Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born on August 15, 1875, and died on September 1, 1912. He was a British composer and conductor. He is best known for creating three musical works based on the 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor first performed the first part of these works in 1898, when he was 23 years old. He was of mixed heritage and became very successful. White musicians in New York City called him the "African Mahler" during his three trips to the United States in the early 1900s. He married an English woman named Jessie Walmisley. Both of their children had careers in music. Their son, Hiawatha, used his father’s music in different performances. Their daughter, Avril Coleridge-Taylor, also became a composer and conductor.

Early life and education

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born at 15 Theobalds Road in Holborn, London, to Alice Hare Martin (1856–1953), an English woman, and Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, a man of Creole heritage from Sierra Leone. Daniel had studied medicine in London and later worked as an administrator in West Africa. Alice and Daniel were not married, and Daniel returned to Africa before learning that Alice was pregnant. Alice’s parents were also not married when she was born. Alice named her son Samuel Coleridge Taylor (without a hyphen) after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

After Samuel was born, Alice lived with her father, Benjamin Holmans, and his family. Holmans was a skilled farrier, or someone who shoes horses, and was married to a woman who was not Alice’s mother. This woman had four daughters and at least one son. Alice and her father called their son Coleridge. In 1887, Alice married George Evans, a railway worker, and moved to Croydon, a town near a railway line.

Many musicians were on Taylor’s mother’s side of the family. His grandfather played the violin and taught his grandson to play from an early age. Taylor showed talent for music, and his grandfather paid for him to take violin lessons. At age 15, Taylor received a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Music. He later switched from playing the violin to studying composition under Charles Villiers Stanford. After finishing his studies, he became a professional musician. He was hired as a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music and began conducting the orchestra at the Croydon Conservatoire.

Later in life, Taylor used the name "Samuel Coleridge-Taylor" with a hyphen, which is said to have followed a mistake made by a printer. In 1894, Taylor’s father was appointed as a coroner in the colony of Gambia.

Marriage

In 1899, Coleridge-Taylor married Jessie Walmisley, a fellow student he had met at the Royal College of Music. Jessie was six years older than Coleridge-Taylor and had left the college in 1893. Her parents did not support the marriage because Coleridge-Taylor had mixed-race heritage, but they later agreed and attended the wedding.

The couple had two children: a son named Hiawatha Bryan (1900–1980), who was named after a character from a poem, and a daughter named Gwendolen Avril (1903–1998). Both children had careers in music. Hiawatha adapted his father’s musical works. Gwendolen began composing music at a young age and also became a conductor and composer. She used the professional name Avril Coleridge-Taylor.

Career

By 1896, Coleridge-Taylor had already gained fame as a composer. Edward Elgar later helped him by introducing him to the Three Choirs Festival, where his "Ballade in A minor" was first performed. His early work was also influenced by August Jaeger, a respected music editor and critic who worked for the publisher Novello. Jaeger told Elgar that Coleridge-Taylor was "a genius."

Coleridge-Taylor became well-known for his work Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which was first performed in 1898 by Professor Charles Villiers Stanford and became very popular. Because of this success, he made three trips to the United States in 1904, 1906, and 1910. During these visits, he became more interested in learning about his father’s African heritage. He attended the 1900 First Pan-African Conference in London as the youngest delegate and met important African-American figures, including poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois.

Coleridge-Taylor’s father, Daniel Taylor, was descended from African-American slaves who were freed by the British and moved to Nova Scotia after the American War of Independence. Around 3,000 of these people, called Black Loyalists, were resettled in Nova Scotia, London, and the Caribbean. In 1792, about 1,200 Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia moved to Sierra Leone, a British colony for free Black people. There, they joined other free Black people, including some from London, and maroons from Jamaica, as well as enslaved people freed by the British navy from illegal slave ships. Coleridge-Taylor once seriously considered moving to the United States to learn more about his family’s history there.

