Samuel Coleridge-Taylor:
Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)
If – as is at least arguable – the Chevalier de St. Georges has the most cinematic biography in all of classical music, then surely Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s story is among its most novelistic.
Coleridge-Taylor was the son of Alice Martin, a suburban farrier’s daughter, and Daniel Taylor, a Krio man from the West African nation of Sierra Leone who had been studying medicine in London. Daniel being unaware of Alice’s pregnancy when he returned to Africa, Alice, a free-spirited 19-year-old lover of literature, named her baby for the poet Samuel Taylor-Coleridge; young Coleridge, as he was called, grew up in a working-class suburb with his mother, grandfather, and step-grandmother.
The family recognized and supported the boy’s musical gifts, and by age 15 he was a scholarship student at the Royal College of Music, where he studied with the noted composer of Anglican church music Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Though he numbered among his classmates and pals Holst and Vaughan Williams, Coleridge-Taylor stood out among them, and by 1898 Stanford had introduced him to Edward Elgar and Elgar’s influential friend, the critic and publisher August Jaeger (the “Nimrod” of the Enigma Variations). The three men arranged for a high-profile performance of Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, which set a portion of Longfellow’s poem inspired by the legendary founder of the Native American Iroquois nation.
This piece – a cantata by a Black Englishman setting a poem by a white American about a Native – was not just an unlikely success but an epochal hit: the printed score sold over 150,000 copies before the beginning of WW I, and the Feast, along with its two follow-up works setting other portions of Longfellow’s poem, became the focus of the Hiawatha Season, wherein for 10 days each summer 900 performers took over London’s Royal Albert Hall for massive, sold-out performances of Coleridge-Taylor’s trilogy.
In 1899, Coleridge-Taylor married an RCM classmate, Jessie Walmisley, and a year later she bore a son, christened Hiawatha; both Hiawatha and his younger sister, Avril, grew to be noted musicians themselves. In that same year Coleridge-Taylor was invited to be the youngest delegate in the first Pan-African Congress, which brought hundreds of Black intellectuals and leaders to London. There he befriended W.E.B. Dubois and P.L. Dunbar, among others, and developed an interest in the culture of the African diaspora. By this time he had developed a relationship with his father, whom Queen Victoria had in the meantime appointed Coroner for the Empire in the African province of Senegambia, and he began incorporating musical ideas from African, African-American, and Afro-British sources into his music.
Within the next decade three hugely successful American tours followed, Theodore Roosevelt inviting Coleridge-Taylor to the White House in 1904. Yet for all his success, Coleridge-Taylor was always obliged to work hard to support his young family; in an arrangement not uncommon to impecunious young composers, he had sold all rights to Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast to its publisher upon completing it. When the composer died of pneumonia in 1912, King George VI was sufficiently moved at the Coleridge-Taylor family’s plight to bestow a lifetime pension on them, and British composers and songwriters were inspired to form the Performing Rights Society, the group that guarantees royalty payments in Great Britain and now has 140,000 active members.
While the Hiawatha pieces eventually faded in popularity, Coleridge-Taylor’s Petite Suite has never left the repertoire, especially in Britain. Originally written in 1911 for solo piano, its high-spirited, melodious music falls somewhere between that of Elgar and the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan. Tonight’s performance features two of the Suite’s four movements, the first (“Nanette’s Caprice”) and last (“The Frisky Tarantella”). In 2022, 110 years after Taylor’s death and 83 years after the last Hiawatha Season in London, Coleridge-Taylor’s star is once again ascendant, and a new generation of audiences is coming to know the power and joy of his music.
See a performance
Hear Petite Suite
Chris Vaneman is the Director of the Petrie School of Music and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse College. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.