Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
(1875 – 1912)
British composer and conductor.
He was of mixed-race birth, Coleridge-Taylor achieved such success that he was referred to by white New York musicians as the “African Mahler” when he had three tours of the United States in the early 1900s. He was particularly known for his three cantatas on the epic 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor premiered the first section in 1898 when he was 22.
He married a British woman, Jessie Walmisley, and both their children had musical careers. Their son Hiawatha adapted his father’s music for a variety of performances. Their daughter Avril Coleridge-Taylor became a composer-conductor.
Coleridge-Taylor was 37 when he died of pneumonia. His death is often attributed to the stress of his financial situation. He was buried in Bandon Hill Cemetery, Wallington, Surrey (today in the London Borough of Sutton).
Honours
The inscription on Coleridge-Taylor’s carved headstone includes four bars of music from the composer’s best-known work, Hiawatha, and a tribute from his close friend, the poet Alfred Noyes, that includes these words: Too young to die: his great simplicity, his happy courage in an alien world, his gentleness, made all that knew him to love him. King George V granted Jessie Coleridge-Taylor, the young widow, an annual pension of £100, evidence of the high regard in which the composer was held.[ In 1912 a memorial concert was held at the Royal Albert Hall and garnered over £1400 for the composer’s family. After Coleridge-Taylor’s death in 1912, musicians were concerned that he and his family had received no royalties from his Song of Hiawatha, which was one of the most successful and popular works written in the previous 50 years. (He had sold the rights early in order to get income.) His case contributed to the formation of the Performing Right Society, an effort to gain revenues for musicians through performance as well as publication and distribution of music.
Coleridge-Taylor’s work continued to be popular. He was later championed by conductor Malcolm Sargent. Between 1928 and 1939, Sargent conducted ten seasons of a large costumed ballet version of The Song of Hiawatha at the Royal Albert Hall, performed by the Royal Choral Society (600 to 800 singers) and 200 dancers.
Coleridge-Taylor’s greatest success was undoubtedly his cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, which was widely performed by choral groups in England during Coleridge-Taylor’s lifetime and in the decades after his death. Its popularity was rivalled only by the choral standards Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. The composer soon followed Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast with two other cantatas about Hiawatha, The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha’s Departure. All three were published together, along with an Overture, as The Song of Hiawatha, Op. 30. The tremendously popular Hiawatha seasons at the Royal Albert Hall, which continued until 1939, were conducted by Sargent and involved hundreds of choristers, and scenery covering the organ loft. Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast is still occasionally revived.
Coleridge-Taylor also composed chamber music, anthems, and African Dances for violin, among other works. The Petite Suite de Concert is still regularly played. He set one poem by his namesake Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Legend of Kubla Khan”.
Coleridge-Taylor was greatly admired by African Americans; in 1901, a 200-voice African-American chorus was founded in Washington, D.C., named the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society. He visited the United States three times in the early 1900s, receiving great acclaim, and earned the title “the African Mahler” from the white orchestral musicians in New York in 1910. Public schools were named after him in Louisville, Kentucky, and in Baltimore, Maryland.
Coleridge-Taylor composed a violin concerto for the American violinist Maud Powell. The American performance of the work was subject to rewriting because the parts were lost en route—not, as legend has it, on the RMS Titanic but on another ship. The concerto has been recorded by Philippe Graffin and the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra under Michael Hankinson (nominated “Editor’s Choice” in Gramophone magazine), Anthony Marwood and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins (on Hyperion Records), and Lorraine McAslan and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Braithwaite (on the Lyrita label). It was also performed at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre in the autumn of 1998 by John McLaughlin Williams and William Thomas, as part of the 100th-anniversary celebration of the composition of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.
Lists of Coleridge-Taylor’s compositions and recordings of his work and of the many articles, papers and books about Coleridge-Taylor’s life and legacy are available through the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation and the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Network.
There are two blue plaques in his memory, one in Dagnall Park, South Norwood, and the other in St Leonards Road, Croydon, at the house where he died. A metal figure in the likeness of Coleridge-Taylor has been installed in Charles Street, Croydon.
A two-hour documentary, Samuel Coleridge Taylor and His Music in America, 1900–1912 (2013), was made about him and includes a performance of several of his pieces, as well as information about him and his prominent place in music. It was written and directed by Charles Kaufmann, and produced by The Longfellow Chorus.
A feature animation, The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Story (2013), was made about him, written and directed by Jason Young. It was screened as part of Southwark Black History Month and Croydon Black History Month in 2020.
On 26 August 2021 Coleridge-Taylor’s Symphony in A minor received its Proms premiere by the Chineke! Orchestra with Kalena Bovell.