Biography
Today, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is chiefly recalled for having written the cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, a work that once enjoyed sweeping popularity. His path and output reflect the Edwardian age—its lavishness and its hardships—more vividly even than Elgar’s. Born to a Krio physician from Sierra Leone and an English mother, he surmounted the obstacles of social rank and racial prejudice to earn a place among the period’s most admired composers.
He came into the world on August 15, 1875, in London’s Holborn district. Early signs of musical promise drew the attention of several patrons, who financed his lessons in composition with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music. While still enrolled there, the Clarinet Quintet of 1895 won critical favor and, thanks to Stanford’s intervention, was played in Berlin by the Joseph Joachim Quartet. In 1896 a chance encounter with the Black American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, then touring England for readings, ignited a lasting interest in African subjects that found expression in numerous songs set to Dunbar’s verse.
After leaving the RCM in 1897, Coleridge-Taylor entered a financially uncertain existence as composer, instructor, competition adjudicator, and conductor. These activities carried him across England and Wales and, in time, produced three journeys to the United States in 1904, 1906, and 1910. On December 30, 1899, he married Jessie Walmisley; their children, Hiawatha and Gwendolen Avril, arrived in 1900 and 1903, bringing both delight and added obligations.
Elgar’s recommendation secured him a commission for the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester in 1898. The resulting orchestral Ballade in A minor, warmly received, displayed a fluent absorption of Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and especially Dvorák. At roughly the same moment he completed Hiawatha's Wedding Feast for chorus and orchestra, yet, still little known, accepted an outright payment of £15.15 from the publisher Novello. Its first hearing, given under Stanford at the RCM on November 11, 1898, triggered an immediate and far-reaching triumph, with subsequent performances throughout Britain, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. Further engagements and conducting invitations followed, though modest fees and his own laxity with money kept lasting solvency out of reach.
Festival demands for further substantial choral scores yielded such short-lived pieces as The Blind Girl of Castel Cuille (1901) and Meg Blane (1902). Between 1900 and 1911 he also supplied incidental music for half a dozen stage works, five of them mounted by Herbert Beerbohm Tree. The endless practical burdens of concert organization, together with persistent amateurism among performers, exacted a steady toll. In 1905 the American house Oliver Ditson issued 24 Negro Melodies for piano, prefaced by an enthusiastic introduction from Booker T. Washington.
During the final years of his short life, the freshness of his earliest writing reappeared, now joined by greater assurance, in the cantata Bon-bon Suite (1909), the Petite Suite de concert (1910), and the Violin Concerto. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor died of pneumonia, aggravated by chronic overwork, on September 1, 1912.
Although his finest scores occupy an ambiguous territory between concert hall, palm court, and drawing room, they continue to embody a gentility, grace, composure, and sentiment that still attract listeners drawn to such qualities.
He came into the world on August 15, 1875, in London’s Holborn district. Early signs of musical promise drew the attention of several patrons, who financed his lessons in composition with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music. While still enrolled there, the Clarinet Quintet of 1895 won critical favor and, thanks to Stanford’s intervention, was played in Berlin by the Joseph Joachim Quartet. In 1896 a chance encounter with the Black American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, then touring England for readings, ignited a lasting interest in African subjects that found expression in numerous songs set to Dunbar’s verse.
After leaving the RCM in 1897, Coleridge-Taylor entered a financially uncertain existence as composer, instructor, competition adjudicator, and conductor. These activities carried him across England and Wales and, in time, produced three journeys to the United States in 1904, 1906, and 1910. On December 30, 1899, he married Jessie Walmisley; their children, Hiawatha and Gwendolen Avril, arrived in 1900 and 1903, bringing both delight and added obligations.
Elgar’s recommendation secured him a commission for the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester in 1898. The resulting orchestral Ballade in A minor, warmly received, displayed a fluent absorption of Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and especially Dvorák. At roughly the same moment he completed Hiawatha's Wedding Feast for chorus and orchestra, yet, still little known, accepted an outright payment of £15.15 from the publisher Novello. Its first hearing, given under Stanford at the RCM on November 11, 1898, triggered an immediate and far-reaching triumph, with subsequent performances throughout Britain, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. Further engagements and conducting invitations followed, though modest fees and his own laxity with money kept lasting solvency out of reach.
Festival demands for further substantial choral scores yielded such short-lived pieces as The Blind Girl of Castel Cuille (1901) and Meg Blane (1902). Between 1900 and 1911 he also supplied incidental music for half a dozen stage works, five of them mounted by Herbert Beerbohm Tree. The endless practical burdens of concert organization, together with persistent amateurism among performers, exacted a steady toll. In 1905 the American house Oliver Ditson issued 24 Negro Melodies for piano, prefaced by an enthusiastic introduction from Booker T. Washington.
During the final years of his short life, the freshness of his earliest writing reappeared, now joined by greater assurance, in the cantata Bon-bon Suite (1909), the Petite Suite de concert (1910), and the Violin Concerto. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor died of pneumonia, aggravated by chronic overwork, on September 1, 1912.
Although his finest scores occupy an ambiguous territory between concert hall, palm court, and drawing room, they continue to embody a gentility, grace, composure, and sentiment that still attract listeners drawn to such qualities.