Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

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This page is about the late 19th century composer. For the 18th-century poet, see Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

A 1912 obituary in the African Methodist Episcopal Church Review

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (August 15, 1875–September 1, 1912) was an English composer.

Coleridge-Taylor was born in Croydon to a Sierra Leonean father and an English mother. He studied at the Royal College of Music under Stanford, and later taught and conducted the orchestra at the Croydon Conservatory of Music. There he married one of his students, Jessie Walmisley, despite her parents' objection to his half-black parentage. By her he had a son, Hiawatha (1900-1980) and a daughter, Avril, born Gwendolyn (1903-1998).

He soon earned a reputation as a composer, and his successes brought him a tour of America in 1904, which in turn increased his interest in his racial heritage. He attempted to do for African music what Brahms did for Hungarian music and Dvořák for Bohemian music. He was only 37 when he died of pneumonia.

Coleridge-Taylor's greatest success was perhaps his cantata Hiawatha's Wedding-feast, which was widely performed by choral groups in England during Coleridge-Taylor's lifetime, with a popularity rivaled only by chorus standards Handel's Messiah and Melssohn's Elijah. He followed this with several other pieces about Hiawatha: The Death of Minehaha, Overture to The Song of Hiawatha and Hiawatha's Departure. He also completed an array of chamber music, anthems, and African Romances for violin, among other works.

Coleridge-Taylor was greatly admired by African-Americans; in 1901, a 200-voice African-American chorus was founded in Washington, D.C. called the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society.

In 1999, freelance music editor Patrick Meadows discovered that three important chamber works by Coleridge-Taylor had apparently never been printed and made available to musicians. After receiving copies for the Royal College of Music in London, he made playing editions of the Nonet, Piano Quintet, and Piano Trio. The works were then performed in Meadow's regular chamber music festival on the island of Majorca, and were well-received by the public as well as the performers. The first modern performances of these works were done in the early 1990's by the Boston, Massachusetts-based Coleridge Ensemble, led by William Thomas of Phillips Academy, Andover. This group subsequently made world premiere recordings of the Nonet, Fantasiestücke for String Quartet and Six Negro Folksongs for Piano Trio which were released in 1998 on the Afka Recordings label. Thomas, a champion of lost works by black composers, also revived Coleridge's Hiawatha's Wedding-feast in a performance commemorating the composition's 100th anniversary with the Cambridge Community Chorus at Harvard's Sanders Theatre in the spring of 1998.

Coleridge-Taylor also wrote a symphony that is yet unpublished, which Mr. Meadows hopes to tackle in the near future.

He composed a violin concerto, the American performance of which had to be postponed because the parts were sent on the RMS Titanic. It has been recorded by Philippe Graffin and the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra and was performed as part of the 100th Anniversary celebration at Sanders Theatre in the Spring of 1998.