continued from "You Shall Hear How Pau-Puk Keewis....".
The young composer's fame was made by a one-two (musical) blow of startling power... & (as is usually the case) with a bit of help from some powerful friends. The most important of these was A J (August) Jaeger, a music editor at Novellos & the "Nimrod" of Elgar's Enigma Variations. Jaeger's patronage of the young composer was actually quite short-lived - within a few years he was positively regretting having wasted his time supporting a young man he now considered a major disappointment (more on this below) - but the help was crucial while it lasted.
Jaeger spread the word on the young composer to Elgar himself; & when the 1898 Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester offered him an orchestral commission he was unable to accept, the older composer strongly recommended that the commission be given to SCT; because:
"He still wants recognition & is far away the cleverest fellow going amongst the young men". (see Avril CT; p.29)
(This charitable gesture was wholly typical of Elgar, by the way: perhaps mindful of his own battle to achieve musical recognition, there were few English composers of the next generation who didn't achieve their big break with the help of an recommendation by the older composer. Still - as with Stanford - given the anti-Catholic prejudice which Edoo had had to deal with, one can't help wondering whether the irony of his situation in reference to SCT totally escaped the great man....
(Typical too, unfortunately, was Elgar's quick turning against SCT when he seemed to have become too successful, too quickly... Self (following Kennedy - "Portrait of Elgar" - OUP, 1986) tends to read this as pure professional jealous on the older composer's party; but given Jaeger's similar change of heart (see below), the issues are probably a bit more complicated here than just that)
The result of all this propagandising was the Ballade in A Minor; now available (in an imaginatively programmed selection performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Grant Llewellyn) on Argo 436 402-2ZH. Resolutely tuneful & lovingly indebted to the great European romantics (Tchaikovski, most obviously; but also SCT's great musical love, Dvorak), the work proved a popular hit; although its "barbaric gaiety" seems distinctly overstated... only the opening bars - always an SCT highpoint - could threaten even the kindliest granny.
(Charles Ives - who's music often does have a "barbaric gaiety" - would no doubt describe SCT as a "bit of a skirt"... conversely: it's hard to imagine SCT making much - if anything - of Ives's wayward muse. On the other hand: SCT certainly knew - & approved of - the composer's teacher, Horatio Parker... Avril mentions that her father was looking at introducing some of Parker's music to England shortly before he died)
If the Ballade was the lead-punch, then SCT's next project was the knock-out blow: originally written for a RCM concert presentation, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast (from the poem by Henry Longfellow; 1898) was the rocket which launched the young composer into the stratosphere of English contemporary music....
How?
& why?
To begin with the most obvious: the poem was already extremely popular in England (having read through the work as part of the research for this page, I can understand why: Longfellow's fusion of European epic verse-writing with native mythology is, by definition, a stylistic shotgun marriage... but it's a successful shotgun marriage; & - one has to say - nowhere near as twee as Dunbar's texts), but had not yet been set for chorus; & the young composer was already considered a hot property in the London music scene. Under Jaeger's urging, Novellos - who have certainly been criticised for nailing one of their most profitable scores for just £15.15.0 (a bit over $31 Australian... they later gave SCT a bonus of £10 when the score became preposterously successful) - should also be praised for making the expensive commitment to publishing the score before it was even performed.
Not incidentally: the score had been completed well in advance of the premiere; which allowed a well-rehearsed (by Stanford, who's careful handling of the score avoided the farces which have marked many other first nights... Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, to name just one) first performance as well as giving the critical word-of-mouth time to build before the actual premiere. The enthusiastic support of Sullivan didn't hurt, either: although battling ill-health (& a theatre already stiflingly overcrowded), the elderly composer insisted on being present at the work's premiere (an extra front-row seat had to be made available for him); & praised its young composer fulsomely... Avril CT takes particular delight in quoting Sullivan as saying:
"I'm always an ill man now, my boy, but i'm coming to hear your music to-night even if i have to be carried". (p.31)
For anyone who's had the chance to hear the cantata, it almost goes without saying that SCT's music is light & tuneful & a delight to the ear... but (more subtly) the work is also radically straightforward, with the exotic text lovingly set as written, & without the thicket of repetitive, fugal writing which dominated English choral music of the time (indeed: many of SCT's finest effects are achieved using pure unison vocal attack). SCT's use of contrasting rhythmic motifs is also surprisingly modern-sounding...
