Who is the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor?

Thankfully, this influential figure in British music has begun to enjoy something of a renaissance in recent years, as a swathe of new musicians have rediscovered his work and committed to sharing it with a wider audience. Chief among them is one of our Resident Orchestras, Chineke!, who recently released an album of the composer’s work. But who is he, and why is he so significant? Well, allow us to tell you more.

Yes, he was named after the poet

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in Holborn, London in August 1875; the son of English woman Alice Hare Martin and Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, a Krio man from Sierra Leone. The pair were not married, and Hughes Taylor, who had been in London studying medicine, returned to Africa (where he would become a prominent administrator, and later coroner for the British Empire in Senegambia) without knowing that Martin was pregnant. She named her son Samuel Coleridge Taylor (without a hyphen) after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, best known for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 

He was born into a musical family

Coleridge-Taylor was brought up in Croydon. His mother’s family boasted several musicians, including her father who played the violin, and subsequently taught the instrument to the young Coleridge-Taylor. Impressed by the child’s adeptness with the instrument and his ability to learn quickly, Coleridge-Taylor’s grandfather paid for him to have violin lessons. When he was 15, the extended family arranged for Coleridge-Taylor to study at the Royal College of Music.

The Royal College of Music shaped his life in more ways than one

Whilst studying under professor Charles Villiers Stanford, Coleridge-Taylor made the change from violin to composition. It was at the College that he also met his future wife, Jessie Walmisley, a fellow student, six years older than him. Jessie left the college in 1893, and the pair married in 1899. Walmiesley’s parents initially objected to the marriage because of Taylor’s mixed-race parentage, but eventually relented and attended the wedding.

He became Coleridge-Taylor in error

With his degree at the Royal College of Music completed, Coleridge-Taylor became a professional musician. He was soon appointed a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music, and also became conductor of the orchestra at the Croydon Conservatoire. It was around this time that Samuel Coleridge Taylor became Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a shift supposedly prompted after his name was spelt that way following a typographical error by a printer.

Edward Elgar was among his early champions

Coleridge-Taylor was still in his very early twenties when he began to find success as a composer. Upon the recommendation of Edward Elgar, who described Coleridge-Taylor as ‘far and away the cleverest fellow going amongst the younger men’, he appeared at the Three Choirs Festival in 1898, conducting the premiere of his own Ballade in A minor, to much acclaim.

He is best known for his Hiawatha cantatas

Buoyed by the success of his Ballade in A minor, Coleridge-Taylor set to work on a trio of cantatas based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic 1855 poem, ‘The Song of Hiawatha’. The first section, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, was premiered in 1898 when Coleridge-Taylor was still only 22, and proved immensely popular, being widely performed by choral groups across the country. It’s suggested that its popularity in the early years of the 20th century was such that it was only rivalled by the choral standards, Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah.

Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast was followed by The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha’s Departure and all three were published together as The Song of Hiawatha. They would be performed in hugely popular Hiawatha seasons at the Royal Albert Hall, led by Malcolm Sargent, until 1939.

There was no escaping Hiawatha, even at home

So significant was Hiawatha in Coleridge-Taylor’s life, that he and Jessie Walmiesley named their son, born in 1900, Hiawatha. Three years later the couple had a daughter, Gwendolyn Avril, and both children would go on to careers in music; Gwendolyn as a composer and later a conductor-composer under the name of Avril Coleridge-Taylor, whilst Hiawatha adapted his father’s works.

He was the first musician of the 20th century to crack America

Popular across the pond, Coleridge-Taylor was greatly admired by African Americans in particular, and in 1901 a 200 voice African-American chorus was established in Washington DC, named the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society. The composer himself toured the United States in 1904, 1906 and 1910 to much acclaim; public schools were named after him in Louisville, Kentucky, Baltimore and Maryland, and White orchestral musicians in New York afforded him the title ‘the African Mahler’.

His work didn’t go down on the Titanic

Coleridge-Taylor certainly had more luck traversing the Atlantic than his compositions did. A violin concerto he’d composed for the violinist Maud Powell had to be rewritten ahead of its American performance because several parts of it were lost en route to the States. Legend had it that they went down on the RMS Titanic, however they were actually aboard another ship. Not that the risky crossings put Coleridge-Taylor off America, as it’s said he had considered emigrating there.

His success though did not make him rich

Despite the acclaim their works may receive, composers of Coleridge-Taylor’s time were not handsomely paid for their works, and many, as he did, often had to sell the rights to their work. This would bring them much needed immediate income, but would see them lose out on future royalties. Even though Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast sold hundreds of thousands of copies, the only money Coleridge-Taylor received for the composition was the sum of 15 guineas he had sold it outright for. Though he managed to hang on for the royalties of later works, he was never a rich man.

He is fondly remembered in Croydon

It’s believed the stress of his financial situation was a contributing factor in the composer’s death. He was just 37 when he died, doing so from pneumonia in September 1912. In Croydon where he lived and worked for so many years there are two blue plaques commemorating the composer, one at his former home in Dagnall Park, South Norwood, and another at his final home in St Leonard’s Road. A metal figure of the  Coleridge-Taylor can also be found in Charles Street as one of a trio of artists connected with the borough, the others being the actress Dame Peggy Ashcroft, and comedian Ronnie Corbett.

His music is enjoying a 21st century renaissance

Though performed often in his lifetime, and the years shortly afterwards, Coleridge-Taylor’s compositions fell out of favour, ceasing to feature in the BBC Proms concerts in the second half of the 20th century. Thankfully, and largely due to the work of Chineke! Orchestra, Coleridge-Taylor’s works have recently begun to reach audiences once again. In 2019, the composer’s 1904 piano work Deep River was reimagined by cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, and recorded with his brother Braimah and sister Isata as a Kanneh-Mason Trio. And in 2021 the orchestra took the composer’s work back to the Proms, performing both his Overture to The Song of Hiawatha and Symphony No. 1.