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COPYRIGHT 2001 Center For Black Music Research
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.
While Americans in general were impressed by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's success and intrigued by the thought that a person of African heritage could be the idol of London audiences, many African Americans looked upon the composer with an admiration that frequently bordered on hero worship. Black newspapers followed his career and kept readers supplied with news of his successes. For example, the Washington Colored American ("An Afro-American Musical Genius" 1900) reprinted on its front page an article from the October 4, 1900, Daily Argus newspaper of Birmingham, England, describing Hiawatha as the "first favorite" at the Birmingham Festival and "by general consent the greatest [work] produced for a long time, and manifestly the product of real genius." Black Americans must have relished the identification of their English cousin as Afro-American.
At this time, black Americans were facing the most extensive repression of their civil liberties, political rights, and economic opportunities since the days of slavery. News of Coleridge-Taylor's triumphs brought much-needed inspiration and encouragement and helped to reinforce ideas of economic self-sufficiency and artistic creativity among these citizens. Another issue of the Colored American ("Doings of Stage Folks" 1900, 6) voiced the aspirations of many: "We may ultimately look among colored Americans for composers of music who will do honor to their country and their art, a prediction all the more easily made because of the general recognition given to the work of S. Coleridge-Taylor, a man of African blood, resident in England, whose 'Hiawatha's Wedding Feast' has commanded the widest approbation of a high creative gift." This statement defined Coleridge-Taylor's position in the minds of African Americans. His was the role of standard-bearer for the future, the unequaled exemplar of what the black artist could be. Almost every review of a concert of Coleridge-Taylor's music in the United States in the next few years would contain a reference to race, and writers frequently took considerable pains to extract from his circumstances lessons in race relations for both black and white Americans.
Education and, along with it, artistic productivity, was seen by black Americans as the primary means of improving their status. The Negro Music Journal ("A Grand Production" 1903, 185) made the case this way:
That our race is steadily progressive along all lines of education is daily being manifested. In the industrial life, the scientific world, the college curriculum, the artistic sphere, in each is to be noticed that the Negro's brain is able to comprehend the various arts and sciences. If this be not a fact, for what do such characters as Dunbar, Wheatley, Tanner, Booker T. Washington, Bruce, Coleridge-Taylor, Burleigh and others stand? It is not for us as a race to feel that we are inferior to any race--for the same God created us all: white and black, brown and yellow, out of the same substance. Our all-important duty is to THINK and LABOR to prove that we can understand and execute works of art. (2)
In this list of artists and writers, the modern eye may note the absence of W.E.B. Du Bois, the professor who had known Coleridge-Taylor since 1900. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1982) was published in the month following this Negro Music Journal issue. The book was an dramatic manifesto that divided black Americans into advocates of protest or, following educator Booker T. Washington, adherents to theories of accommodation with white oppression. Considerations of racial progress in the United States were long affected by the tensions symbolized by the two men. Coleridge-Taylor knew them both. Although not in agreement with the concept of limiting black efforts to the utilitarian, abandoning the artistic and creative, Coleridge-Taylor respected Washington.
The hunger for higher education on the part of the mid-nineteenth-century African American was satisfied in part by the establishment of historically black colleges. By 1900, African Americans could study music at several such institutions, including Howard University (Washington, D.C.), Fisk (Nashville, Tennessee), Hampton Institute (Hampton, Virginia), Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Alabama's cotton belt, and a cluster of colleges that eventually combined to form the Atlanta University System in Georgia. A handful of white conservatories of music including Oberlin in Ohio, the New England Conservatory in Boston, and the National Conservatory of Music in New York City admitted black students.
Educational opportunities for black Americans were particularly abundant in Washington, D.C., where the black population of ninety thousand constituted nearly a third of the city's residents at the turn of the century. In the wake of the Civil War, many families came to Washington hoping not only for federal protection from the more heinous practices spawned by racial prejudice but also for superior education for their children. The city's school system was strong, and the M Street High School--later Dunbar High School--had a national reputation for academic excellence. Access to higher education within the city included Howard University, Wayland Seminary, and Myrtilla Miner Normal Teachers College.
Washington had a well-substantiated claim to its position as an intellectual and cultural center for African Americans. It was home to the nationally known Bethel Literary and Historical Society, established in 1881 as a "forum in which maturity of thought, breadth of comprehension, sound scholarship, lofty patriotism, and exalted philanthropy could find a cordial welcome" (Cromwell 1896, 26). In the realm of music the city could point to a tradition of recitals by black concert artists and choral groups extending back to the 1850s. The Colored American Opera Company, the first such opera company, had its beginnings in Washington's St. Augustine Church in 1873, ten years before the Metropolitan Opera House was built in New York. The Negro Music Journal, a classical music magazine, was established in September 1902; it is no surprise that its first issue contained a biographical sketch of Coleridge-Taylor. A development of much broader implications was the founding by Harriet Gibbs Marshall of the Washington Conservatory of Music and School of Expression in 1903, an important addition to the opportunities for African Americans to study classical music at the college level.
At the time of the earliest American performances of Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha music in other cities, Washington's black press gave kudos to the first successful presentation by African Americans of a major choral work under African-American auspices. An oratorio identified in the press only by its title, Emanuel, was performed by the Asbury Church Choir under J. Henry Lewis, along with members of the Dvorak Musical Association and the Amphion Glee Club. Asbury's choir was one of several nationally famous for high standards; the Amphions were ten years old, a favorite of Washingtonians and also nationally known; and the more recently formed Dvorak Musical Association excited a great deal of curiosity. The collaboration between the three groups drew large audiences and hinted at possibilities for the concerts of Coleridge-Taylor's music that were soon to begin.
This was the background for the most exciting and arguably most eagerly anticipated concert of The Song of Hiawatha in the United States. It took place on April 23, 1903, at the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church and launched an enthusiasm so intense in Washington, D.C., as to suggest the term "Hiawatha mania." Initiated, promoted, managed, and performed by African Americans, the concert resulted from the resolve and energy of the S. Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, a unique organization whose specific and immediate goal was to bring the composer to America to conduct the choir in a performance of his music. The organization further pledged itself to cultivating in its audiences interest in music that would "refine and elevate" (S. Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society 1901).
Stimulus for the establishment of this choral group--yet another in this city of distinguished choirs--came from Mamie Hilyer, an accomplished local pianist, who had met Coleridge-Taylor in England during the homeward portion of her visit to the Paris Exhibition of 1900. Mamie Hilyer's and Carl Stoeckel's enthusiasm led to an opportunity for Coleridge-Taylor to visit the United...
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