[Man] It was that damned sonata,
[violin plays] the Kreutzer.
[violin and piano]
[Man in historic dress] One evening, my husband and I were relaxing with a rented video
on Beethoven, called Amoral Beloved (?).
It's a bio pic about Beethoven.
[Woman - Rita Dove?] When there came a moment in the movie,
just a few seconds.
[off male voice] He and George Bridgetower, the famous virtuoso from Africa,
were about to premiere this new Beethoven Sonata at Count Razumovsky's (?) that evening.
[Woman] And I turned to my husband and I said: "What was that?"
(An Acclaimed Poet...) [Violin playing something unrelated to the shown musical score]
[female voice,off] This is a story about music
and what it does to those who make it, (Sonata Mulattica - Rita Dove)
whom it enslaves.
Yes. Slavery of all kinds enters into the mix,
(On a Journey to Rescue from Obscurity) [Violin plays something unrelated to the shown musical score]
[Woman, off] although the skin of our protagonist
does not play so great a role [piano music starts]
in his advancement and subsequent fade from grace as might be imagined.
(A Forgotten Musical Genius...) [...Piano...]
[???] Or does it?
[Woman, off] Rather, let's say that the racial divide [Violin + piano start]
has not yet been invented.
(George Bridgetower)
[Woman, off] His life is an improbable story,
where the great composer Franz Haydn
actually discovered the child genius in the servants' quarters.
He played across Europe,
all the way to Paris, to London, to Royal Court,
but his greatest triumph came in his early 20's,
when he traveled to Vienna
and inspired Ludwig Van Beethoven,
arguably the greatest composer of all times,
to write his most stunning violin sonata
for his new "lunatic mulatto", as he called him.
[Violin + piano:unrelated to the shown score] (A Sonata That Could Have Changed History)
[Rita Dove] But there, George Bridgetower's extraordinary success story ends.
[Dove (?) off] All because of a falling out
over a girl nobody remembers, nobody knows.
Beethoven re-dedicated the sonata
to another violinst, Rudolf Kreutzer (Dedication to Kreutzer on Italian score)
who not only never played the Kreutzer Sonata,
but declared it unplayable.
[Piano chord]
(A Boy Transcends His Crippling Past) [Piano+violin: unrelated to shown score]
[Dove] Disappearance.
A boy and his violin -
That's it.
[Jane Coyne] He was born to a drug-addicted woman -
[Dove] both small, unremarkable
until one of them moves.
The boy lifts his arm and the violin floats up to kiss his chin. (Dec. 30. 1994)
[Jane Coyne] and then he was placed in foster care.
[Dove] A man can vanish between the down stroke and the first note's sigh,
from one word to the next,
a wink and a nod.
[Jane Coyne (?), off] This woman, she hit him with baseball bats, (Dec. 30. 1994)
his legs were broken in eighteen places, (Dec. 30. 1994)
[Jane Coyne] they said he might not walk.
[Dove] He'll evaporate under a lady's glance, as her smile slides across the room.
[Jane Coyne (?), off] And the doctors said that
if there was anything that kid needed at the time, it was a mother.
(Joshua Coyne) [Dove(?), off] But a boy looks out
from the backs of his eyes.
[Dove] A boy stays where you put him,
invisible until you hiccup, and suddenly, he's there.
[Piano: unrelated to shown score] (Given a Second Chance at Destiny
[1st woman, off] I'm off then, to anywhere - (passionate: [pash-uh-nit] having, compelled by or ruled by intese emotion or strong feeling; espressing, showing, or marked by intese or strong feeling)
Fiotti's (?) perhaps, or closer,the Royal Boudoir (Leslie Milk's "Rising Stars" with pic of Joshua Coyne)
the arabesques and flickering silks (The Violinist - Joshua Coyne - Senior, WInston Churchill High School)
[Dove] of music, always music.
Only music, now, can save me.
[rain]
[Joshua Coyne (?) off] Ready?
[Joshua Coyne (?)] You either have tadadam tadadam tam tam tam,
or you have tam tam tam tam.
[Man and woman singing and joking (?)]
[Orchestra]
[Joshua Coyne(?)] I don't want to play a competition or an audition.
After some(?) time, they'll tell me that the jazz auditions are on the other side of the building
or like that kind of things, and -
you know, you get over it.
[Piano chords] (National Book festival - Tent 5 - Current author: Rita Dove)
[Dove(?)] All my life, I've been confronted with variations of that old line,
"What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?"
And early on, it was "What are you doing in the orchestra playing cello?"
"What are you doing studying German?"
Apparently, those were not Black-approved activities,
the implication being that an African American poet had no business dabbling in European culture.
[Barack Obama] And somewhere in America, the next great artist is doodling on their homework.
They're out there right now, dwelling in possible (?).
[Dove] Ah!
[Dove (?) Off] Look at that!
(Sonata No. 9 in A major, Opus 47 "Kreutzer Sonata") Unbelievable piece.
[Violin]
[Obama] We need them to succeed, [Violin]
[Obama] to disrupt our views [Violin]
[Dove] Yeah [Joshua Coyne] Yeah.
[Obama] and to challenge our presumptions. [Violin]
[Dove] So it's not only looking back at history and be able to neatly put it in a box,
even if we say: "Oh, there were so many that were constrained like this." No.
Let's roll it forward, then. [Violin]
because this is a story happening now -
[Dove(?)] - 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 Number 9 in A major, Opus 47, also known as The Bridgetower.
[Piano and violin]
[Dove] What you'll hear at the beginning of that sonata
is something that everyone thought was insane, at that time.
[Piano and violin]
You will hear a solo violin [Piano and violin]
Then you'll hear a solo piano.
[piano (and violin)]
And it's a call and response: they talk to one another.
[piano and violin]
[off man] It is the power of music to carry one
[Man] directly into the mental state of the composer.
[off man] The listener has no choice.
[Man] It is like hypnotism.
[Piano and violin]
[Dove (?) off] To the poet as witness,
[Dove] where is the poet in the poem.
(Veni, Vidi: I came, I saw) [Dove (?) off] In order to even begin
[Dove] to approach Bridgetower's story poetically,
that I had to figure out how to be a witness.
(Lives Intertwined By Poetry) [Music unrelated to shown score]
[Joshua Coyne (?) off] So when you write music here,
[Joshua Coyne (?)] you sort of choose what you do want to put into your music,
You don't write music for an exercise to show out all the different things
that you know how to do as a composer,
or you're not being authentic to your own music.
[Dove (?) off] Because I was historian, poet,
[Dove] I mean, I created him.
[Joshua Coyne (?) off] If you were able to do in the late 1700,
[Coyne] early 1800
then you are able to do it now.
(Lives Intertwined by History) [Music unrelated to shown score]
[Dove] Yes, and that was one of the things that drove me to write the book.
I was curious to find out exactly how people regarded a mixed-race person
and it was radically different from what happens in this country.
(Lives Intertwined By Destiny) [Music unrelated to shown score]
[Woman (?) off] It's also really incredible that this mixed-race child could grow up
and become a prodigy 200 years before, you know, Obama becomes president.
And there are so many parallels and echoes, here.
(Linked by a Sonata) [Music unrelated to shown score]
(Sonata Mulattica)
(Coming Soon...)
[applause] (Fetzer Institute)
(Ideas, images, spark changes)
(Spark Media)