Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), who rose rapidly to positions of authority in Britain’s musical world, and won the admiration of leading composers, the public, and the royal family. The hyphen in his surname was, apparently, a typographical error which Samuel liked and used thereafter.
AT the age of five, Samuel Taylor began violin lessons with a local music-teacher in Croydon. Fifteen years later, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he changed course to study composition, under Charles Villiers Stanford.
In 1905, Samuel was appointed to a Chair of Composition at Crystal Palace School of Art and Music, and was already in demand as a judge at prestigious music festivals. Stanford and Edward Elgar both fostered his career, and Sir Arthur Sullivan left his sickbed just to be present at the premiere of Samuel’s Scenes from The Song of Hiawatha.*
Samuel made three rapturously-received tours of the United States, and was granted a private audience at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt, but tragically succumbed to pneumonia in 1912, aged just thirty-seven.* Such was the regard in which he was held that King George V, hearing that Samuel’s struggling widow was being denied royalties on ‘Hiawatha’, awarded her an annual pension of £100.*
Berwick Sayers recorded Sullivan’s promise, made to Coleridge-Taylor when the two bumped into each other at his publisher’s (Sullivan had gone there to purchase a copy of ‘Hiawatha’). “I’m always an ill man now, my boy,” said he, “but I will come to this concert, even if I have to be carried into the room.” The respect was mutual: Coleridge-Taylor regarded Sullivan’s ‘Golden Legend’ very highly, as he did the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas.
See a touching account by family friend Berwick Sayers in our post Deep River.
Roughly equivalent to £8,800 in terms of purchasing power today.
Précis
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (named after the famous poet) was a late-Victorian and early-Edwardian composer, much admired by Elgar, Stanford, and Sullivan. Though he died at the tragically early age of thirty-seven, he had already achieved extraordinary success at home and also in America, as a composer in his own right, and as an academic authority. (54 / 60 words)
