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COPYRIGHT 2001 Center For Black Music Research
From early published compositions (the seven African Romances, op. 17, for voice), Samuel Coleridge-Taylor consciously projected himself as a composer of lively African sensibilities. His later scores reflect more somber musical influences from the African diaspora. The composer also made one specific attempt to incorporate West African thematic materials into his work, offering a tantalizing glimpse of a path he might have taken had he not died so young. He never visited Africa or met his father, but he had firm contacts with the tight-knit social circle of West African professionals to which his father belonged. At least twenty-four West Africans attended the composer's funeral in 1912, and a wreath in the shape of the continent, highlighting Sierra Leone, was laid at his grave (Fryer 1984, 261). African aspects of both his music and his family background are relevant to proper assessment of the composer and his work.
Coleridge-Taylor came to prominence at the high point of Victorian political and popular engagement with Africa. The commander-in-chief of the British-led forces in Egypt, Sir Herbert Kitchener, defeated the Mahdists at Omdurman on September 2, 1898. Tory prime minister Lord Salisbury's main intent in venturing into the Sudan was to counter French threats to control continental river and rail connections. On September 19, Kitchener confronted a small advance party of French troops led by Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand at Fashoda, farther south on the Nile. It was not until early November that the French government, unwilling to inflame the army or right-wing opinion in the depths of the Dreyfus crisis, ordered Marchand to withdraw (Lewis 1988, 200-205, 227; Wesseling 1996, 247-257). One historian of Victorian Britain wrote: "In the history of public opinion, ... the battle of Omdurman and the enforced retreat of the French at Fashoda represented the high water mark of British Imperialism.... Most of the press, ... politicians and ... public opinion, learned and unlearned alike, reacted with an enthusiasm so jubilant and widespread that it is impossible to deny that this was indeed a new Imperialism" (Seaman 1973, 394).
On November 11, 1898, seven days after the French retreat, Charles Villiers Stanford stepped forward to conduct the premiere of the young black composer's new cantata, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, in a concert at the Royal College of Music, to great acclaim. The success of the music, like that of the original poem from the moment it appeared in the 1850s, was instant. Coleridge-Taylor's African ancestry and Longfellow's epic of alien worlds and culture clash clearly struck a chord at this especially intense moment of late Victorian "enthusiasm so jubilant" for the empire.
Another English composer was to achieve prominence at this highwater mark of the New Imperialism. Edward Elgar's metropolitan breakthrough came in the summer of 1899, with the Enigma Variations. Africa briefly linked and then forever divided the careers of the two men. They approached the New Imperialism from opposite sides of the fence--Coleridge-Taylor, the collegial champion of indigenous peoples; Elgar, the self-doubting praise singer of imperial adventure.
The older composer's attention was first drawn to Coleridge-Taylor by Novello's music reader August Jaeger. This led Elgar, too busy to fulfill a commission from the Three Choirs Festival, to suggest Coleridge-Taylor as a replacement. The resulting work was the ten-minute orchestral Ballade in A minor, op. 33, of 1898. (1) Elgar characterized Coleridge-Taylor as the best of young men and told Jaeger that he had enjoyed meeting the young composer: "[I]t was a real refreshment to me to see C. T. and know him" at the ballade's rehearsals in London in early September (Young 1965, 22-23; Moore 1987, 89). The enthusiasm was short lived. Sixteen months later, Elgar was confiding to Jaeger that Coleridge-Taylor's overture to The Song of Hiawatha was "rot" (Young 1965, 74; Moore 1987, 157).
Born in 1857 and married in 1889 to the daughter of a general of the imperial Indian army, Elgar had been deeply stirred by the African exploits of General Charles Gordon--"a half-mad Christian fundamentalist" (De-la-Noy 1983, 80)--who was responsible for a political crisis in Britain in 1884-85, when the Liberal government delayed dispatching reinforcements to rescue Gordon in the Sudan. Gordon died; the Liberals lost office (Wesserling 1996, 61-68). In the ensuing election, Elgar campaigned for the Conservatives.
Elgar planned a symphony memoralizing Gordon (Kennedy 1968, 44, 177). But in the end, the work that speaks of Gordon was not a symphony but an oratorio-length setting, for soloists, choir, and orchestra, of a poem by Cardinal Newman. A copy of Newman's The Dream of Gerontius (1865), which Gordon had studied and annotated, was entrusted to Frank Power, correspondent of The Times, who carried it from Khartoum shortly before the city was surrounded by the Mahdists. The annotations reached the Catholic Elgar's priest, who transcribed them into a copy of the poem he presented to Edward and Alice Elgar on their marriage (Kennedy 1968, 25; Richards 2001, 60-61).
