String theories

Fans of Ludwig van Beethoven’s famed “Kreutzer Sonata” might not know that violinist Rudolphe Kreutzer, to whom the work was

dedicated, wasn’t one himself. History records that he dismissed it as too demanding, and someone else already had played it, which diminished its novelty.

That someone was violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower, the friend and colleague to whom Beethoven originally dedicated his “Violin Sonata No. 9 in A Major, Op. 47” in 1803. They premiered it together, to rave reviews.

The piece survives, but the collaboration melted down after the violinist allegedly mocked a woman the composer admired. Beethoven scribbled out his original dedication after the friendship dissolved.

Over time, people pretty much forgot the violinist who’d been a touring sensation in his day, worked for a prince, did some composing of his own and became a respected teacher, clearing racial hurdles all the while.

It all leaves an American poet, herself a musician, wondering what might have been.

“If this black violinist back in the day had been better known, we might have more Boyd Tinsleys,” Rita Dove said.

She’ll team up with the Dave Matthews Band violinist tonight for a program of music, verse and conversation inspired by Bridgetower’s sparkling career and the challenges he faced as a mixed-race man in an elite white arts realm at a time when slavery remained a brutal reality in much of the world.

Together, Dove and Tinsley explore the life of Bridgetower, a gifted violinist of Polish and West Indian heritage. Beethoven even referred to both Bridgetower’s race and his capacity for performing furiously difficult musical passages in his erased dedication to a “mulattico lunattico.”

“His story fascinates me and had fascinated me for years,” Dove said. “I just wanted to know more about him — not in the historical sense, but what it would be like to be him, to get in his skin, so to speak.

“I needed to feel what it was like to be a mulatto prodigy in this musical landscape. I told my husband, ‘It’s a book. A big book.’ ’’

Indeed it is. Although “Sonata Mulattica,” Dove’s latest collection of poems, runs more than 200 pages, she said that “the poems themselves take one particular moment and try to crystallize it.”

Teaming up with Tinsley was a natural. They share a love of experimentation and asking “what if” in their respective disciplines — in both fields, “improvisation is not something to be frightened of,” as Dove said.

“He’s composing a piece that he’s going to be playing,” she said.

Together, the poet and the rock star can ditch the powdered-wig stuffiness and get to the emotional heart of the issues.

“They were the rock stars of their day,” Dove said of the elite violinists of Bridgetower’s time. “I want them to feel how electrifying that music could be. What music does for us very often is get us at a very visceral level.”

That visceral component of communication is a way to remind book lovers of something she reiterates to her students: Life isn’t meant simply to be read. It should be felt, heard, experienced.

“Those of us who are in literature can fall into that trap that literature is ‘literature,’ ’’ she said with a chuckling emphasis, “not born of the body and the world.

“You write because you live intensely and you want to tell someone about it.”

The Kreutzer Sonata figures prominently in an earlier literary work for an entirely different reason.

Notable for its longer length and vastly changing, almost exhausting emotional landscape, the sonata demands a lot from its performers. The close partnership required to perform it — the piano-and-violin version of the idea that it takes two to tango — is a theme in Leo Tolstoy’s story of the same name, in which a man describes the events that prompted him to kill his wife.

In Tolstoy’s hands, she was the pianist, her lover was the violinist, and the strong emotions the composition drew out of them both swept them into adultery — and her devastated husband into murder.