Ballade in A Minor, Op. 33
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
(b. August 15, 1875 in London; d. September 1, 1912 in South London)
In April 2022 the CSO featured Coleridge-Taylor’s last major work, his Violin Concerto from 1912, the year of his death. Tonight the CSO continues an overdue revival of this biracial Englishman with a work from 1898, only 5 years into his tragically short career.
Coleridge-Taylor’s talent and drive attracted attention from the best of the Brits. When Edward Elgar (his knighthood came in 1904) could not take on a commission for the Three Choirs Festival to be held in 1896, he recommended Coleridge-Taylor, describing him as “far and away the cleverest fellow going amongst the younger men.” The commission became Ballade in A Minor, his first orchestral work to receive a public performance.
The piece begins at a breakneck pace, careening pell-mell for nearly two minutes until he lets the air out and a gorgeous passage rises and falls, totally Romantic and intimately romantic. More harum-scarum and then an extended tearing at the heartstrings. The final wild ride begins with a bit of modesty but propels to a frenzied finish.
Sir Arthur Sullivan, of Gilbert and Sullivan fame, attended the premiere and wrote of it, “Much impressed by the lad’s genius. He is a composer, not a music-maker. The music is fresh and original—he has melody and harmony in abundance, and his scoring is brilliant and full of colour—at times luscious, rich and sensual...”
Alice Martin, his mother, named her son Samuel Coleridge Taylor after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She was White and English. His father Daniel Taylor was Black African and in London as a medical student. After finishing his studies, he returned to Sierra Leone never knowing Alice was pregnant.
Alice moved in with her father, a blacksmith, and they called her son Coleridge. These circumstances may be rightly seen as impoverished and when Alice married George Evans, a railway worker, it was hardly a step up. They lived in a house next to a busy rail line and downwind from a slaughterhouse.
Supposedly a printer’s error somewhere rendered his name as Coleridge-Taylor. He embraced the affectation, using it for the rest of his life.
Young Coleridge began study at the Royal College of Music when he was 15. By the time he graduated, his career was on a fast track. His cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast proved enduringly popular after its 1898 premiere and was performed throughout Europe and even reached the United States ahead of his first tour here in 1904.
Why did Coleridge-Taylor virtually disappear from the concert hall for most of a century? There was a particular kind of Romanticism that fell out of the mainstream and British composers fell fastest. To gauge the depths, consider Hyperion Records ongoing series that began in 1990 called The Romantic Piano Concerto. In its first 50 volumes are 59 premiere recordings. Here are some Brits on the list: Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sir Donald Tovey, Sir Hubert Parry, and even Coleridge-Taylor’s composition teacher and conductor of the first performance of Hiawatha, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. All White men of achievement even as they, too, were forgotten. Coleridge-Tayor is once again getting his due, but among him and his peers, it had been an equal-opportunity erasure.