Opera Scotland

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Suggest updates

Born Holborn, London, 15 August 1875.

Died Croydon, 1 September 1912.

English composer and conductor.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was of mixed race, with an English mother, from London.  His father, Daniel Taylor, was black, and a native of Sierra Leone.  He studied medicine in London and returned to Sierra Leone without knowing of his son's existence.  Taylor enjoyed a successful career, and in 1894 was appointed Coroner for the British Empire in the province of Senegambia.  Samuel was given the middle name Coleridge through his mother's admiration for the poet, and the hyphen began as a printer's error which was retained.

Coleridge-Taylor's musical talent was recognised and his mother's relations paid for his studies at the Royal College of Music. initially he studied violin, then composition under Charles Villiers Stanford.

He himself taught as a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music and conducted the orchestra of the Croydon Conservatoire, as well as other choirs in the locality.  His success as a composer, particularly the three Hiawatha cantatas based on Longfellow, allowed him to undertake three visits to the United States in 1904, 1906 and 1910.  During the first of these he was received at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt.

The premieres in successive years of the three parts of The Song of Hiawatha were in circumstances of steadily increasing prestige.  Hiawatha's Wedding Feast was conducted by Stanford at the Royal College of Music in 1898.  The Death of Minnehaha followed at the North Staffordshire Festival the following year.  All three parts, and an overture, were given in 1900 at the Royal Albert Hall, which became its natural home, with frequent performances for the next forty years.

Coleridge-Taylor later composed an opera, Thelma (1907-09).  This was not performed in his lifetime, but had its first performance at the Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon, in February 2012.

He married and had two children, named Hiawatha and Avril.  The daughter herself had a musical career. His life ended through pneumonia, believed to be the result of persistent poverty.  He was buried in Bandon Hill Cemetery, Wallington.