In 1904, during his first trip to the United States, Coleridge-Taylor was invited to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt, an unusual event for someone of African descent at that time. His music was widely performed, and he had strong support from African Americans. He tried to blend traditional African music with classical music, similar to how composers like Johannes Brahms and Antonín Dvořák used music from other cultures. After meeting Paul Laurence Dunbar in London, Coleridge-Taylor set some of Dunbar’s poems to music. A joint performance between them was organized in London with the help of the U.S. ambassador, John Milton Hay, and African-American playwright Henry Francis Downing. Dunbar and others encouraged Coleridge-Taylor to use his Sierra Leonean heritage and African music in his compositions.

Coleridge-Taylor was invited to judge at music festivals, even though he was personally shy. He was still respected as a conductor. At the time, composers often sold the rights to their music for a small amount of money to earn income quickly. This meant they did not receive future payments from sales. Although Hiawatha's Wedding Feast sold hundreds of thousands of copies, Coleridge-Taylor had sold the rights for 15 guineas, so he did not earn money from its sales. Later, after becoming famous, he learned to keep the rights to his music and earned royalties for other works. However, he always had financial difficulties.

Death

Coleridge-Taylor was 37 years old when he died from pneumonia. His death is often believed to have been caused by the pressure of his financial problems. He was buried in Bandon Hill Cemetery, Wallington, Surrey, which is now part of the London Borough of Sutton.

Honours

• The carving on Coleridge-Taylor's headstone includes four musical notes from his most famous piece, Hiawatha, and a message from his friend, the poet Alfred Noyes. The message includes these words:

• King George V gave Jessie Coleridge-Taylor, who was married to the composer, a yearly payment of £100 (worth about £12,356 in 2024). This shows how much respect people had for Coleridge-Taylor.

• In 1912, a special concert was held at the Royal Albert Hall. It raised more than £1400 to help Coleridge-Taylor’s family.

• After Coleridge-Taylor died in 1912, musicians were worried that he and his family had not received money from his most famous work, The Song of Hiawatha. This piece had been very popular in the 50 years before his death. Coleridge-Taylor had sold the rights to the music early to earn money. His situation helped lead to the creation of the Performing Right Society, which aimed to help musicians earn money from performances, as well as from publishing and sharing music.

Coleridge-Taylor’s music remained popular. Later, conductor Malcolm Sargent supported his work. Between 1928 and 1939, Sargent led ten performances of a large ballet version of The Song of Hiawatha at the Royal Albert Hall. The ballet included the Royal Choral Society, which had 600 to 800 singers, and 200 dancers.

Legacy

Coleridge-Taylor’s most famous work was his cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. This piece was performed many times by choral groups in England during his lifetime and for many years after he died. Its popularity was only matched by two other famous choral works: Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. After Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, Coleridge-Taylor wrote two more cantatas about Hiawatha: The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha’s Departure. All three cantatas, along with an overture, were published together as The Song of Hiawatha, Op. 30. The Hiawatha performances at the Royal Albert Hall, which included hundreds of singers and special stage designs, continued until 1939. These performances were conducted by Sargent. Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast is still sometimes performed today.

Coleridge-Taylor also wrote chamber music, anthems, and African Dances for violin, among other works. His Petite Suite de Concert is still played regularly. He also composed music for a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, titled Kubla Khan.

Many African Americans admired Coleridge-Taylor. In 1901, a 200-voice African-American choir in Washington, D.C., was named the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society. He visited the United States three times in the early 1900s and was widely praised. In 1910, he was called “the African Mahler” by white musicians in New York. Public schools in Louisville, Kentucky, and Baltimore, Maryland, were named after him.

In 1912, Coleridge-Taylor wrote a violin concerto for the American violinist Maud Powell. The parts for the American performance were lost during shipping—not, as some people think, on the RMS Titanic, but on another ship. The concerto has been recorded by several musicians and performed in many places, including Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre in 1998. It was also played at the BBC Proms in 2023 with Elena Urioste as the soloist.

Lists of Coleridge-Taylor’s compositions, recordings, and writings about his life and work are available through the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation and the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Network.