From 1898 to 1900, against the background of Kitchener's Sudanese exploits, seen by the British as avenging Gordon's death, Elgar wrestled with The Dream of Gerontius, while Coleridge-Taylor completed his triology The Song of Hiawatha, the first part of which had been launched so auspiciously in the heady London days following the battle of Omdurman. The two works were received very differently. Where choirs and orchestras quickly warmed to the social drama and conviviality of The Song of Hiawatha, The Dream of Gerontius had a woeful first performance at the Birmingham Festival of 1900. The choir was uncomprehending, and the conductor Hans Richter was ill prepared. The choir might have made a better effort if it had not been exhausted by a heavy festival program. This included a first performance of Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha's Departure, the third part of the trilogy, which according to Elgar's friend Dora Penny, "distressed the composer only little less than Gerontius had distressed Elgar" (De-la-Noy 1983, 91).
Elgar was devastated by the failure of The Dream of Gerontius, considering it to be his best creation. He railed against the conservatism of choirs and their directors (a group he described as "cheese mongers"). It cannot have helped that the talented and likable young Coleridge-Taylor was a musician who hardly ever strayed beyond the bounds of what a choir could do readily and well. The lessons of church singing in Croydon were learned well. Elgar could only dream of a day when his complex masterpiece would be sung by professional choirs; Coleridge-Taylor, apparently effortlessly, had provided amateur singers, who sacrificed time after a hard day's toil, with straightforward but not unchallenging works that they immediately grasped. (2)
In a January 10, 1900, letter to Jaeger declaring the overture to The Song of Hiawatha to be "rot," Elgar grumbled, "I have never worked so hard for any man before" (Moore 1987, 157). Biographer Michael Kennedy has noted Elgar's capacity to take deep and long-lasting offense and observes that this seemed to be his relationship with Coleridge-Taylor. Elgar may well have been jealous of the younger man's success. Elgar's earlier settings of Longfellow, The Black Knight (1889-92) and Olaf (1896), had only limited impact.
Different views of empire may also have played a part in Elgar's reaction to Coleridge-Taylor. Critics once tended to downplay the significance of imperialism for Elgar's work as a whole, but cultural historian Jeffrey Richards (2001) has recently argued forcefully that the mystical, introspective Elgar, fully apparent only in his large-scale compositions (such as The Dream of Gerontius), is as much a reflection of New Imperialism as the more obviously ceremonial music such as the five Pomp and Circumstance marches. Coleridge-Taylor had meanwhile begun to express African--and by implication, anti-imperialist--sympathies in his own compositions.
Black in a world impregnated with racist sentiments, Coleridge-Taylor was always liable to view the New Imperialism in a rather different light than Elgar. The Dream of Gerontius and The Song of Hiawatha are, in fact, poles apart in what they celebrate. Coleridge-Taylor's concerns, as expressed in the Hiawatha trilogy and later works, lay not with the glorious deeds and self-doubts of the conquerors but with the dignity of the oppressed races. The conductor Kenneth Alwyn (1991) finds Hiawatha's Farewell Elgarian precisely where Longfellow dealt with the impact of the Europeans in Native American society--the fourth movement, "Hiawatha's Dream." But the mood does not recur. After 1900, the two composers moved in obviously different social and aesthetic directions. As the soul of Gerontius ventured to imperial heights, Coleridge-Taylor was already seeking new ways to address the issues of culture contact raised by Longfellow's epic poem. Understanding the pain of black history--the separation of forced migration and the social dissolution it entailed--is never far from the core of the best of Coleridge-Taylor's later work. Refusing any further aspiration to Elgarian glory or introspection, Coleridge-Taylor preferred to concentrate on the stoic but sociable qualities of African-American (and African) song.
It is intriguing that Elgar lost faith in Coleridge-Taylor over the overture to The Song of Hiawatha. "Rot" or not, it is a patchy piece. Self (1995, 91) finds it well made but unimaginative. For another commentator--David Ades (1995)--it demands to be used as background music to a film. No tightly woven symphonic argument--Elgar complained of lack of cumulative argument (Self 1995, 92)--neither is it a potpourri of tunes from the choral work being introduced. The only quotation occurs at the end, where it serves as an obvious link to the material about to follow. Most of the material is new. Some of it is memorable and, as Stephen Banfield (2001) remarks, attains real breadth. Other passages appear banal or less certain in intent.
Such a mix suggests more an experiment than hackwork. A clue to what Coleridge-Taylor may have been trying to achieve is found in the main theme, modeled on the spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" (Sundquist 1993, 494). Coleridge-Taylor first encountered spirituals in 1897, as he was beginning work on Hiawatha's Wedding Feast. African-American and African thematic material formed the basis for several...
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