(The contrast is established right from the opening bars: where the five bar, sixteen note main theme (later sung as: "You shall hear how Pau-Puk Kee-wis (...) Danced at Hia-a-wath-a's wed-ding") is contrasted with a minim-crochet-crochet - halfnote-quarternote-quarternote in the US-American musical vernacular - tom-tom combination... a contrast which recurs throughout the work)
... & the score is remarkably through-composed for its time; although it may be overstating the case to describe (as Tortolano does) the basic melodic components of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast as leitmotifs. There is something Wagnerian in the work's flow of continuous melody & lack of obvious number breaks, though: the only time the music really grinds to a dramatic halt is with the tenor's big setpiece aria, Onaway! Awake beloved!.
The ending is another highpoint: according to Avril, the final sequence - where "the great boaster", Iagoo (up until then, purely an object of mockery & fun), is effectively redeemed by being given the chance to entertain the feast by telling one of his stories - was her father's favorite in the work. It's mine as well; & for some reason always reminds me of the final bars of Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring (1944)... not just in an obvious, sonic sense; but also in the way the music suggests a fine, forgiving contentedness in music....
The result was a cantata which quickly became one of the most popular ever written; both for its own musical sake & as a much-needed antidote to the deadly seriousness of much of the English choral repertoire: if ever a choir wanted to let its collective hair down, SCT's Hiawatha's Wedding Feast was just the score to do it....
(One should note that Constant Lambert's more overtly modernistic The Rio Grande (1927) played a similar choral-cathartic role in the years around the Second World War; & while it may again be stretching a point to say that Lambert's stylish romp was obviously inspired by SCT (Stravinskian neo-classicism is a clearer influence), it's equally hard to believe that the work could have been written as it was had - or achieved the popularity that it did - had Hiawatha's Wedding Feast not previously existed. The two works would make interesting discmates, actually... anyone got a choir, two soloists, a piano & orchestra to spare?)
Despite this popularity, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast is being shockingly served by CM companies at present: including Kenneth Alwyn's 1990 recording of the complete Hiawatha cantatas (formerly Argo CD430356-2), there are at least four separate recordings of the work (two by Alwyn; & two by the work's most famous great chief, Malcolm Sargent), only one of which seems to be currently commercially available: the 1984 Alwyn recording of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast (with Anthony Rolfe Johnson & the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra & Chorus; EMI Eminence CD-EMX2276), although there is some ambiguity about the degree of availability of this disc (i was recently advised by EMI Australia that this disc had been deleted, only to find new copies of the disc turning up in stores a short time afterwards... go figure!). Sargent's only recording of the second work in the cycle, The Death of Minnehaha (see below), is similarly unavailable....
The cantata was planned as a one-off; but the success of the work made sequels inevitable... & Hiawatha's Wedding Feast & the two cantatas (The Death of Minnehaha (1899) & Hiawatha's Departure (1900)) & the Hiawatha - overture (also 1899) which followed it form the basis of SCT's musical reputation (it isn't for nothing that Self called his book "The Hiawatha Man"). In later life, SCT would describe the complete cantatas from The Song of Hiawatha as a kind of choral symphony; but this is only really true in the sense that the three works offer a clear sense of narrative development & suitably contrasting tones: the works were conceived separately (if sequentially) for different performance groups; & there is no through-composition across the three cantatas... indeed: there is only the reappearance of the Hiawatha's Wedding Feast opening motif in Hiawatha's Departure to suggest that these scores have any kind of musical continuity at all.
The Hiawatha - overture - oddly written to be performed between the second & third cantatas; & available in a loving performance by the RTE Concert Orchestra, Dublin/Adrian Leaper on Marco Polo 8.223516 - is equally self-contained; & transparently built around the spiritual, Nobody Knows the Trouble I See... a melody which nowhere appears in the cantata cycle proper....
(This is a big statement, I know; but the Hiawatha - overture may very well be one of the most interesting works SCT ever wrote. Critically, it's been one of the most problematic: SCT's one-time champion, Elgar, absolutely hated the piece; describing it as:
"I was cruelly disillusioned by the 'Overture to Hiawatha', which I think is really only 'rot'." (to Jaeger, quoted by Self; p. 92)
(... while Self remains stoically noncommittal about the piece (Avril CT doesn't mention it at all). Stephen Banfield, who wrote the excellent short essay on SCT in Grove VI, on the other hand praises the work; describing it as a piece where the composer:
"... transcended (his) limitations... & attains real depth".
