Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
A gifted composer of classical music in the romantic tradition, admired by Stanford, Elgar, and Sullivan.
1875-1912
Queen Victoria 1837-1901 to King George V 1910-1936
A gifted composer of classical music in the romantic tradition, admired by Stanford, Elgar, and Sullivan.
1875-1912
Queen Victoria 1837-1901 to King George V 1910-1936
Daniel Taylor, a medical doctor who was later a coroner and magistrate in the Gambia, had a brief affair with an unmarried woman in London named Alice Martin. The result was a boy she named Samuel Coleridge Taylor, after the famous poet (it was Samuel who hyphenated it as Coleridge-Taylor).
AT the age of five, Samuel Taylor began violin lessons with a local music-teacher in Croydon. Fifteen years later, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he changed course to study composition, under Charles Villiers Stanford.
In 1905, Samuel was appointed to a Chair of Composition at Crystal Palace School of Art and Music, and was already in demand as a judge at prestigious music festivals. Stanford and Edward Elgar both fostered his career, and Sir Arthur Sullivan left his sickbed just to be present at the premiere of Samuel’s Scenes from The Song of Hiawatha.*
Samuel made three rapturously-received tours of the United States, and was granted a private audience at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt, but tragically succumbed to pneumonia in 1912, aged just thirty-seven.* Such was the regard in which he was held that King George V, hearing that Samuel’s struggling widow was being denied royalties on ‘Hiawatha’, awarded her an annual pension of £100.*
Berwick Sayers recorded Sullivan’s promise, made to Coleridge-Taylor when the two bumped into each other at his publisher’s (Sullivan had gone there to purchase a copy of ‘Hiawatha’). “I’m always an ill man now, my boy,” said he, “but I will come to this concert, even if I have to be carried into the room.” The respect was mutual: Coleridge-Taylor regarded Sullivan’s ‘Golden Legend’ very highly, as he did the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas.
See a touching account by family friend Berwick Sayers in our post Deep River.
Roughly equivalent to £8,800 in terms of purchasing power today.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
What was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s own instrument?
He began learning the violin aged five.
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
Samuel played the violin well. He studied composition at the RCM. He is remembered today as a composer.