Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was a British composer and conductor of mixed race named eponymously after the renowned English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I painted this picture because I heard that the National Portrait Gallery was short of pictures of famous people from the ethnic minorities, and I rather foolishly hoped that my painting might help to fill one of the gaps. Upon submission of my work I learned that the gallery was only interested in pictures painted from life. Ironically my picture is entirely painted from life with the exception of the actual portrait of Samuel himself, I even got a friend to pose for the body, the portrait itself is adapted from photographs. All of the details in this picture refer to aspects of Samuel’s life, he was an accomplished violin player from an early age, the picture of the Indian chief refers to Samuels’s three cantatas inspired by Longfellow’s epic poem ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, the two busts on the left reference Samuel’s two children and the picture behind the sunflower is of the composer’s wife. Also the landscape on the right indicates his connection to Africa and the books below indicate Samuel's knowledge of music and history.

Samuel was born in Holborn in London to Alice Martin (1856-1953) an English woman and Daniel Taylor a Creole man from Sierra Leone who was a medical student. They were not married at the time and Daniel returned to Africa without learning that Alice was pregnant. Daniel would go on to become an administrator in the West African state of Gambia. I have not been able to discover whether or not father and son were reunited later in Samuel's life.

It quickly became apparent that Samuel had musical talent and his grandfather paid for him to have violin lessons. At the age of 15 he changed his focus from violin playing to musical composition and after completing his degree at the Royal College of Music he became a professional musician. Before long he was made a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music and he began conducting the orchestra at the Croydon Conservatoire. Early in his career he was helped by Edward Elgar who recommended him to the Three Choirs Festival. Following on from the success of 'Hiawatha's Wedding Feast' which was premiered in 1898 Samuel made three tours of the United States in 1904, 1906 and 1910. His visits to the States made him increasingly interested in his paternal racial heritage. He met several leading Americans during this time including the writer Paul Lawrence Dunbar and the civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1904 he was received by President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, a rare distinction in those days for a man of African descent. His music was widely performed and proved popular with both white folks and African Americans. Samuel was influenced by all kinds of African music and he attempted to integrate it into the classical tradition, which he considered Johannes Brahms to have done with Hungarian music and Antonin Dvorak with music from Bohemia. Musicians both black and white began to call him the 'African Mahler'.

In those days before the establishment of the Performing Rights Society composers often sold the rights to their music for an immediate income, Samuel did this with 'Hiawatha's Wedding Feast' which would later go on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, he sold this masterpiece for just 15 guineas. Later on he learned to retain his rights and earned some royalties for other compositions however he struggled financially throughout his life, and the stress caused by this situation has been blamed for his early death from pneumonia at the age of 37.

Samuel was buried in Bandon Hill Cemetery at Wallington in Surrey. The inscription on his headstone includes four bars of music from his best known composition 'Hiawatha's Wedding Feast' and a tribute from his close friend the poet Alfred Noyes - 'Too young to die: his great simplicity, his happy courage in an alien world, his gentleness, made all that knew him love him.'

King George V granted Samuel's young widow Jessie Coleridge-Taylor an annual pension of 100 pounds a year, an indication of the high regard in which the composer was held. In 1912 a memorial concert at the Royal Albert Hall earned over 1400 pounds for the composer's family. In this same year musicians concerned by the fact that he had received no income from his 'Hiawatha' cantatas got together and various discussions led to the creation of the Performing Rights Society.

Samuel's work has continued to be popular and was championed by the conductor Malcolm Sargent, between 1928 and 1939 Sargent conducted 10 seasons of a large ballet version of the 'Song of Hiawatha' at the Royal Albert Hall with 600-800 singers and 200 dancers. And since then he has received numerous accolades from musicians and composers all over the world.

There are two blue plaques to his memory, one is in Dagnall Park, South Norwood and there's another in St Leonards Rd, Croydon at the house where he died.

For more detailed information about Samuel's musical career and legacy please look him up on Wikipedia.