WITH complete absorption, and perhaps unconsciousness of his surroundings, he conducted the work, beating time with both arms, and smiling his approval here and there.* The smile never left his face, and the performance was never completed on earth. Still smiling and conducting he sank back on his pillows, and in that supreme moment of devotion to his art, his beautiful spirit set out on its voyage to the Land of the Hereafter.*
Tragic, almost, is the thought of these brief thirty-seven years; but he had lived longer than many who attain to twice his age. His memory is fragrant amongst all who touched his hand or heard his voice; he gloried in and glorified his art, and through it gave the purest pleasure to men. I have never heard of any to whom by word or deed he ever gave a moment of unhappiness; and in the record of men of fame, who have done positive work and who have faced disappointment and jealousy, there is surely no fairer praise.
* As a young man, Coleridge-Taylor conducted the Croydon Conservatoire of Music, and in rehearsals was often to be seen conducting vigorously with one hand while drinking from a teacup held in the other. His manner of dealing with sloppy playing was characteristic too. “His correction was never pointedly directed at particular members,” Sayers tells us, “but was given in a serious voice, with his glance carefully fixed upon the cornice of the room. They rarely failed to reach the understanding of the delinquent.”
* Coleridge-Taylor was Church of England, but his encounters with the clergy were rare and occasionally mortifying — the shepherds of the Established church seem to have been among both the quickest and the slowest in England to grasp the notion of racial equality. He rarely spoke about his beliefs. “I do not know what his creed was,” one of Samuel’s long-time friends, Henry Down, told Sayers, “but at the back of everything he did — even his minor works — lay a strong religious feeling.”
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Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto in G Minor, Op. 80, 2: Andante semplice, Andantino, played here by Played by Lorraine McAslan with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Braithwaite.
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