See/Hear

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was born in London and raised by his mother's family in Surrey, where he received his earliest musical training as a violinist. Having displayed a musical aptitude from a young age, Coleridge-Taylor was admitted to the Royal College of Music in London at age 15, where he became a pupil of Charles Villiers Stanford. Edward Elgar and the editor/critic August Jaeger provided early mentorship and opportunities. Coleridge-Taylor's oratorio Hiawatha's Feast (later incorporated into the trilogy The Song of Hiawatha) was immensely popular during his lifetime and afforded him the opportunity make several tours of United States, where he was introduced to a number of prominent African-Americans including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. This exposure sparked an interest in African-American spirituals and poetry, which greatly influenced his later works. Despite his successes, he was in dire financial straits when succumbed to pneumonia at the early age of 37; he had sold the rights to Hiawatha's Feast shortly after its premiere and therefore never received royalties from its many performances. Following his death, a memorial concert was held at Royal Albert Hall to raise money for his family, and King George V personally granted his widow an annual pension.

In the years before he achieved wide renown with his large-scale orchestral and choral works, Coleridge-Taylor composed several notable works of chamber music. The op. 5 Fantasiestucke (1895), a set of character pieces in the Schumann model, bears the unmistakable influence of Brahms and Dvorak both in the melodic contours and ensemble textures. Coleridge-Taylor's compositional maturity is already on full display in these pieces, and it is unfortunate that his premature death prevented him from a serious return to the string quartet idiom; who knows what rich contributions he could have produced.