(I tend towards the latter camp, myself; & find SCT's quasi-minimalist treatment of his spiritual material - which is repeated throughout the work without obvious melodic development; but with a continuous variation in orchestral texture (the technique sometimes suggests a fascinating mixture of Dvorak & Ravel) - startling in its freshness. You pays yer money; & you takes yer pick, I guess)
Heard sequentially (now only possible with a copy of Alwyn's deleted recording, unfortunately), the difference in tone between Hiawatha's Wedding Feast & The Death of Minnehaha is startling: the work moves quite literally from warm & joyful feast to icy & bitter famine (Avril considers this work to be the strongest work in the trilogy; & it isn't hard to agree with her assessment). The score has the advantage of what may very well have been the best all-round text that SCT had the chance to set; with clear dramatic incident (as opposed to Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which is primarily descriptive) & some harrowing narrative details... the composer rises to his text's occasion magnificently: the actual death scene (& the funeral march which follows it) is handled superbly; while Hiawatha's crisis of faith as he stalks the frozen forest makes the all-round failure of SCT's The Atonement (1903; see below) a few years later more mystifying than ever. The lack of recordings of key works makes career assessments difficult, of course, but The Death of Minnehaha may be SCT's most mature composition, ever.
On the down side, the work also shows clear signs of SCT's retreat from the musical frontline: although the orchestral sound in The Death of Minnehaha is better developed & more overtly symphonic in conception than in its predecessor, the continuous flow of musical ideas in Hiawatha's Wedding Feast has now become a more obvious cantata, complete with distinct musical numbers. These hints of trouble ahead become something of an accusation in the final cantata of the cycle, Hiawatha's Departure: in this work, the basic melodic material remains strong; but the freewheeling approach to musical story-telling which marked Hiawatha's Wedding Feast is now almost painfully traditional in its structure; & comes complete with something which could only be described as a Live from Hollywood! - in Technicolor! finale....
(The music to the final sequence - Hiawatha's (actual) departure, to the Land of the Hereafter - strongly suggests the finale to a Cecil B DeMille wannabe, c.1950... which, incidentally, makes you wonder how the mature SCT would have developed as a film composer)
Hiawatha's Departure (& the cycle as a whole) remained a popular classic; but it & the Hiawatha - overture marked the end of Jaeger's active sponsorship of the young composer (see also below). The loss of the critically minded Jaeger didn't immediately impact on SCT (after the farce of Novellos' purchase of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast for just over £25 outright (ie, no royalties), SCT received a much more reasonable £250 for the two sequels as well as a five year/£100 per year first look option deal with the company); but seems in hindsight to have been a major loss: instead of developing into a musical maturity as Elgar did (always with plenty of prompting from Jaeger, who was never afraid to dismiss a score as not good enough), SCT almost seemed to go forward into Elgar's past, turning himself into a one-man cantata factory & mass producer of vocal, orchestral & keyboard minatures. The result of all this industrious composition appears to have been (perhaps inevitably) significantly less than the Hiawatha's Wedding Feast promise; although a lack of recordings makes a real assessment of SCT's musical achievement during this period difficult.
Self praises the Scenes from an Everyday Romance suite (1900), for example; but neither a recording or score to this work is available to me. The concert overture Toussaint L'Ouverture (1901) seems to have been more problematic: inspired by the Haitian slave (& grandson of an African chief) turned freedom-fighter, the subject was clearly important to SCT; but despite a substantial revision by the composer after its premiere, the work was indifferently received & remains inaudible to a late 20th century audience.
The cantata Meg Blane (a seaside rhapsody for mezzosoprano, chorus & orchestra; 1902) is also worth noting... both Self & Avril CT speak highly of the score; but - once again - there are no recordings available to test their claims....
The low point in SCT's career was almost certainly the abject failure of SCT's one Three Choirs Festival choral commission, The Atonement (1903)....
First organised (probably) in 1715, the Three Choirs Festival - effectively a ganging-up of the three (Catholic) choirs of Gloucester, Hereford & Worcester; & held in rotation between these three cities - was (& is) pretty much the spiritual home of the English choral tradition. The composers linked with the festival are essentially a who's who of English music during the last one hundred years: Sullivan, Stanford, Parry, Elgar (who was an orchestra player at the 1878 festival; & became one of the festival's star composer/conductors from 1902 onwards), RVW, Holst, Bliss, Howells, Finzi, Walton, Mathias, Maxwell Davies & Fanshawe (even SCT's own Hiawatha cantatas); so a major choral commission from the festival was a significant break for the young composer.
