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Introduction
Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-seven, leaving behind him his wife Jessie and two children, and a treasury of tuneful and often innovative music that is beginning to be appreciated again today. A close family friend, Berwick Sayers, tells of his last hours.
COURAGE did not desert him, except for a brief moment when the unrealised possibilities of his life came vividly before him, and he broke down sobbing: “I am too young to die; I am only thirty-seven!” But the despairing mood was of short duration, and he faced the end with calm, saying that he looked forward to meeting “such a crowd of musicians.”
Sunday, the first of September, was a calm day, one of the few pleasant days in the miserable summer. Except that he seemed weaker, there was, in the morning, no appreciable change in Coleridge-Taylor’s condition. His wife* read to him Allen Raine’s “A Welsh Singer,”* a work which he admired so much that he wished someone would write him an opera libretto of the story. Soon after mid-day he became restless, and new doubts about his work seemed to trouble him. Later his mind reverted to the Violin Concerto.* Propped up by pillows, he seemed to imagine an orchestra before and an audience behind him.
* Jessie Walmisley, a fellow-violinist at the Royal College of Music, who also came from Croydon. In the year he died, Samuel told a friend: “I have been very happy in my surroundings all my life, first in my mother and then in my marriage. Even without any moderate success I think I should have been one of those rare beings — a happy man.”
* Allen Raine was the pseudonym of Welsh novelist Anne Adalisa Puddicombe, née Benyon (1836-1908); in all her stories, life along the west coast of Wales plays at least some part. Coleridge-Taylor knew and liked Wales, having judged eisteddfods there. Coleridge-Taylor was well liked in return; one young lady competitor wrote to Samuel’s wife many years later with her recollections of him as an adjudicator, saying “I am sure that you will like to know how he is loved and remembered by one who knew him but slightly.” Samuel’s favourite among Raine’s novels was ‘A Welsh Singer’ (1897), her first novel. It was made into a silent movie in 1915.
* His Violin Concerto in G minor, Op. 80 (1912). The violin was Coleridge-Taylor’s own instrument; he was admitted to the Royal College of Music at fifteen.
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