Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. (2023, January 16). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Coleridge-Taylor

There once was a tremendously popular piece of music about a Native American which was written by a composer of African descent whose forbearers had been slaves in the New World prior to the American Revolution of 1776. I’m willing to bet that the average acolyte of woke culture, nay, even the most erudite of woke culture has not heard of such a phenomenon.

The piece of music is Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast and the composer was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. It is a lost piece of music that was once as popular in England as Handel’s Messiah. Coleridge-Taylor attended The Royal College of Music and graduated in 1896. Edward Elgar was a champion of the young composer along with Coleridge-Taylor’s professor of composition Charles Villiers Stanford.

The premier of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast at The Royal College of Music in 1898 was a triumph. Composer Sir Hubert Parry called it "one of the most remarkable events in modern English musical history.”

Coleridge-Taylor had sold the piece to the publisher Novello for 15 guineas and received nothing in royalties from the hundreds of thousands of copies sold to choral societies worldwide. Coleridge-Taylor did retain the rights to two subsequent compositions based on the Hiawatha legends but these did not fare as well as the original.

Impoverished for most of his life, Coleridge-Taylor died of pneumonia at age 37. Elgar had called him the most promising of the younger generation of composers. Composer Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and Sullivan, was an admirer. He had composed 82 pieces of music that he considered worthy of an opus number. All of them, even Hiawatha have now been ignored.

Perhaps the topic of Hiawatha is too sensitive for modern audiences since the poem based on Native American legends was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. What of Coleridge-Taylor’s excellent Symphony in A minor? This symphony is full of hope and optimism. Perhaps those sentiments are out of style.

What then of his Symphonic Variations on an African Air? This is a delightful piece of music yet it lies in obscurity. Surely it could receive as much attention as say, Hector Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras.

I see the classical music world attempting to widen its appeal to a culture that is more and more inclusive. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is a fully-developed composer with an entire catalog of quality compositions. It’s time to wake up and remember Coleridge-Taylor.