(The Three Choirs Festival also had an orchestral arm; & (as we have seen) SCT's Ballade in A minor had already been premiered under the festival's auspices (RVW's first big orchestral hit - the Thomas Tallis Fantasia - would similarly premiere as part of the 1910 festival)... but to be a real Three Choirs composer meant premiering a real choral blockbuster there)
Unlike the Hiawatha cantatas, SCT seems to have self-consciously wanted to make a statement with his The Atonement; but all the contemporary evidence indicates that he failed pretty dismally. Self - who has had the opportunity to look at a score - seems rather underwhelmed by what he sees; & his description of a bad libretto (one of SCT's less attractive trademarks, unfortunately) & what appears to have been a overtly operatic treatment of his subject doesn't exactly engender hope (he also speculates that SCT's purity of faith - as opposed to Elgar's Gerontius ambivalence or Delius's out-&-out Mass of Life athiesm - may also have been a factor... plausible enough: since in religious music, if not the devil then certainly the doubter usually gets the best tunes). Perhaps inevitably under the circumstances, the mixed-to-poor reviews stung the composer badly (as they (apparently) continued to sting Avril, who's comments about the work in her book are defensive rather than her usual celebratory)... although the composer's continued defense of his religious masterwork meant The Atonement retained a slender hold in the repertoire throughout SCT's lifetime.
The question remains to be answered: is The Atonement as important as SCT thought?; or as bad as contemporary reports suggest? As with all the works referred to in this section, without a good recording... who can tell?
The three tours of the US (1904, 1906 & 1910), on the other hand, were in many ways the culmination of SCT's musical & cultural life. In hindsight, the reasons for this are fairly easy to see: the greater sense of racial division in a US only a generation away from Civil War made the image of a successful African-English artist a beacon of hope for the African-American community. The reverse was (probably) also true: in England, SCT was unquestionably the outsider; but in the US, he found himself a part of a parallel African-American society which - while obviously isolated from the white mainstream - was often materially prosperous & socially ambitious.
Historically, the first performance of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast was in Boston in 1900; but the work's greatest American bulldog was to be Henry T Burleigh (1866-1949), a one-time student of Dvorak; & - or so the story goes - the source of African-American spirituals used by the great Bohemian composer in his American compositions. With the help of the Hilyer family in Washington, DC, in 1901, a Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society for African-American singers was formed in the US-American capital; with the explicit intention of performing the composer's music... & the not-so-hidden agenda of bringing SCT to the US.
(Both the Hilyers were amateur singers: Mrs (Mamie) Hilyer - who first met the composer in England in 1900 - was a member of Treble Clef Club, a Washington womens' vocal club. SCT's 1902 concert march, Ethiopia Salutes the Colours - which certainly looks a promising trifle in the piano reduction i have here - was dedicated to this club)
SCT was proud of his African ancestry & more than aware of his potential as a cultural role model; but at the same time, he wasn't the kind of person who could be shamed into doing something prematurely: the original invitation for a 1901 visit was refused due to increased - & increasingly profitable - work commitments in England (more on this below); & the lead-up to the tour was marked by SCT's concerns that suitable orchestral forces would be available for him to lead (the composer had no doubt about the quality of the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society choir; but SCT was reluctant to cross to Atlantic to work with an amateur band: in the end, the US Marines Band was engaged (quite successfully) leading to the intriguing image of "the president's own band" - which i assume would still have been exclusively white at this stage in its history - following the baton of a man of African ancestry)... but on 16 November 1904, after four years of prompting, the Marines Band, the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society choir, three soloists (Burleigh (of course), Estella Clough & J Arthur Freeman) & an audience of 2700 gathered in the Convention Hall, Washington, for SCT's first performance of the complete cantatas from The Song of Hiawatha in the new world....
It must have been one hell of a performance (indeed: this is probably the one musical concert I most wish I could've attended): the choir had been practising for this moment for almost three years; & the audience (two-thirds of whom were African-American; which is another way of saying that an not inconsiderable one-third of the audience was white) was just as enthusiastic. The one disappointment was that the US president, Theodore Roosevelt, was unable to attend due to the proverbial "affairs of state"... instead, SCT's visit was acknowledged with a formal visit to White House. This honor had previously been bestowed on the visiting German composer/conductor Richard Strauss (from which Self decides that a similar honor was probably politically inevitable for SCT); but still gives some idea how seriously the Washington party machine took the composer's visit....
(Also featured during this tour - & it's worth remembering that composing conductors of this time tended to showcase their new compositions in exactly the same way that modern pop performers always tour their latest albums - was one of SCT's most intriguing works: the three Songs of Slavery... later expanded & retitled for publication as the Five Choral Ballads (1905; from texts by Longfellow). The Five Choral Ballads - with A Tale of Old Japan are probably the SCT works most in need of a new performance/recording)
to continue: hit the link to Twenty-Four Negro Melodies.
to return to the Samuel Coleridge Taylor cover sheet, just hit the link here.
Page created by Robert Clements