Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born on the fifteenth of August 1875 at Holborn, London, the son of Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor — a Sierra Leonean Krio medical student at King’s College Hospital — and Alice Hare Martin, an English working-class woman of Croydon. His father returned to Sierra Leone before his birth in the belief that the relationship would not survive the racial conditions of late-Victorian Britain, and the child was raised by his mother at Croydon.

He was placed at fifteen in 1890 at the Royal College of Music in London on a violin scholarship under Henry Holmes, and transferred at seventeen into the composition class of Charles Villiers Stanford. He completed at the College the cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast in 1898, on a libretto adapted from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, and the work was premiered at the College on the eleventh of November 1898 under his own direction at twenty-three.

He completed across the following five years the two further panels of the Hiawatha trilogy — The Death of Minnehaha (1899) and Hiawatha’s Departure (1900) — and the cycle entered the standard British choral-society repertoire alongside Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah for the following three decades.

He toured the United States three times — in 1904, 1906 and 1910 — at the invitation of the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society of Washington, D.C., a Black amateur choral society founded in 1901 in his honour. He was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House on the first of the tours in 1904.

He composed across the brief remainder of his career the Twenty-Four Negro Melodies for piano (1905) — settings of African and African American melodies in the manner of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances — and the violin concerto in G minor (1911).

He died at Croydon on the first of September 1912 of pneumonia and overwork, at thirty-seven.

He is honored here as the first composer of African descent in the standard European concert repertoire.