![]() “Much impressed by the lad’s genius,” the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote. Over the next six years, it was programmed approximately 200 times, and Coleridge-Taylor composed two sequel cantatas. Although her parents had bitterly opposed the union, owing to Coleridge-Taylor’s mixed race and illegitimacy, they eventually gave their consent and even attended the wedding.īy that point, Coleridge-Taylor was a rising star, lauded by critics and colleagues, including Edward Elgar and the influential publisher August Jaeger, who proclaimed the young man a “genius.” His 1898 cantata Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, based on the popular 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was a massive hit. In 1899, the year that he composed Solemn Prelude, he married Jessie Walmisley, an aspiring singer whom he had met at the Royal College of Music. Upon graduating from conservatory, Coleridge-Taylor became a professional musician and conductor, as well as a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music. Among his important early mentors was the composer Charles Villiers Stanford, who would conduct the premiere of Coleridge-Taylor’s breakthrough cantata, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. By the time the prodigy was 15 years old, his extended family had raised enough money for him to attend the Royal College of Music, where he began as a violin student and eventually shifted to composition. Coleridge-Taylor’s talent became apparent in early childhood, and Holmans paid for him to take formal lessons. Until she married a railway worker in 1887, Martin and her son lived in Croydon, Surrey, with her father, Benjamin Holmans, a farrier and amateur violinist. The hyphen is believed to have been a printer’s error, although Coleridge-Taylor never bothered to correct it and published his music under that name. ![]() Martin, whose parents were also unmarried when she was born, named her son after the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, calling him by his middle name, Coleridge, for short. Taylor, a Krio, or Creole, was descended from former enslaved Africans from the United States who were freed by the British after the American War of Independence he eventually became a prominent public health administrator in West Africa. Coleridge-Taylor was born out of wedlock in London, to Alice Hare Martin, a white English woman, and Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, a Black medical student from Sierra Leone who returned to his home country before Martin discovered that she was pregnant.
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