An Overdue Visit

Bandon Hill cemetery, Wallington

Early last month I made a small pilgrimage to the municipal cemetery covering the broad summit of Bandon Hill, near Wallington in Surrey.  December had descended on London’s southern fringe: the last leaves scuttered under low blustery cloud; to the east, like Mordor, brooded high-rise Croydon, while to the west the new towers in Sutton loomed in credible imitation.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1905)
(retrieved from http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/99401098)

For some time I have been meaning to come and search these graves for one particular name: COLERIDGE-TAYLOR.  Not the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but the composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who, though born in central London in 1875, grew up and lived most of his life in Croydon.  He is perhaps the closest this part of south London has to a prominent local composer.  Indeed, if it had not been for his catastrophically early death in 1912, he would have been one of Britain’s major composers.

These days he is not really well-known enough at all, but there is plenty to read about him.  The Sutton Museums and Heritage Service has a brief introduction here, there is a book-length biography, and he has been featured on BBC Radio Three as ‘Composer of the Week’: an abridged version of the week-long series can be heard here.  In his lifetime and for some time afterwards he was best known for the cantatas forming ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, which was later turned into an annual stage show at the Royal Albert Hall, but there is plenty else in his considerable legacy of music (eighty-two opus numbers in such a brief career).  Happily, much of it has been recorded, and his music is still regularly performed live.  There is also the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation, as well as the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Network, which publishes regular newsletters and otherwise promotes the composer’s life and music.

Having traipsed all round the cemetery in search of the composer’s grave, I eventually found I had missed it quite near the entrance.  There was the epitaph which, as I had discovered elsewhere, included verses by his friend Alfred Noyes (a Catholic convert who wrote the famous poem ‘The Highwayman’).  I read the epitaph through and in the December drizzle tried to transcribe it onto gradually soggifying paper:

In memory of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who died on September 1st 1912, bequeathing to the world a heritage of an undying beauty.  His music lives.  It was his own, and drawn from vital fountains.  It pulsed with his own life, and now it is his immortality.  He lives while music lives.  Too young to die, his great simplicity, his happy courage in an alien world, his gentleness, made all that knew him love him.

Sleep, crowned with fame, fearless of change or time,
Silent, immortal; while our discords climb
To that great chord which shall resolve the whole.

Silent, with Mozart, on that solemn shore:
Secure, where neither waves nor hearts can break
Sleep, till the Master of the World once more
Touch the remembered strings and bid thee wake.

[Four bars from ‘The Song of Hiawatha’: ‘Thus departed Hiawatha, Hiawatha the Beloved’.]

Erected by his wife [Jessie] and lovers of the man and his music.

These words make strong claims, but more than a century since they were written they seem neither fulsome nor purple, but entirely proportionate.  ‘His music lives’ indeed, and if it really ‘pulsed with his own life’ — if his works really reflect his character — then it will live on, because his music is so disarmingly appealing, and he is such good company as a composer.  The epitaph’s reference to his ‘happy courage’ a neat way of describing the uplifting, cheering quality that pervades much of his music without ever being glib or insincere.  ‘Now it is his immortality’, and so much the better for us.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Violin Concerto (op. 80, 1912): soloist Tamsin Little with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Davis.

‘His Music Lives. It was his own, and drawn from vital fountains’

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (picture from Wikipedia.org)

Today is the 140th anniversary of the birth, in Holborn in London, of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the late nineteenth-century composer (as distinct from the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge!).  Coleridge-Taylor never knew his father, a doctor from Sierra Leone, who for his part had returned there without knowing he had a son.  His mother Alice moved to Croydon; there Samuel was brought up and lived for the rest of his life.

He learnt the violin and sang in two church choirs, and polished his talent diligently enough that, in 1890, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music.  Here he was taught by Stanford, knew Holst and Vaughan Williams, and had his first publications.  A few years later he received a commission for the Three Choirs Festival on the recommendation of Sir Edward Elgar, who called him ‘the cleverest fellow going amongst the young men’.  

Not long afterwards came his greatest success.  This was ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast’, the first of a trilogy of cantatas, which catapulted him to his greatest fame, but, alas, not to riches.  He had sold the rights outright for a trifling fee, and all his life had to work hard for a living, and to provide for his wife Jessie Walmisley, his son Hiawatha and daughter Gwendolyn.  

Here is the first movement of his violin concerto in G minor (the second movement and the third movement are also available to listen to):

His African background led him to take a deep interest in African and African-American culture and history; he collaborated with the American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and travelled to the U.S.A. on conducting tours.  He also made haunting arrangements of spiritual melodies, and saw himself as doing much the same work as Dvořák and Grieg had for the folk-music of their own cultures:

Coleridge-Taylor died, having collapsed at West Croydon railway station and succumbed a few days later to pneumonia, at the catastrophically early age of thirty-seven, and so never wore, as he might deservedly have done, the laurels of a great twentieth-century British composer.  He is buried within a few miles of his home in the cemetery at Bandon Hill in Wallington.  His life seems under-remembered today in his own south London, but all the same ‘his music lives’, as the epitaph on his grave, by his friend Alfred Noyes, proclaims: ‘It was his own, and drawn from vital fountains.  It pulsed with his own life, but now it is his immortality.  He lives while music lives.’

Further reading and listening:

• A biography on the British Library’s website: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/blackeuro/coleridgebackground.html
• A facsimile of ‘Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: His Life and Letters’ (1916): https://archive.org/stream/samuelcoleridget002424mbp#page/n7/mode/2up
• A photograph of Coleridge-Taylor at work in his room in 1901: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/blackeuro/sctpiano1lge.html
• Article about Coleridge-Taylor on the website of the London Borough of Sutton: https://www.sutton.gov.uk/info/200554/heritage_and_culture/1359/local_people/2
• ‘Composer of the Week’ programme on B.B.C. Radio 3: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0219x03