Symphony
to write a sonata for his new friend
to premiere triumphantly on May 24,
whereupon the composer himself
leapt up from the piano to embrace
his “lunatic mulatto.”
Who knows what would have followed?
They might have palled around some,
just a couple of wild and crazy guys
strutting the town like rock stars,
hitting the bars for a few beers, a few laughs . . .
instead of falling out over a girl
nobody remembers, nobody knows.
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 Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47,
also known as The Bridgetower.
This is a tale of light and shadow,
what we hear and the silence that follows.
Remember this as we set out
across sea and high roads, as talk turns
to gentlemen and valets, grave robbers
and tormented souls. This is a story
about music and what it does to those
who make it, whom it enslaves . . . yes,
slavery of all kinds enters into the mix,
although the skin of our protagonist
does not play so great a role
in his advancement and subsequent
fade from grace as might be imagined.
Or does it? Rather, let us say that
the racial divide has not yet been invented;
you lived, you died, things happened
between the two.
But you are here
for the story. The story someone penned
in thirst and anger on an uncharted desert isle,
then stuffed into a bottle that now floats,
a glassine porpoise, swell upon swell, too small
for anyone to find . . . until the paper inside
finally crisps, tanned beyond recognition
by the sun that is its constant lover. . . .
So it is a lost story
but we will be imagining it, anyway.
We’ll leave out the boring parts.
There’ll be marching bands, wardrobe changes
and, of course, Love—melting hearts,
sweaty meringues, Flowers of the Realm
and the occasional heave-to in the shrubbery.
Political cartoons. Honorable,
quiet fools.
The major players:
father and son, son and father.
Two composers, a violinist between them.
An African Prince in Turkish robes;
a Prince of Wales turned Regent turned King;
an Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe to the Queen.
(Always the wait-staff, ever vigilant, eye- and ear-y.)
A music student turned copyist, a performer
turned entrepreneur, a faux emperor, a famed chef,
a fiddling beggar; plus assorted fops and dabblers,
countesses and dwarves, all with their freakish
bundles of accoutrements: turbans and reticules,
wigs and vinaigrettes; brooches painted
in the shape of the lover’s eye.
Enter
two prodigies (of an age but not a color),
an absent mother and all-too-present father,
a fattening son and his maddening sire,
a small man and his indigestion,
a fat man and his gout,
rabble and revolutionaries,
guillotines cranking up in time
with the organ-grinders—just
your average gulp of hope
and gobble of terror—then picture a river
pouring itself through a city,
picking up garbage and gulls,
doused in barge oil, speckled with swans,
lapping and sloshing and pooling . . .
that’s how we’ll be traveling—and the rest,
as they say, is background music.
(Ah, but what heavenly music that was. . . .)