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NYT: The Black Violinist Who Inspired Beethoven https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/arts/music/george-bridgetower-violin.html

By Patricia Morrisroe

Six months after Beethoven contemplated suicide, confessing his
despair over his increasing deafness in the 1802 document known as
the Heiligenstadt Testament, he was carousing in taverns with a
charismatic new comrade, George Polgreen Bridgetower. This biracial
violinist had recently arrived in Vienna, and inspired one of
Beethoven's most famous and passionate pieces, the "Kreutzer"
Sonata.

Beethoven even dedicated the sonata to Bridgetower. But the
irritable composer--who would later remove the dedication to
Napoleon from his Third Symphony--eventually took it back.

While Napoleon didn't need Beethoven to secure his place in history,
this snub reduced Bridgetower to near obscurity. Though his name was
included in Anton Schindler's 1840 biography of Beethoven, he was
described inaccurately as "an American sea captain." Like so many
Black artists prominent in their lifetimes, he has been largely
forgotten by a history that belongs to those who control the
narrative.

IFRAME: https://www.youtube.com/embed/8uPGz7NU-mk

Bridgetower was born on Aug. 13, 1778, in eastern Poland, and
christened Hieronymus Hyppolitus de Augustus. His father, Joanis
Fredericus de Augustus, was of African descent; his mother, Maria
Schmid, was German-Polish, making Bridgetower what was then known as
a mulatto, a person of mixed race. (The poet Rita Dove's 2008 book
"Sonata Mulattica," an imagined chronicle of Bridgetower's life, has
helped raise his profile a bit in recent years.)

Bridgetower's father--who took the name Frederick, and sometimes
went by others--was the driving force behind his son's career.
Handsome, charming and fluent in multiple languages, Frederick was a
natural storyteller with a flair for promotion; he claimed that his
father had been an African prince unofficially adopted by a Dutch
sea captain, was promised diamonds and gold dust, and then sold into
slavery, surviving a shipwreck in the process. The father married an
African woman and wound up in Barbados, where Frederick was born;
the name Bridgetower was likely derived from the island's capital,
Bridgetown.

It's unclear how Frederick wound up in Poland, but the historian
William Hart wrote in a 2017 article in The Musical Times that young Bridgetowers's godparents were members of the noble Radziwill
family; Frederick, and possibly his wife, may have been in their
service. The couple and their son soon moved to Austria, where
Frederick, known as "the Moor," worked as a page to Prince Nikolaus
Esterhazy. The music-loving prince maintained his own orchestra at
his palace in Eisenstadt, where Haydn was court composer. (George
Bridgetower was later touted as a pupil of Haydn's, but it's unclear
if he ever studied with the master.)

Bridgetower's public debut was long thought to have taken place in
Paris in 1789. But Mr. Hart discovered an advertisement in a
Frankfurt newspaper promoting a concert by "Hieronymus August
Bridgetown," the "son of a Moor," in April 1786, when the boy would
have been just seven. It noted that he had already played for
Emperor Joseph II.

The Bridgetowns, as they were then known, lived for a time in Mainz,
an important musical center, where Maria gave birth to another son,
who would later become a cellist. Frederick, leaving his wife and
younger child behind, took on tour his elder son, who, billed as a
"young Negro of the Colonies," performed a violin concerto by
Giornovichi in the prominent Concert Spirituel series in Paris in
1789.

"His talent, as genuine as it is precocious, is one of the best
replies one can give to the philosophers who wish to deprive those
of his nation and his color the faculty of distinguishing themselves
in the arts," said a review in Le Mercure de France.

After several more concerts in Paris, including one attended by
Thomas Jefferson, the Bridgetowers--as they then called themselves
--left for England, where the family created a sensation.

With Oriental-inspired clothing in vogue, Frederick played up his
presumed exoticism by wearing flowing Turkish robes. Everyone wanted
to meet this "African prince" and his prodigy--whose name had now
become George. By the fall of 1789, Frederick had arranged for his
son to play before King George III and Queen Charlotte, as well as
the Prince of Wales, later George IV.

George induced "general astonishment" playing in Bath, according to
the Bath Morning Post. At 11, he made his London debut with a
Giornovichi concerto between the first two parts of Handel's
"Messiah." He and his father were often at Carlton House, the town
residence of the Prince of Wales, who organized regular chamber
concerts. On June 2, 1790, the prince sponsored a benefit concert
for Bridgetower and another young artist at the Hanover Square
Rooms, the premier concert venue for fashionable society.

Until then, Frederick had skillfully managed his son's career. But
his behavior turned increasingly self-destructive. At a masquerade
attended by the prince, Frederick dressed as a caricature of a Black
slave, advocating for abolition; this was certainly a worthy cause,
but the stunt served to alienate the elites whose favor he had taken
pains to cultivate. During a performance of "Messiah," he shouted
for a repeat of the "Hallelujah" chorus, and, after a struggle, was
thrown out of the theater. There were reports of excessive drinking
and womanizing.

Charlotte Papendiek, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte and a
prolific journal keeper, wrote that Frederick gambled away his son's
money and treated him so brutally that George sought refuge with the
Prince of Wales at Carlton House. Frederick was committed to an
asylum before being sent back to Germany by the prince, who took
12-year old George under his protection.

