Simon Webb
This book is probably best regarded as a short (98 pages) introduction to the life and music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. It is written mainly from the perspective of Coleridge-Taylor’s status as a black composer in Victorian England. However, it was not merely that he was one of a racial minority; in addition, he was also illegitimate.
At the time of Coleridge’s birth, his father, a doctor, Daniel Taylor had returned to Africa and may have been unaware that he had made Alice Martin, Coleridge’s mother, pregnant. Fortunately, she appears to have come from an unusually tolerant and warm family and she and her son found a stable and welcoming home with them, first in Holborn and then in Croydon.
The Langley Press, by which this book is published, specialises in producing books concerned with the lives of Africans who have in various ways distinguished themselves. Other books in the series include The Life of Ignatius Sancho: An African in Eighteenth Century London, The Life and Times of Paul Cuffe: Black Quaker Abolitionist and An African Testament: The Heart of Kebra Nagast.
The author, Simon Webb does not appear to be in any way a music specialist and the assessments of Coleridge-Taylor’s music are likely to be at second hand. The Select Bibliography indicates that, for the biographical material, Webb has depended on W. C. Sayers’, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Musician: His Life and Work (1915) and Jeffrey Green’s much more recent study, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, A Musical Life (2016). However, it would be unfair to suggest that Webb has contributed nothing of his own to this account of the composer’s life.
By placing him within the historical context of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Webb draws attention to the lesser-known examples of Coleridge-Taylor’s work such as the incidental music he wrote for plays such as Shakespeare’s Othello, as well as those by, the now completely forgotten dramatist, Stephen Phillips (1864 -1915).
These included Herod: A Tragedy (1901), as well as Ulysses, Nero and Faust and he provided music for all of them. Ironically the only one which may today be even faintly familiar is Herod, since the music was extremely popular in the arrangement for piano solo, designed for the home market. To this day, copies still abound in charity shops and second-hand bookshops.
For this reader at least, the most valuable aspect of this brief study is the author’s discussion of Coleridge-Taylor’s success and its nature. The composer’s most celebrated work is his Scenes from the Song of Hiawatha and from a 21st century perspective it has its controversial aspects. Longfellow’s poetry and the attitude it embodies have dated badly. The acknowledged leaders of what has been termed the English Musical Renaissance largely eschewed setting Longfellow.
One commentator remarked that one feature which singled out C. Hubert H. Parry as a composer was that he was never tempted to set Longfellow. Stanford began a setting of Longfellow’s The Golden Legend and very unusually abandoned the attempt. Webb also identifies a problem with the composer’s posthumous reputation in that, although he was an Englishman of African heritage, his most famous work features content about Native Americans. It is compounded by the fact that they are drawn from the work of American poet with a reputation for blandness and a style regarded as old-fashioned even in his lifetime and as Webb puts it, ‘was not a Native American himself, and presented Native Americans fashioned out of pasteboard and papier mâché.’
As a brief introduction to the composer’s life and work, this book is valuable. The prose style is unpretentious and I only identified one error where Peter Warlock’s real name is stated as Peter Heseltine rather than Philip. Those reading it may well be encouraged to explore the two available full-length studies, published almost exactly a century apart.
Perhaps inevitably, given the point of view of the author, Coleridge-Taylor’s significance in the wider history of British music is somewhat overstated, but the book, for all its brevity, covers all the composer’s areas of activity and draws attention to aspects of his output which are as yet little known.
Review by Martyn Strachan