Samuel and Hiawatha.

 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.

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.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor 1875-1912

 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.

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

 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.

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!