There are two blue plaques in his memory: one in Dagnall Park, South Norwood, and the other in St Leonards Road, Croydon, where he died. A metal statue of Coleridge-Taylor stands in Charles Street, Croydon.

A two-hour documentary titled Samuel Coleridge Taylor and His Music in America, 1900–1912 (2013) was made about him. It includes performances of his music and was created by Charles Kaufmann and produced by The Longfellow Chorus. A feature animation titled The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Story (2013) was also made about him by Jason Young. It was shown during Southwark and Croydon Black History Month in 2020.

In 2017, Chi-chi Nwanoku presented a program about Coleridge-Taylor on the Sky Arts series Passions.

On August 26, 2021, Coleridge-Taylor’s Symphony in A minor was first performed at the BBC Proms by the Chineke! Orchestra with Kalena Bovell. On September 1, 2023, his Four Novelletten was first performed at the BBC Proms by the Chineke! Orchestra with Anthony Parnther.

The American composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932–2004) was named after Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Posthumous publishing

In 1999, music editor Patrick Meadows discovered three important chamber works by Coleridge-Taylor that had never been printed or widely shared with musicians. A handwritten version of the Piano Quintet, based on the original in the Royal College of Music (RCM) Library, was created earlier by violinist Martin Anthony Burrage of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. The first modern performance of the Piano Quintet took place on November 7, 2001, by Burrage’s chamber music group, Ensemble Liverpool / Live-A-Music, in Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. The lunchtime concert included the Fantasiestücke. Recordings of this performance are stored at the RCM and the British Library. The performers were Andrew Berridge (violin), Martin Anthony (Tony) Burrage (violin), Joanna Lacey (viola), Michael Parrott (cello), and John Peace (piano).

The first modern performance of the Nonet occurred on July 8, 1998, at the International Clarinet Association ClarinetFest in Columbus, Ohio. The performing edition by Jane Ellsworth was published in 1998 and again in 2025 by Tecchler Press.

After receiving copies of the work from the RCM in London, Patrick Meadows created printed versions of the Nonet, Piano Quintet, and Piano Trio. These works were performed in Meadows’s regular chamber music festival on the island of Mallorca and were well received by both the public and performers.

The first modern performances of some of these works were given in the early 1990s by the Boston, Massachusetts-based Coleridge Ensemble, led by William Thomas of Phillips Academy, Andover. This group later made world premiere recordings of the Nonet, Fantasiestücke for string quartet, and Six Negro Folksongs for piano trio, which were released in 1998 by Afka Records. Thomas, who supported lost works by Black composers, also revived Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast in a performance celebrating the composition’s 100th anniversary with the Cambridge Community Chorus at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre in spring 1998. In 2006, Meadows completed engraving the first edition of Coleridge-Taylor’s Symphony in A minor. Meadows also copied the Haytian Dances from the RCM manuscript. This work is nearly identical to the Noveletten but includes an additional movement based on the Scherzo of the Symphony. It is written for string orchestra, tambourine, and triangle.

The Nash Ensemble’s recording of the Piano Quintet was released in 2007.

Coleridge-Taylor’s only large-scale operatic work, Thelma, was long thought to be lost. In 1995, Geoffrey Self wrote in his biography of Coleridge-Taylor, The Hiawatha Man, that the manuscript of Thelma had not been found and that the piece may have been destroyed by its creator. While researching for a PhD on Coleridge-Taylor’s life and music, Catherine Carr discovered the manuscripts of Thelma in the British Library. She created a libretto and cataloged the opera in her thesis, offering the first detailed study of the work by analyzing the discovered manuscripts, including examples of the composer’s handwritten notation. The work was later added to the British Library’s catalog.

Thelma is a story about deceit, magic, retribution, and the triumph of love over evil. Coleridge-Taylor avoided the traditional "numbers" opera format, instead blending recitative, aria, and ensemble into a continuous whole. He may have been influenced by Marie Corelli’s 1887 novel Thelma, which inspired the name of the opera’s heroine. Coleridge-Taylor composed Thelma between 1907 and 1909; it is also called The Amulet.

