THE FORGOTTEN COMPOSER: Samuel Coleridge-taylor

Samuel Coleridge-taylor was born in London in 1875. His father, Daniel Taylor, was descended from freed American slaves. Taylor studied medicine in London but returned to Sierra Leone around the time of Samuel’s birth because he wasn’t allowed to practice medicine in England.

His mother, Alice Martin, came from a musical family, and Samuel was a precocious musician, studying violin at first with his grandfather and then, starting at age 15, at the Royal College of Music. He soon changed his focus to composition, studying with England’s preeminent teacher, Charles Villiers Stanford.

Coleridge-taylor’s music was championed by composer Edward Elgar and conductor Malcolm Sargent, who programmed his cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast for 10 consecutive years at the Royal Albert Hall. The ailing Sir Arthur Sullivan insisted on going to the work’s world premiere, telling the composer, “I’m coming to hear your music tonight even if I have to be carried,” and later that evening writing in his diary, “The music is fresh and original. He has melody and harmony in abundance, and his scoring is brilliant and full of color, luscious, rich, and sensual.”

Coleridge-taylor met Black American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1897, which sparked a deeper interest in his family heritage. He subsequently set several of Dunbar’s poems to music and began writing works such as African Romances (1897), African Suite for Pianoforte (1898), and a concert overture, “Toussaint l’ouverture” (1901), about the 18th-century slave who helped lead Haiti’s liberation from French rule.

Coleridge-taylor made three very successful American tours, was invited to meet President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House in 1904, and had a 200-member choral society in Washington, D.C., named in his honor. Unfortunately for the music world, he contracted pneumonia in 1912 and died in London at age 37. — M.T.