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| Samuel Coleridge-Taylor |
Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Anglo-African
composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was just 22 and recently
graduated from the Royal College of Music (RCM), London, when he
completed Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. Hiawatha, a cantata for chorus,
orchestra, and tenor, is based on a section of The Song of Hiawatha, the
epic poem by noted American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The
piece was an instant hit from its first performance at the RCM on
November 12, 1898, and during the beginning of the 20th century gained
the young composer wide acclaim, if not financial security. Insecure in
his own abilities, and a novice in the music publishing business,
Coleridge-Taylor sold the Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast’s copyright to music
publisher Novello’s for a mere 15.15 British pounds, in today’s terms
the equivalent of 1,855.18 GBP or $2,404.64. During his 1910 visit to
the United States Coleridge-Taylor remarked more than once: “If I had
retained my rights in the Hiawatha music I should have been a rich man.”
Hiawatha’s
Wedding Feast was Coleridge-Taylor’s most successful production, in its
time rivaling Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah in popularity.
After the cantata’s premiere, Sir Hubert Parry, a contemporary composer,
pronounced it “one of the most remarkable events in modern English
musical history.” The work was received enthusiastically not only in
England, but also in South Africa, New Zealand, and the United States.
Despite
the popular success of Hiawatha (more than 200,000 copies of the music
sold during his too-brief lifetime), Coleridge-Taylor struggled to make a
living for himself and his family and his extraordinary efforts to
write original commissions, to conduct his and other composers‘ works,
and to teach contributed to his premature death from pneumonia at the
age of 37.
From 1904 until his death in 1912 he was
principal conductor of the Handel Society of London, and professor at
Trinity College of Music, at the Crystal Palace School of Art and Music,
and at the Guildhall School of Music. At the time of his death,
Coleridge-Taylor had produced 82 numbered compositions and some 25 other
works.
Unlikely Musical Career
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| The composer in is studio |
Coleridge-Taylor’s humble origins and dark skin would
not necessarily anticipate his illustrious musical future, even if his
unmarried white English mother named him after the English poet Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge-Taylor’s black African physician father
(Daniel Hughes Taylor) returned to his native Sierra Leone before the
child’s birth and, apparently, never knew of his existence. The composer
experienced racism in England, although not as extreme as the racism in
the United States. In his early childhood, Coleridge-Taylor lived with
his mother in his maternal grandfather’s modest household in the London
suburb of Croydon. This grandfather sparked Samuel’s musical gift when
he gave the five year old a small violin and his first music lessons.
In
addition to his violin mastery, Coleridge-Taylor was an in-demand boy
treble soloist at several churches. His musical talent recognized,
Coleridge-Taylor in 1890 at age 15 entered the RCM. The young man soon
showed promise as a composer and in 1892 was accepted as a student to
RCM composition teacher Charles Villiers Stanford, at the time a noted
composer. By the age of 20, Coleridge-Taylor had already scored nearly
30 vocal and instrumental works. Inspired by Johannes Brahms’ Quintet
for Clarinet and Strings, Coleridge-Taylor wrote his own clarinet
quintet, leading Stanford to acclaim the originality of his student’s
work. Thus Coleridge-Taylor became the RCM’s star student in
composition, and in 1893 he received the RCM’s only composition
fellowship.
Referring to young Coleridge-Taylor, the
music critic Auguste J. Jaeger wrote to his future wife that “I have
long been looking for a new English composer of real genius and I
believe I have found him.” Mr. Jaeger became a champion of
Coleridge-Taylor’s music and pressed music publisher Novello’s to
publish Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.
Coleridge-Taylor in
1897 completed his studies at the RCM where several of his student
compositions (mostly small group chamber pieces) were performed. Edward
Elgar, even in Coleridge-Taylor’s lifetime considered a top English
composer, was among the music luminaries of the time who were impressed
by Coleridge-Taylor’s work and promoted it. Elgar urged the directors
of the prestigious Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester to perform
Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade in A Minor for Orchestra in 1898.
Hiawatha
Longfellow’s
poem, completed in 1855, adopted the trochaic tetrameter [a rapid meter
of poetry consisting of four feet of trochees; a trochee is made up of
one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable] of the
Finnish epic poem The Kalevala. When he chose to set the poem to music,
Coleridge-Taylor acknowledged his attraction for the characters’
curious-sounding Indian names such as Nokomis, Chibiabos, and Iagoo, and
that “The essential beauty of the poem is its native simplicity, its
unaffected expression, its unforced realism”. Furthermore,
Coleridge-Taylor was a great admirer of the Czech composer Antonín
Dvořák, and of that composer’s Symphony from the New World which, some
experts say, was inspired in part by Longfellow’s Hiawatha. The unusual
rhythms of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast are said to be a reflection of
Coleridge-Taylor’s admiration for Dvořák’s music.