The full score and vocal score in the British Library are both written by the composer. The full score is unbound but complete (except for missing lyrics in the vocal parts after the first few pages), while the vocal score is bound in three volumes and includes all the lyrics. Patrick Meadows and Lionel Harrison created a typeset version of the full score, vocal score, and libretto (the librettist is unknown but may have been Coleridge-Taylor himself). In both the full and vocal scores, the composer changed the heroine’s name to "Freda" (though he occasionally wrote "Thelma" instead). He may have done this to avoid the impression that his work was based on Corelli’s popular novel. Meadows and Harrison later restored the original name, "Thelma."

There are small differences between the full score and the vocal score, such as some passages in different keys, but these do not prevent a complete, staged performance.

Thelma had its world premiere in February 2012, the 100th anniversary of Coleridge-Taylor’s death, at Croydon’s Ashcroft Theatre, performed by Surrey Opera using an edition prepared by Stephen Anthony Brown. The performance was conducted by Jonathan Butcher, directed by Christopher Cowell, and designed by Bridget Kimak. Joanna Weeks sang the title role, with Alberto Sousa as Eric and Håkan Vramsmo as Carl.

Recordings

• Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Chamber Music – Hawthorne String Quartet. Label: Koch International 3-7056-2 (1992)
• Ballade in A minor, Op. 33, Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op. 63 – Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Grant Llewellyn. Label: Argo Records 436 401-2 (1993)
• Sir Malcolm Sargent conducts British Music includes "Othello Suite" – New Symphony Orchestra. Label: Beulah Records 1PD13 (1995)
• Hiawatha – Welsh National Opera, conductor Kenneth Alwyn, soloist Bryn Terfel. Label: Decca 458 591–2 (1998)
• Quintet for Piano & Strings in G minor, Op. 1, Fantasiestücke for String Quartet Op. 5 – Live-A-Music (2001)
• Violin Sonata; African Dances; Hiawatha Sketches; Petite Suite de Concert – David Juritz (violin), Michael Dussek (piano). Label: Epoch CDLX 7127 (2002)
• The Romantic Violin Concerto Volume 5 includes "Violin Concerto in G minor, Op. 80" – Anthony Marwood (violin), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Martyn Brabbins (conductor). Label: Hyperion CDA67420 (2005)
• Symphony, Op. 8 – Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, Douglas Bostock (conductor), in The British Symphonic Collection, Vol. 15. Label: Classico by Olufsen Records (2006)
• Piano & Clarinet Quintets – Nash Ensemble. Label: Hyperion CDA67590 (2007)
• 2nd of the Three Impromptus, Op. 78 for organ – Choir of Worcester Cathedral, performed by Christopher Allsop. Label: Now Let Us Sing! (2013)
• Heart & Hereafter – Collected Songs, Elizabeth Llewellyn (soprano), Simon Lepper (piano). Label: Orchid Classics ORC100164 (2021)
• Fantasiestücke in Dvořák: String Quartet Op. 106; Coleridge-Taylor: Fantasiestücke – Takács Quartet. Label: Hyperion Records (2023)
• Choral Music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor – London Choral Sinfonia, directed by Michael Waldron. Label: Orchid Classics ORC100247 (2023)
• Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Partsongs – The Choir of King's College London, Joseph Fort (director). Label: Delphian Records DCD34271 (2023)
• Toussaint L’Ouverture, Ballade Op. 4, Selections from 24 Negro Melodies, Suite from 24 Negro Melodies – National Philharmonic/Michael Repper. Label: Avie AV2763 (2025)
• Orchestral Music, including Ethiopia Saluting the Colours (March), Solemn Prelude, Zara’s Earrings, Idyll, Ballade for violin and orchestra, Entr’acte from Nero, Romance in B for strings – Ulster Orchestra, Charles Peebles. Label: Somm CD0713 (2025)