The prince gave him the opportunity to learn from the finest
musicians in London. He studied composition, theory and piano with
Thomas Attwood and violin with both François-Hippolyte Barthélémon
and Giornovichi. He formed a close relationship with Giovanni
Battista Viotti, a violinist and composer whose confident, daring
style would influence his own.

Over the next decade, Bridgetower would play in nearly 50 public
concerts with leading orchestras and musicians, including Haydn and
the double-bass virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti. He was the first
violinist of the Prince of Wales's band; the organist and composer
Samuel Wesley wrote that Bridgetower was "justly ranked with the
very first masters of the violin."

After visiting his ailing mother in Dresden, Bridgetower arrived in
Vienna in early April 1803. He had been invited by Prince Lobkowitz,
one of Beethoven's patrons, to play that composer's quartets.

Beethoven and Bridgetower formed an instant bond. The composer, then
32, may have recognized himself in the 24-year-old violinist.
Beethoven had been nicknamed the Spaniard for his swarthy
complexion, and engravings of the two men show a marked resemblance.
They also had in common abusive fathers with vested interests in
their careers, as well as the ability to thrill audiences with their astonishing talents.

After hearing Bridgetower play, Beethoven not only agreed to
participate in a concert for him at the Augarten, but also decided
to write something for them to perform together. He had already
started sketching out the first two movements of a violin sonata, to
accompany a previously discarded finale. He now began to compose
with Bridgetower in mind, as the two men stayed up nights drinking
and acting like teenagers. Though Bridgetower was described as
melancholic, he could also be high-spirited and ribald. He brought
out Beethoven's freewheeling, bawdy side.

The concert had been planned for May 22, 1803, but since the sonata
wasn't ready, it was postponed until the 24th. At 4:30 that morning,
Beethoven instructed his pupil, Ferdinand Ries, to copy out the
first two movements for the violinist. Ries managed only the first,
and the piano part was still in sketch form. Beethoven and
Bridgetower took the stage for the morning concert, having never
rehearsed the piece. Bridgetower was sight-reading.

Beethoven had given Bridgetower an opening solo that began with an
explosive declaration, moving into a fiery, sensual dialogue. At one
point, Bridgetower surprised Beethoven by imitating and then
expanding on a short piano cadenza in the first movement. Beethoven,
jumping up, hugged him, crying, "My dear boy! Once more!"

After the performance, Beethoven presented Bridgetower his tuning
fork and wrote a dedication on the score: "Sonata mulattica composta
per il mulatto Brischdauer, gran pazzo e compositore mulattico"
("Mulatto sonata composed for the mulatto Bridgetower, great lunatic
and mulatto composer").

Tolstoy wrote about the unsettling first movement in his novella
"The Kreutzer Sonata," whose protagonist, after hearing his wife
play the piece with her violin teacher, stabs her to death in a
jealous rage. Beethoven didn't do anything that extreme, but after
Bridgetower made a rude comment about a woman Beethoven admired, the
two men quarreled and Beethoven took back the dedication.

When the sonata was published, it instead bore the name of the
French violinist Rudolphe Kreutzer. Beethoven had been thinking of
moving to Paris, and dedicating the piece to Kreutzer was a
calculated political move. What Beethoven didn't know was that
Kreutzer disliked his music; Kreutzer described the sonata as
"outrageously unintelligible" and never played it.

Bridgetower returned to London and continued to perform, enjoying
the patronage of the Prince of Wales. On May 23, 1805, he
participated in a concert in the Hanover Rooms, along with his
brother, who played a Romberg cello concerto. Their father had also
come back to England, where he was arrested and thrown in jail for
vagrancy.

In 1811, Bridgetower received a master's degree in music from
Cambridge University and became a member of the Royal Philharmonic
Society. Five years later, he married Mary Leake, the daughter of a
prosperous cotton manufacturer; they had two daughters. One died in
infancy, and he grew estranged from the other. He and his wife
separated in 1824.

Little is known about Bridgetower's later years; at some point, he
seems to have stopped performing, making his living as a piano
teacher in Rome and Paris. In an 1847 letter to Madame de Fauché, a
fellow musician, he makes a joking but telling reference to his
biracial identity: "If the bearer of this letter is fortunate to
find you, favor me by having your message conveyed to him who is not
fair enough to be 'my tiger,' nor 'dark enough' to be 'my Friday,'
but is my long-tried honest Caliban." The allusion to the
half-human, half-beast character in Shakespeare's "Tempest" is a
poignant one: When his island is suddenly occupied, Caliban is
enslaved.

Bridgetower died on Feb. 29, 1860, in a house on a small back street
in south London; he was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. The death
certificate identifies him as a "gentleman." By then, Beethoven had
been gone for 32 years.

It's unknown if Bridgetower ever played the "Kreutzer" Sonata again,
or if he was in contact with Beethoven after their rift. All we know
is that on May 24, 1803, two brilliant performers dazzled a crowd
with their high-wire virtuosity. One of them entered history.

Patricia Morrisoe is the author of the novel "The Woman in the
Moonlight."

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