Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
This is the poem inscribed on Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s gravestone in Bandon Hill Cemetery, Wallington, Surrey (today in the London Borough of Sutton).
Too young to die
his great simplicity
his happy courage
in an alien world
his gentleness
made all that knew him
love him
He was 37 when he died of pneumonia in September of 1912. His death is often attributed to the stress of his financial situation. Samuel was a late 19th/early 20th century black composer. His father Daniel Taylor was descended from African-American slaves who were freed by the British and evacuated from the colonies at the end of the American Revolutionary War, and his mother was Alice Hare Martin, an English woman. He went to study at The Royal College of Music at the age of 15. The year was 1890 at the start of his education there. He is named after the famous early 19th century poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
He had a daughter, Avril Coleridge-Taylor who went on to be a composer in her own right. Sadly, I was not able to find any of her music online. I did find a video of her speaking about her father that I enjoyed. Turns out, Samuel was a Dvorak fan, and wrote one of his more sensational compositions “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast” (premiered at The Royal College of music in 1898 and conducted by Charles Villiers Stanford) using a thematic approach suggestive of Dvorak’s inspiration associated with Longfellow’s Czech translation of his Song of Hiawatha. Samuel was greatly influenced by composers who implemented their heritage into their works, like Dvorak, who implemented Bohemian themes, and Johanne Brahms with his Hungarian themes. This led him to incorporate African themes into his work, which he featured during a rare visit to the White House in 1904 where President Theodore Roosevelt received him.
I can’t believe how much music is out there, sometimes. This man’s contribution to early 20th Century composition, specifically the incorporation of African themes and influence is one of the greatly under-represented tragedies that I hope we can appreciate and celebrate more often. I love Dvorak and listened to him nightly when I would go to sleep growing up. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor would have easily been another, and now is. It is unfortunate that it took an obscure internet “rabbit hole” search on Wikipedia for my attention to be drawn to him, though I am eternally grateful that I did.
The first four notes of the Overture of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast brought me to tears.