From sensation to spectacular, to silence: the strange history of Coleridge-Taylor’s Song of Hiawatha

Chances to hear Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s choral masterpiece in concert are rare. Ahead of its belated Edinburgh festival premiere with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, we look at the epic work - and its epic baggage

The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s setting of Henry Longfellow’s poem, comes to the Edinburgh international festival next week. It’s the first time the work will be performed there, a very belated premiere for the three-part cantata that sealed the composer’s reputation nationally and internationally, inspiring Coleridge-Taylor societies in the US, and making him the world’s best-known Black classical composer of the Edwardian era, before his tragically early death at the age of just 37 in 1912.

The performance history of The Song of Hiawatha makes for an astounding story. In the early years of the 20th century the work quickly became a sensation, with hundreds of performances on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1924, and then every year from 1926 to 1939, the Royal Albert Hall housed a spectacular and vast staging that involved around 1,000 performers – 200 dancers and hundreds of singers of the Royal Choral Society – dressed up to play out a series of exoticised and racialised caricatures to be part of the pageant of Hiawatha, Minnehaha and their tribespeople. The Mohawk chief also performed in the shows, granting an apparent authenticity to The Song of Hiawatha’s dramaturgy.

Post the second world war, performances of the massive work in concert – let alone staged – became rare, and, this century, there’s been barely a handful done professionally.

Coleridge-Taylor’s decision to set Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem was far from novel by the late 1890s. Since the work’s publication in 1855, US composers in their dozens had turned it into cantatas, operas and symphonic works. It inspired the middle movements of Dvořák’s New World Symphony, his tribute to the country that had adopted him and his vision of what might inspire a new American music. But Longfellow’s poem can be read today as a piece of colonialist caricature, mixing Indigenous stories and turning them into a parable of Hiawatha’s noble savagery, as he accommodates the missionaries at the end of the story, before sailing his canoe into the glorious west. It’s a white-empowering fantasy.

But such readings concerned few in the first half of the 20th century, and Coleridge-Taylor’s setting was popular with its performers and audiences for less complicated reasons: the immediacy of its melodic ideas, the directness of its choral writing and the emotional clarity of all it sets out to do in its three parts of celebration, lamentation and farewell. The work is exquisitely made for amateur singers to get their teeth into, and, in the context of a British musical culture at the end of the 19th century that was dominated by choral societies and gigantic-scale performances of Handel and Mendelssohn, Coleridge-Taylor’s musical language was sufficiently challenging to reward its singers, but simple and accessible enough to guarantee that choruses all over the world could champion it enthusiastically.

Before his death, Coleridge-Taylor apparently sanctioned the idea of the staged performances, produced by TC Fairburn, that took over the whole arena level of the Royal Albert Hall for a fortnight at a time, in annual performances mostly conducted by Malcolm Sargent. The photos of the production and its stars are jaw-dropping in their red-face exoticism. And despite Os-ke-non-ton’s presence, there is nothing that seems authentic about their representation of Native American life, culture or music. Coleridge-Taylor’s score is similarly devoid of ethnographic inspiration of indigenous musical cultures. Beyond a melodic focus on wide-open intervals, fifths and octaves, and piquant modal inflections and orchestrational flourishes, the sound world of The Song of Hiawatha is typical, and marvellous, Victoriana.

The significance of The Song of Hiawatha, and especially the success of the first part, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, is that it opened Coleridge-Taylor’s horizons to the US. After his first visit there in 1904, he took his place on the world stage as a Black composer, the musician who would take “24 Negro Melodies” as the inspiration for one of the most important collections of British piano music of the early 20th century. He went on to make African music the foundation of orchestral pieces such as his visionary Symphonic Variations on an African Air and his “rhapsodic dance”, The Bamboula, which was premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1910.

There are plenty of other postscripts to The Song of Hiawatha story: the fact that Coleridge-Taylor never saw any royalties from performances of his most successful piece – a sorry state of affairs that led, in part, to the creation of the Performing Rights Society. And there’s Coleridge-Taylor’s catalogue of later cantatas from Kubla Khan to Endymion’s Dream, and his only opera, Thelma, which have been performed even less than the Hiawatha trilogy in the postwar decades.

The world has changed: and hopefully the Edinburgh festival performance next week will be the start of another life for The Song of Hiawatha, music that’s both uncomplicatedly powerful in its expression, and endlessly rich in its multi-dimensional cultural histories.

***

This week Tom has been listening to: Robin Ticciati’s 2019 recording of Debussy’s Nocturnes and Duruflé’s Requiem with the DSO Berlin. The Nocturnes have a breathtaking combination of sensitivity and viscerality, the Duruflé is a revelation to me. I wish I’d heard this years ago!