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Samuel Coleridge-Taylor,
known as "Coly" by his friends, was born in London in 1875 to
Daniel Taylor, a surgeon who came to England from Sierra Leone to practice
medicine [but who later returned to Africa, "unable to find patients
in London prepared to be treated by a black doctor"] and a 17-year-old
English woman named Alice Holman. Her wealthy parents brought the boy
up and sent him to private schools in Croydon.
Breathtakingly talented from the beginning,
he was hectored by jealous students for being different. One time they
set fire to his hair. So the boy plunged more deeply into his music and
created a stir as early as age 11.
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Composer Arthur Hatchard once recalled
that he'd given Coleridge-Taylor "some musical tutelage,"
showing interviewer K.P. Hunt "the programme of a concert
given in 1886 at the Croydon Y.M.C.A. at which the 11-year-old
Coleridge-Taylor played his violin: he contributed Sullivan's
The Lost Chord and a melody which he had composed himself.
His performance of the Sullivan piece received more applause than
that for his own melody, with the result that he promptly tore
up his own effort," writes biographer Geoffrey Self in The
Hiawatha Man (Scolar Press, 1995).
Illustration shows the dashing Coleridge-Taylor
as he ducks "the autograph fiends," above. Below is a Hiawatha's
Wedding Feast programme signed by many famous musical composers and
personalities of the day. |
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His gifts recognized, Coleridge-Taylor
was enrolled at the Royal College of Music. "In his second
term, he composed two anthems that were published by Novellos,"
music critic Norman Lebrecht writes in a recent feature for the
London Evening Times and Edinburgh Scotsman.
Led by professor Charles Villiers Stanford, young Coleridge-Taylor
now dazzled faculty and listeners with original scores, including
"three movements of a symphony for the college orchestra
as well as much chamber music for his classmates," Lebrecht
notes.
So he was somewhat prepared when his
Hiawatha's Wedding Feast earned him instant international
celebrity, though doubters dogged him by saying he came by the
native melodies innately via his father's ancestry, those murky
"west African rhythms," codifying their racism by calling
his music "barbaric."
Quick-witted, the young man, since childhood
packing a violin under his arm, could lash back. According to Lebrecht,
when he was insulted for his race on a London train, 'Coly' was observed
to wheel on his attacker and say, "Sir, I am an Englishman."
On these shores, he was an inspiration
for W.E.B. DuBois, who spent many of his summers vacationing in
Maine. Perhaps Hiawatha scored because audiences were
tired of Oscar Wildean sophistry and, like today, craved naivete
and a direct appeal to original beauties and softer times.
But then the genius lost heart
for his work. In spite of being touted "the black Mahler,"
with Hiawatha's Wedding Feast sold out to packed crowds
at the Royal Albert Hall, 'Coly' was swept into a spiral of depression
and exhaustion. Just 37, he died in 1912 in London with a ticket
to the Crystal Palace in his hand, writes Lebrecht, who this spring
has excited new interest in Coleridge-Taylor by reviewing the
CD release of the composer's lost violin concerto.
 "[When]
the great sing-song fell out of fashion…nothing remained
of the composer's reputation," Lebrecht writes. "Among
80-odd opus numbers, two Hiawatha sequels fell flat and
the orchestral parts of [a] deathbed violin concerto [he was writing]
went down with the Titanic."
The new CD, with the Johannesburg
Philharmonic playing, is available through Avie Records. Lebrecht,
for his part, feels it falls short of the dizzy moments Coleridge-Taylor
hits in Hiawatha's Wedding Feast: "It betrays hints
of Stephen Foster in the opening theme and persistent nudges of
Illinois-era Dvorak." Still, with our conncection to Longfellow
and DuBois here in Maine, it's fascinating summer listening.
When we asked if the Portland
Symphony has ever performed any work of Coleridge-Taylor's, particulary
Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, we were told, "not in
our recollection."
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