Samuel Coleridge-Taylor - Life and Work

Life and Work

Coleridge-Taylor was born in 1875 in Holborn, London, to Alice Hare Martin, an English woman, and Dr Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, a Sierra Leonean Creole. They were not married. He was named Samuel Coleridge Taylor. His surname was Taylor, and his middle name of Coleridge was after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His family called him Coleridge Taylor. He later affected the name Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, allegedly following a printer’s typographical error. Daniel Taylor returned to Africa by February 1875 and did not know that he had a son in London. He was appointed coroner for the British Empire in The Gambia in the late 1890s.

Coleridge-Taylor was brought up in Croydon by Martin and her father Benjamin Holmans. Martin's brother was a professional musician. Taylor studied the violin at the Royal College of Music and composition under Charles Villiers Stanford (who would conduct the first performance of his Hiawatha's Wedding Feast in 1898.) He also taught, he was appointed a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music, and conducted the orchestra at the Croydon Conservatoire.

In 1899 Taylor married a fellow student at the RCM, Jessie Walmisley, despite her parents' objection to his mixed race parentage. She left the college in 1893. They had a son Hiawatha (1900–1980) and a daughter Avril, born Gwendolyn (1903–1998).

By 1896, Coleridge-Taylor had earned a reputation as a composer. He was later helped by Edward Elgar, who recommended him to the Three Choirs Festival. There his Ballade in A minor was premièred. His early work was also guided by the influential music editor and critic August Jaeger of music publisher Novello; he told Elgar that Taylor was "a genius."

His successes brought him a tour of the United States in 1904, which increased his interest in his racial heritage. He sought to do for African music what Johannes Brahms did for Hungarian music and Antonín Dvořák for Bohemian music. Having met the American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in London, Taylor set some of his poems to music. Dunbar and other black people encouraged him to consider his Sierra Leonean ancestry and the music of the African continent.

Coleridge-Taylor was sometimes seen as shy, but effective in communicating when conducting. Composers were not handsomely paid for their efforts and often sold the rights to works outright, thereby missing out on royalties (a scheme which became widespread only in 1911) which went to publishers who always risked their investments. He was much sought after for adjudicating at festivals.

Coleridge-Taylor was 37 when he died of pneumonia a few days after collapsing at West Croydon railway station. He was buried in Bandon Hill Cemetery, Wallington, Surrey (today in the London Borough of Sutton). The inscription on the fine carved headstone includes a quotation from the composition Hiawatha, in words written by his close friend and poet Alfred Noyes:

Too young to die
his great simplicity
his happy courage
in an alien world
his gentleness
made all that knew him
love him.

His widow gave the impression that she was almost penniless but King George V granted her a pension of £100, evidence of the high regard in which the composer was held. A memorial concert was held later in 1912 at the Royal Albert Hall and garnered £300. His estate was thus worth approximately the price of three houses, and there were royalties from compositions (but not from Hiawatha, which he had sold outright for 15 guineas).

Coleridge-Taylor's work was later championed by Malcolm Sargent, who between 1928 and 1939 conducted ten seasons of a costumed ballet version of The Song of Hiawatha at the Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Choral Society (600 to 800 singers) and 200 dancers.