African-American Influence
Although
many of Coleridge-Taylor’s works resemble the style of white English
composers, even from his student days he was interested in reflecting
his African heritage. In this last pursuit, Coleridge-Taylor looked to
African-Americans. He found inspiration from the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a
gospel chorus from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, that had
toured in England. Coleridge-Taylor also partnered with
African-American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, whom he met in London in
1896, to set some of Dunbar’s poems to music. And he composed some
African-themed orchestral works. The overture to Hiawatha’s Wedding
Feast even incorporates strains from the African-American spiritual
“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and the composer used melodies of
African-American spirituals in his “Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, P. 59”
for piano. Contemporaries reported that he advocated for black
classical music.
U.S. Reach
Hiawatha’s
Wedding Feast was performed in the U.S. before Coleridge-Taylor’s tours
here in 1904, 1906, and 1910. The Ann Arbor, Michigan Argus-Democrat
of December 15, 1899 announced a December 18 performance by the Choral
Union with the Chicago Festival Orchestra. The Chicago Apollo Club on
April 15, 1901, at the Chicago National College of Music, presented the
premiere Chicago performance of the cantata which “is creating quite a
furore both in England and in this country”, the monthly magazine Music
reported. Also in 1901, the African-American Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Choral Society of the District of Columbia was founded specifically to
perform Hiawatha and it invited the composer to conduct the piece when
he would tour the U.S. which he did for the first time in November
1904. In an unusual honor at the time for an individual of African
descent, President Theodore Roosevelt received Coleridge-Taylor at the
White House during the composer’s 1906 visit.
The
composer was well-known and respected among African-American communities
in the early 20th century, much as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm
X are well known today. Schools were named after him, including The
Historic Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Elementary School in Baltimore,
Maryland, and Coleridge-Taylor Montessori Elementary School in
Louisville, Kentucky.
In a spring 1908 letter to
Coleridge-Taylor, the honorary treasurer of the S. Coleridge-Taylor
Choral Society summed up African-Americans’ high regard for the composer
and his cantata: “In composing Hiawatha you have done the coloured of
the U.S. a service which, I am sure, you never dreamed of when composing
it. It acts as a source of inspiration for us, not only musically but
in other lines of endeavor. When we are going to have a Hiawatha concert
here, for at least one month we seem, as it were, to be lifted above
the clouds of American colour prejudice, and to live there wholly
oblivious of its disadvantages, and indeed of most of our other
troubles.”
Chicago Pleasure
During
his visits to Chicago in late November/early December 1904 and 1906,
Coleridge-Taylor conducted a program of his shorter pieces but not
Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. Although the composer’s 1904 Chicago concert
was arranged with only 10 days’ notice, the hall was full. Reportedly,
the Chicago concert pleased him more than the others: “My best time was
in Chicago. The audience was made up almost entirely of those whom you
would call really musical people, and there was no mistaking the
immense German element among the listeners. Coloured people always put
in a large attendance, and they were most enthusiastic.”
Song of Hiawatha Trilogy
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| A memorial to the composer in his hometown of Croydon (SCT in the center). |
Following Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast’s success,
Coleridge-Taylor completed two more sections in 1899 and 1900, The Death
of Minnehaha, and Hiawatha’s Departure, respectively. The trilogy,
published as The Song of Hiawatha, was first performed in its entirety
in 1900 at the Royal Albert Hall. The last two parts never attained the
success of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. However, from 1924 until the
beginning of World War II, the complete trilogy and the Hiawatha Ballet
Music were performed with costumes, scenery, and up to 1,000 performers
at the Royal Albert Hall for two weeks annually. The famous English
conductor Sir Malcolm Sargent recorded Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast in 1929
and again in 1961.
While in modern times Hiawatha’s
Wedding Feast, and Coleridge-Taylor’s music, had declined in popularity,
interest in black composers has grown most recently spurring new
performances and recordings. On the 100th anniversary of the work’s
premiere, it was revived in Boston in 1998. The Colour of Music
Festival in Charleston, South Carolina scheduled a performance for
October 21, 2017.
On August 24, 2017, during Chicago’s
classical radio station WFMT’s Mid-Day program, host Lisa Flynn played a
cut from a new release (Music by Composers of African Descent, or
Violin Gems from Black Composers issued summer 2017) by
Hungaro-Ethiopian violinist Samuel Nebyu playing Coleridge-Taylor’s
Romance, Op. 39. Again on September 6, 2017, WFMT aired
Coleridge-Taylor’s Clarinet Quintet in A. Rachel Barton, Chicago’s own
star violinist, in 1997 released a new recording under the Cedille label
of Violin Concertos by Black Composers of the 18th and 19th Centuries
including Coleridge-Taylor’s Romance in G Major for Violin and
Orchestra.
The British paper The Guardian in a June 2,
2015 article titled “Ten black composers whose work deserve to be heard
more often” says of Coleridge-Taylor: “Even better [than Hiawatha’s
Wedding Feast] are Coleridge-Taylor’s works for violin and orchestra,
which are elegant pieces of fin de siecle romanticism.”
- Program note by Miriam B. Scott
