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| Chi-chi Nwoanoku |
A friend and I were given tickets to a concert in the Concertgebouw
last Friday, when the purchaser was unable to go herself. This stroke
of luck enabled me to see a documentary on Samuel Coleridge-Taylor,
the composer, before a marvellous concert by the Chinekei Orchestra
playing Coleridge-Taylor and Brahms. The orchestra is a BME group
started by Chi-chi Nwanoku four years ago. It was also she who is
responsible for the excellent documentary.
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Samuel in a portrait in 1881
by Walter Wallis, now in
the National Portrait Gallery.
It was a surprise to find this
portrait, considering
Samuel's background. |
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| Samuel Coleridge-Taylor 1875-1912 |
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Samuel with Jessie, his wife and their children,
Hiawatha and Gwendolyn Avril. |
It is with some shame that I admit that I had never heard of Samuel
but there is a lot of information on him available. He was born in
1875 in Holborn to Alice Martin and Dr Daniel Taylor, a Creole from
Sierra Leone who was studying medicine in London. Daniel never knew of
the pregnancy nor of the existence of his son; he became a prominent administrator in
West Africa, eventually becoming Coroner for the British Empire in
the Province of Senegambia in 1894. Alice named her son after the famous
poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and they lived with her father,
Benjamin Holmans, a farrier, in Croydon; she eventually married a
railway worker, George Evans, in 1887. Benjamin was an amateur
violinist and there were other musicians in his wider family.
Benjamin taught Samuel to play the violin from the age of 5, eventually paying for violin lessons
for him while someone in the extended family arranged for the boy to
study at the Royal College of Music from the age of 15. Samuel,
studying under a notable professor, Charles Villiers Stanford,
changed from specialising in violin to composition and after
completing his degree, became a professional musician, soon appointed
a professor at the Chrystal Palace School of Music and conductor of
the orchestra at the Croydon Conservatoire. Samuel married Jessie
Walmsley whom he had met at the Royal College of Music, in 1899 after
overcoming her family’s opposition on account of his mixed race
parentage. They had two children, Hiawatha and Gwendolyn Avril, both
of whom went on to have careers in music.
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| Theodore Roosevelt |
By 1896 Coleridge-Taylor was earning a national reputation as a
composer; Edward Elgar recommended
him to the Three Choirs Festival where Samuel’s Ballade
in A Minor was premiered. His early works were guided by the
influential music critic and editor, August Jaeger of the music
publisher, Novello, who regarded Coleridge-Taylor as a ‘genius.’
His Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, conducted
by his old professor, Charles Villiers Stanford at its 1898 premiere,
became wildly popular and on the strength of that, Samuel made three
tours of the United States, on the first of which he was
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| Paul Laurence Dunbar, poet. |
received by
President Theodore Roosevelt, a rare honour then for a man of mixed
race, however eminent. He was very popular indeed among African
Americans and in London, he collaborated with Paul Laurence Dunbar,
setting some of Dunbar’s poems to music. Coleridge-Taylor became
increasingly interested in his father’s family history, featuring
as it did, the release from slavery of his forbears after the end of
the American Revolutionary War and their eventual settlement in
Sierra Leone.
Throughout his adult life, Samuel composed constantly. However,
composers were not handsomely paid for their creativity and he made
an early bad mistake. He sold the rights to
Hiawatha,
copies of which were destined to be sold in hundreds of thousands
over the years, outright to Novello for £15 when he needed money to
get married. He did learn to retain his rights and earned royalties
for other compositions but he always struggled financially. He died too young, at 37, in 1912, of pneumonia in which financial stress was
also believed to have played its part.
His greatest success was undoubtedly Hiawatha’s Wedding
Feast, widely performed during his lifetime and for decades
thereafter. He also wrote two more Hiawatha cantatas and the
tremendously popular Hiawatha seasons at the Royal Albert Hall
continued until 1939. Among his other works were chamber music,
anthems and The African Dance for violin; his Petite
Suite de Concert is still played. Books and
music about Coleridge-Taylor’s life and legacy are available
through the Foundation which bears his name and the Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor Foundation.
King George V granted Jessie, his widow an annual pension of £100 in
1912; a memorial concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1912 garnered
£300 and his loss of rights to Hiawatha, [one of the most successful
and popular works written by anyone during the fifty years before his
death] contributed to the formation of the Performing Rights Society
to gain due future rights for composers to the fruits of their work.
Samuel’s close friend, the poet Alfred Noyes, wrote the following
inscribed on his tombstone:
Too young to die,
his great simplicity
his happy courage
in an alien world,
his gentleness
made all that knew him
love him.
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| The popularity of Hiawatha continues. |
Coleridge-Taylor wrote music of extraordinary charm, inventive,
sometimes lyrical, sometimes majestic. Nothing he composed came near
to catching the public imagination and the devotion of choral
singers, like his Hiawatha. The poignancy of his life story touches
the observer; to live in near-poverty, while simultaneously enjoying wide recognition of his talents, and when his rights to
Hiawatha could have provided him and his family with a steady income,
is the saddest aspect of that narrative.
Coda
A friend with strong musical interests Facetimed me a couple of days
after the Chinekei Orchestra concert and the Coleridge-Taylor
documentary and I confessed to him my earlier ignorance and how my
interest had been awakened. Immediately he said that ‘of course’
he knew of Samuel and his compositions and proceeded to give an
instant mini-lecture. I was mortified!
