by Andra Moss

The glorious days of July usher in the return of the Norfolk Music Festival, albeit still in virtual format. This year, the program for July 23 will feature a special tie to the festival’s historic past, highlighting the work of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Although one of the best-known composers of his era, Coleridge-Taylor is a name many in the musical world of today are only now rediscovering, yet Norfolk has long held him as one of its own. 

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in 1875 to an English mother and a doctor, Daniel Hughes Taylor, of Sierra Leone, who was studying medicine in London. While it is unclear whether Dr. Taylor knew about his child – he returned to West Africa months before the birth – the baby was named for both Dr. Taylor and the English Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The hyphen was a later addition, but the creative connection was spot-on.  

Raised by his mother and her family in very modest circumstances in Croydon, Surrey, it was the gift of a violin from his blacksmith grandfather that first sparked Coleridge-Taylor’s love of music. He was accepted into the Royal College of Music in London at 15, won a scholarship in composition, and at age 23 composed a cantata inspired by Longfellow’s epic poem, “The Song of Hiawatha.” Coleridge-Taylor’s “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast” was an instant sensation across England and propelled him to international fame.  

Coleridge-Taylor rode this wave of success to the U.S. in 1904, returning in 1906 and 1910. “Sensitive to racial restrictions in the U.S., he travelled to America only when he was persuaded that he would work with both white and black musicians,” writes Hilary Burrage of the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation. He immediately became a celebrity to black Americans as an example of what could be possible for black people. A black choir was formed in his name; Booker T. Washington wrote the introduction to his piece, “Twenty-Four Negro Melodies;” and his friend W.E.B. Du Bois would later write about him when comparing the status of black people in America and Britain. 

He also formed a strong connection with Norfolk. It is likely that Norfolk Music Festival patrons Ellen and Carl Stoeckel became aware of Coleridge-Taylor in 1904 and by September 1909 The Hartford Courant  reported that, “According to a cable dispatch from London, Carl Stoeckel has engaged Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the famous composer, as the conductor for a performance of his ‘Hiawatha’ at the Norfolk Music Shed next June.” The dispatch further noted that, “Mr. and Mrs. Stoeckel have been taking a five weeks’ drive with a five-horse carriage through Italy and Switzerland, Mr. Stoeckel considering this safer than motoring.” 

The horses did their job and the Stoeckels welcomed Coleridge-Taylor to Norfolk’s White House in June 1910. The visit was a success on many levels. A chorus of 475 singers, orchestra of 75 and elite soloists presented a dazzling ‘Hiawatha’ to a full house and rave reviews. 

But much more happened during that visit that would inextricably tie Samuel Coleridge-Taylor to Norfolk in mind, spirit and music. Upon returning to England, he wrote the Stoeckels, “It is strange that the remembrance of Norfolk and the extremely happy week I spent there remain most vividly in my mind! It was all so beautiful and there was nothing to mar the wonder of it.” He shared how he had been inspired by the natural surroundings (and Norfolk’s famous laurel) to begin a musical setting for Alfred Noyes’s poem “A Tale of Old Japan.” He would later refer to it as the best work he had done and dedicated the piece “To Mr. & Mrs. Carl Stoeckel, with happiest remembrances of the White House, Norfolk, Conn., U.S.A., and the people I met there.” 

Yet another act of inspiration occurred during that June visit, according to conductor and musicologist, Lionel Harrison: 

“During Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s visit to the Norfolk Festival in 1910, he overheard Mrs. Stoeckel playing the negro hymn ‘Keep Me from Sinking Down, Good Lord‘ on the piano. As Geoffrey Self writes in ‘The Hiawatha Man’: “Impressed with its beauty, he thought he had found a subject for the slow movement of the violin concerto he then was planning. It was a tune Mrs. Stoeckel had learned from her father, to whom it had been passed down by a slave…Both Maud Powell, the renowned American violinist for whom Coleridge-Taylor was writing his concerto, and Carl Stoeckel pressed him for an arrangement of it, to be made for violin and orchestra. Unable to resist this plea, he made the transcription and sent it as an encore in the premiere performance of the concerto which was given in June 1912 at the Norfolk festival.” 

That piece, together with his “Five Negro Melodies for Piano Trio” and “Symphonic Variations on an African Air”, which date from 1906 and are based on African-American songs, are part of a body of Coleridge-Taylor’s work being rediscovered and celebrated by today’s young musicians.  

The world, however, would miss any further development of this unique talent. On September 1st, 1912, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor died suddenly in Croydon of pneumonia. He was 37. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote in October 1912: “His music has stood and will stand exclusively upon its own merits. It is rich in its harmony, charming in its tunefulness, and eloquent in its emotional appeal, and the man who wrote it was one of the most gifted and remarkable among the composers of the day.” His close friend, the poet Alfred Noyes, provided the enduring tribute that is etched on Coleridge-Taylor’s headstone:  Too young to die: his great simplicity, his happy courage in an alien world, his gentleness, made all that knew him love him.   

Those who knew him in his time would not be surprised to find the works of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor being programmed by the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in 2021.