Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Born: May 22, 1813, Leipzig, Germany
Died: February 13, 1883, Venice, Italy

Ballade in A Minor, Op. 33

• Composed: 1898
  
• Premiere: 1898 at the Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester, England, conducted by the composer
  
• Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, crash cymbals, strings
• CSO notable performances: These are the first CSO performances of the Ballade.
• Duration: approx. 13 minutes

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (named after the English Poet) was the son of Alice Hare Martin and Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor. Daniel was Creole (Krio) from Sierra Leone and studied Medicine in London, where, presumably, he met Alice. They were never married, and it is unclear if Daniel knew of his son before leaving London to become an administrator in West Africa. Samuel lived with his mother and her father, Benjamin Holmans, who played the violin and taught the instrument to young Samuel. Grandfather Benjamin quickly recognized Samuel’s abilities and paid for him to have violin lessons. At age 15, Samuel attended the Royal College of Music, where he later switched from violin to composition, studying (1893–97) under the venerable and musically highly conservative Charles Villiers Stanford (teacher of Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Rebecca Clarke, Frank Bridge and many others). After graduation, Samuel was appointed professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music and conducted the Croydon Conservatoire orchestra.

Novello & Co. published Coleridge-Taylor’s first work in 1891, and August J. Jaeger, head of the firm’s publishing department, became an avid advocate for the young composer. Jaeger is immortalized in Variation No. 9, “Nimrod,” of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations. It is this triangle of connections (Coleridge-Taylor, Jaeger and Elgar) that led to the creation and premiere of Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade in A Minor.

In advance of the 1898 Three Choirs Festival, Elgar received a request to compose a work for the Festival. On April 17, 1898, Elgar wrote:

I am sorry I am too busy to do so. I wish, wish, wish you would ask Coleridge-Taylor to do it. He still wants recognition and is far away the cleverest fellow amongst the young men. Please don’t let your Committee throw away the chance of doing a good act!

The Festival administrators ignored the advice from Elgar and asked Edward German, but Jaeger inserted himself in May 1898:

My friend Mr. Elgar told me a week ago that he has refused an offer to write an orchestral work for your Festival…. My object in writing is to draw your attention to a young friend of mine, S. Coleridge-Taylor, who is most wonderfully gifted and might write your Committee a fine work in a short time…. There is nothing immature or inartistic about his music. It is worth a great deal to me—I mean I value it very highly, because it is so original and often beautiful. Here is a real melodist at last…. At any rate you keep your eye on the lad, and believe me, he is the man of the future in musical England.

With Elgar and Jaeger’s backing, the Festival Committee commissioned Coleridge-Taylor (on May 28, 1898) to write a piece in three months. Coleridge-Taylor conducted the resulting Ballade in A Minor at Gloucester Shire Hall to tremendous applause. This success led the Festival Committee to invite the composer to return three more times: in 1899 to conduct his Solemn Prelude (recently reconstructed and published by Faber Music), in 1990 for his song cycle for contralto and orchestra, The Soul’s Expression, and in 1903 to premiere and conduct his The Atonement.

While writing the Ballade in A Minor, he was also completing his most well-known composition, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, which premiered at the Royal College of Music on November 11, 1898. The resounding success of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast brought Coleridge-Taylor to the United States in 1904, where he conducted the Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, accompanied by the U.S. Marine Band. He visited President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House during this trip. He again visited the U.S. in 1906 and 1910.

By all accounts, Coleridge-Taylor was highly sought after and much celebrated during his lifetime. But composers were not well paid and often were required to sell the rights to their works to publishers. Financial hardship plagued Coleridge-Taylor for most of his life, leading to the bout of pneumonia that caused his death at the age of 37. 

The term “ballade” was first introduced to instrumental music by Chopin in his Op. 23 Ballade in G Minor. The ballade has no formalized structure, but its common features are compound meter (in this case 6/8) with thematic transformation overseen by some narrative or programmatic intention. Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade begins with a short chromatic introduction followed by the first theme in a statement by the woodwind section. This first section in A Minor is boisterous, highly accented and dramatic. The horns transition the Ballade to C major for the first statement of the second theme voiced by the strings, which has an “old Hollywood” love song sound with its long, lyrical melody and lush, reaching string texture. After the two themes are established, the rest of the composition develops those themes in different guises and keys before the piece descends in a flourish of dramatic scales to the final resounding A minor chord.

—Tyler M. Secor