"That you came so far to see us": Coleridge-Taylor in America.

By the time that Samuel Coleridge-Taylor made his first visit to the United States in 1904, American audiences were not only aware of the status of this young musician as the foremost composer and conductor of England but, by degrees, were also becoming acquainted with his music. Following the European model, American choral organizations had historically adopted the masterworks of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn as staples of their repertory. But in the year following the London premiere of Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, American choral societies began to tackle this "experimental" and "modern" work, which was based on the words of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. On March 23, 1899, the Temple Choir of Brooklyn, New York, performed Hiawatha's Wedding Feast (Janifer 1967, 187). Almost a year later, on March 14, 1900, the highly respected Cecilia choral organization of Boston performed the work under the baton of J. B. Lang, repeating it two days later in response to the high demand. In 1901, the society added Hiawatha's Departure to its repertory and in 1903 performed it again along with The Death of Minnehaha. According to records of the New York Public Library dated May 2, 1901, the Albany Musical Association of New York gave the first United States performance of the trilogy, known as The Song of Hiawatha (187).

A highly significant early performance of portions of the Hiawatha music took place in Winsted, Connecticut, on June 5, 1901. The Litchfield County Choral Union of Norwalk, Connecticut, then a young and little-known choral society, presented Hiawatha's Wedding Feast and The Death of Minnehaha at its spring festival with an ideal assembly of musical forces. Soloists and a chorus of 190 members were accompanied by sixty instrumentalists selected from the orchestras of the Philharmonic Society and the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, conducted by Arthur Mees. The lengthy program included arias from Wagner's Tannhauser and Die Meistersinger, the "Indian Bell Song" (Vaill 1912a, 64, 65) from Delibes' Lakme, and Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2. (1) Coleridge-Taylor was made an honorary member of the Littlefield County Choral Union, only the second person to receive this distinction, which was later accorded composers such as Saint-Saens, Horatio Parker, Sibelius, and George Chadwick.

Comments on the choral union program highlighted the position of the new entry into America's choral music repertory. The Hartford Courant observed, "It is well known how shy the old-established societies are of new works, as the almost inevitable deficits have made them timid; and so the money-sure 'Elijah' and 'Messiah' are in a sense stagnating influences" (quoted in Vaill 1912a, 66, 67). The writer described the Hiawatha works as "intensely modern and fascinating for a strangely weird cast of melody and the brilliant, sumptuous instrumentation." His conclusion that "the chorus is now on record as one of the best in the State," suggests that he considered the ability to sing Scenes from Hiawatha a defining test of a choir's excellence. Indeed, a certain prestige came with the successful presentation of the Hiawatha music and brought fame to the Litchfield County Choral Union, especially in Europe.

The Litchfield County Choral Union was an unusual organization. Established in 1899, it consisted in 1907 of nearly seven hundred singers from five choral groups in the Litchfield area--the Norfolk Glee Club, the Winsted Choral Union, the Salisbury Choir, the Canaan Choral Society, and the Torrington Musical Association (Vaill 1912b, 208). The latter, the last to be admitted, presented the second performance of Hiawatha music for the community in 1907. The groups performed together in a series of festivals established and largely supported by Carl Stoeckel and his wife, Ellen Battell Stoeckel. Carl Stoeckel, a philanthropist and patron of music and soon to be a good friend of Coleridge-Taylor, was the son of Gustav Stoeckel, the first head of the Yale University School of Music; Ellen Stoeckel was the daughter of Norfolk jurist and philanthropist Robbins Battell, a man of considerable wealth, in whose honor the festivals were established (Vaill 1912a, 23-24).

Ellen and Carl Stoeckel supported handsomely the annual festivals or meetings, as they were called, through 1925 by regularly adding twenty thousand dollars to a ten thousand dollar annual endowment (Self 1995, 186). This underwriting was a boon to the community and was influential in determining the direction of concert music in Connecticut (Vaill 1912a, 105-107). For the first few years, tickets were sold; after 1904, entrance to the concerts was strictly by invitation (23, 26). Although it offered only choral music until 1907, the choral union became well known for both orchestral and choral works introduced at its annual June concerts (134, 135). The Litchfield County Choral Union would become one of the most auspicious influences in Coleridge-Taylor's life.

Additional performances of the Hiawatha works between 1900 and 1910 demonstrated the growing interest of American choruses in Coleridge-Taylor's music. There were further presentations by the Cecilia Society and by the Church Choral Society of New York, which performed another of the composer's works, The Atonement, on February 24 and 25, 1904, under conductor Henry Warren. The Southington Harmonic Society and Hosmer Hall Choral Society in Hartford, Connecticut, the Cleveland, Ohio Vocal Society, and other choral groups in St. Louis, Missouri, Des Moines, Iowa, and Nashville, Tennessee, all participated in what seemed for a time to be a rush to perform the Hiawatha music (Janifer 1967, 187).

Overall, the American press accepted these early presentations with some enthusiasm, but there were some dissatisfactions. A writer in the Boston Herald ("The Cecilia Society" 1903, 5) of February 4, 1903, was less than positive about the Cecilia Society's Death of Minnehaha: "The second section contains little that either edifies, impresses or delights." On the positive side, the critic admitted to "winning moments, bland, fluent phrases and its full, unusual harmonies" but felt that there was a lack of feeling. Contrasting the great interest in the first performance of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast with the reception of The Death of Minnehaha, an article signed with the initials B.R.G. (1903) concluded that "It was not altogether a wise move on the part of the Cecilia Committee to provide too much of a good thing." The critic's comments on the uneven singing and poor diction invite a question about whether his displeasure stemmed from the composition itself or from the performance.