|
COPYRIGHT 2001 Center For Black Music Research
The grand red-brick Royal College of Music on Prince Consort Road in London faces the Royal Albert Hall, a large concert hall that witnessed dozens of performances of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Song of Hiawatha in the 1920s and 1930s. The hall had and still has fierce critics--"The design is wrong for anything except gladiatorial combat" was an early comment in The Engineer (Clark 1958, 41). It could hold eight thousand spectators, but it was situated in a residential area, immediately south of Hyde Park, far from other theaters and halls (42, 61). From the moment it opened in 1871, the management struggled to fill its seats. The combination of Coleridge-Taylor's The Song of Hiawatha and the showmanship of Thomas Fairbairn solved that problem in the interwar years.
Fairbairn was a pageant master who mounted Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and scenes from Gounod's Faust at the hall in 1922, combining singers in costume with projection slides. In 1924, responding to a charity's request, he considered presenting a dramatized version of either Mendelssohn's Elijah or Coleridge-Taylor's Song of Hiawatha. He had discussed the general concept with Coleridge-Taylor "many years before" (180). Both works had been presented previously at the hall in standard choral style, so Fairbairn visited the Royal Choral Society to see which one had been financially more successful. The Song of Hiawatha had brought in more people. On that existing success, Fairbairn set to work.
The Royal Albert Hall has a central arena, not a stage, and Fairbairn's backcloth was ten thousand square feet. The members of the chorus had to sing without scores, for they were to be in a Native American costume and always in public view. When first discussing this with the Royal Choral Society, Fairbairn was told that the members could probably sing the Hiawatha choruses "in their sleep already" (Reid 1968, 158). A waterfall--with real water draining into a natural stream beneath the building--was part of the colorful set. "'Hiawatha' was a success from the start," producing the lion's share of the hall's annual profits (Clark 1958, 181).
From 1924 to 1939, with the exception of 1926, The Song of Hiawatha played before thousands for two weeks every summer. From the late 1920s, showman Charles...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
