Old time jazz: Violin virtuoso George Bridgewater

At the beginning of next month, a group of men and women dressed in wigs, frock coats and all the finery of Regency London will take to the stage of a converted church in east London and begin to sing jazz. It may seem a strange combination, for the late 18th and early 19th centuries are more often represented in theatre and film by the sound of the harpsichord that was just going out of fashion or, more appropriately, by the symphonies of the First Viennese School - Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven - who were then flourishing.

But this opera is different. The score to Bridgetower: A Fable of London in 1807 is by Julian Joseph, one of the UK's pre-eminent jazz pianists and composers, and it centres on the life of George Bridgetower, a remarkable black Briton whose name would be familiar to all lovers of classical music were it not for his having fallen out with Beethoven over a woman.

"It's time we told this story," says Joseph, who worked to a libretto by Mike Phillips, the novelist and cross-cultural curator at the Tate. "He was a successful musician at a time when slavery was in its heyday. We need to talk about the fact that there were black people in British society at that time." Commemorating the 200th anniversary of the 1807 Act which banned British participation in the transatlantic slave trade, Joseph adds: "It's good to be able to talk about slavery from a British rather than an American perspective."

Born in 1779, Bridgetower was a child prodigy on the violin. He studied with Haydn, then the court composer to the Esterhazy family which also employed Bridgetower's father, an ex-slave from Barbados who had reinvented himself as an Abyssinian prince. Fleeing Paris after the French Revolution, the young Bridgetower came under the protection of the Prince Regent, and held the post of first violin in his personal orchestra for 14 years.

He became friends with Beethoven while touring Germany in 1802, and performed what later became known as the Kreutzer Sonata when the ink was not dry on the stave. The composer was so impressed by Bridgetower's playing that he dedicated the work to him - until their argument, after which the piece was rededicated to Rudolphe Kreutzer (who, ironically, declared the piece unplayable).

Bridgetower died in Peckham in 1860 and is buried in Kensal Green cemetery. A member of the Royal Society of Musicians and a founder of the Philharmonic Society, he was described by Samuel Wesley as "justly to be ranked with the very first masters of the violin". "He was one of the cats," says Joseph. "To perform with Beethoven - that's like [the 1960s British pianist] Victor Feldman getting the gig with Miles Davis. He's a hero to all of us."

Joseph's opera will be performed by a jazz ensemble (featuring Christian Garrick on violin and Steve Williamson on clarinets), the LSO Community Chorus and an intriguing mix of singers. The jazz singers Cleveland Watkiss and Jacqui Dankworth take the roles of Bridgetower and Mary Prince, a runaway slave; the countertenor Jonathan Peter Kenny will play both the Prince Regent and William Wilberforce, and the mezzo-soprano Buddug Verona James appears as the prince's mistress, Mrs Fitzherbert.

The pairing of jazz and classical performers reflects Joseph's appreciation of contemporary classical composers such as Mark-Anthony Turnage and Thomas Adès and is a nod to the origin of the operatic form. "I've been wanting to write an opera, to let jazz find its own way there, for a couple of years," says Joseph. "The colours I'm using are jazz. There is room for improvisation, but there's also atonal and Bach chorale-type writing. I also wanted to use jazz outside of its own time. So often you hear it on film in scenes set in basements with people wearing berets, or in strip joints. I didn't want to adhere to cliché."

Phillips curated the Black Europeans exhibition, which featured Bridgetower, for the British Library's Online Gallery. He suggested the violinist as a subject when Joseph asked him to collaborate on an opera. Why, I ask him, had the rest of Britain forgotten Bridgetower? "The historical narrative constructed by the Victorians couldn't cope with the idea that black people were part of British identity," he says. "Everyone 'knew' that there were no black people here at that time, and after a while you don't go looking."

Telling Bridgetower's story now is important, thinks Phillips, not just because of the resonance of the Slave Trade Act bicentenary but also to open out ideas about to whom culture belongs. "The message is that if you're black you don't have to be a rapper, and if you're white you don't have to believe in exclusive cultures." He is particularly keen that this reaches young black men. "Everyone offers us such a restricted view. They don't say 'Here's culture'; they say 'Here's your culture', and you don't get respect for playing the violin."

Bridgetower, he says, offers "a real corrective to the racist nonsense on both sides". He adds: "It's possible to be a human being in any language or culture. This man was the finished article, a violin virtuoso. His was an astonishing achievement." s

'Bridgetower - A Fable of 1807', 5-7 July, City of London Festival, Barbican Centre, London EC2, 0845 120 7502, www.colf.org

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