[Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto;
Lorraine McAslan, violin; London Philharmonic Orchestra; Nicholas
Braithwaite, conductor; Lyrita SRCD.317 (2007)]The
English historian Jeffrey Green is author of Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor, a Musical Life,
published by Pickering & Chatto Publishers (2011). He is also a
Guest Blogger at AfriClassical. This is his fifth contribution.
Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor And The Handel Society
by
Jeffrey Green
A
love of music has brought together many individuals whose paths would
other wise have never crossed. So it was in 1904 when London’s
Handel Society appointed Samuel Coleridge-Taylor to be their
conductor. He was the illegitimate son of an African doctor; the
members of the Handel Society were from London’s upper crust.
A
major influence in the Handel Society from the moment it was founded
in 1882 was Arthur Balfour – nephew of Lord Salisbury, he became
Prime Minister in 1902. Balfour’s entry in the Dictionary
of National Biography
notes his love of Handel’s oratorios, and his comment that Handel
had possessed ‘a more copious, fluent and delightful gift of
melody’ than any other composer.
Coleridge-Taylor,
born in London in 1875, had studied the violin and then composition
at the Royal College of Music 1890-1897, and had written
Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast in
1898. This cantata for tenor, chorus, and orchestra included ‘Onaway!
Awake Beloved!’— a melodic masterpiece. By 1900 the now
three-part Song
of Hiawatha
began its decades-long position as a firm favourite of choirs all
over the English-speaking world.
Members
of the Handel Society were wealthy, amateur, and enthusiastic.
Balfour had hosted early rehearsals, but the long-serving secretary
Philip Webb (a player of the violin and the viola, not the famed
architect) managed the society. The social status of the
instrumentalists and singers caused difficulties for conductors.
August Manns, whose Crystal Palace orchestra had long been a fixture
in London’s concert world, conducted the Handel Society from 1892,
is recorded as commenting
‘If
I hear your first clarinet playing a wrong note, am I to call out,
‘Lieutenant-General Lord Chelmsford, G.C.B., you are playing A
sharp instead of A natural’?’
After
three years Manns was replaced by J. Samuel Liddle, who was replaced
in 1904 by Coleridge-Taylor, who held the position until his death in
1912.
A
scan of the musical press of Edwardian England reveals that the music
of Handel was far from rare. There was a Handel Festival at the
Crystal Palace every three years, where there were occasions when the
choir for Messiah
numbered four thousand – and the audience twenty thousand. The
Handel Society’s programmes were quite different, and had been from
the beginning.
In
April 1888 the society presented Samson
to eight hundred residents of the Homes for Working Girls. In
February 1889 they performed in Bow, a concert witnessed by George
Bernard Shaw who had made ‘a hazardous voyage to the east end [of
London]’. He noted that all of the second violins were ‘beautiful
young ladies’ and that the choir seemed to believe ‘that choral
singing is merely a habit caught in church’. His review noted
Webb’s request for tenors, horns, and a second bassoon.
A
year later the society’s two hundred singers and one hundred
instrumentalists presented Handel’s Incidental
Music to Alceste,
Mozart’s Haffner,
and the Bach magnificat. At Liddle’s last concert in May 1904 they
performed Jeptha.
Coleridge-Taylor conducted Max Bruch’s Scenes
from the Odyssey
at the Queen’s Hall in May 1905. The Musical
Times
noted that it ‘lacked intensity of expression, the common fault of
London choirs’. Shaw’s verdict was still valid.
The
society’s Queen’s Hall concert on 23 May 1906 was under
Coleridge-Taylor’s baton, and he conducted Dvorak’s Spectre’s
Bride
and the premier of his own Kubla
Khan.
The
Handel Society performed for fashionable London at the Queen’s Hall
and St. James’s Hall, and in the semi-slum land of Bow (at the
People’s Palace). Coleridge-Taylor continued the policy of reviving
Handel’s works and presenting music by others. Mozart’s Requiem
and Handel’s Triumph
of Time and Truth
were presented in early 1907 ‘with much testimony of good
intention’ (Musical
Times).
In May the concert was ‘before a large and fashionable audience’
who listened to works by Schumann, Saint-Saens, and Dvorak. In
February 1908 Handel’s Hercules
was performed at the People’s Palace; in May Coleridge-Taylor
conducted Dvorak’s Stabat
Mater
and Elgar’s From
the Bavarian Highlands at
the Queen’s Hall. The Musical
Times
critic observed
The
choir of the society seems to be suffering from the usual choral
difficulty in London, that of obtaining a sufficient number of male
voices to secure perfect balance of parts, but under Mr.
Coleridge-Taylor’s direction an effective interpretation was
secured.
The
February 1909 People’s Palace concert was Acis
and Galatea with
‘full band and chorus’. Tickets cost three pence. The annual
Queen’s Hall concert, however, had nothing Handelian: ‘indeed,
nothing nearer his period was heard than Brahms’ noted the Musical
News.
Conducting ‘with strength and alertness’ Coleridge-Taylor
directed an enlarged choir, for the New Philharmonic Society of
Richmond had joined with the Handel Society to present works by
Parry, Stanford, Bizet, Glinka: and Sibelius’s Finlandia.
Coleridge-Taylor
conducted the Finnish masterpiece at a performance by the Croydon
String-Players’ Club, augmented by seventy professional
instrumentalists, in Croydon in May 1909. His conducting skills had
been honed with his friends in the String-Players’ Club. He had
known many of them a long time, for he had been raised by his mother
and blacksmith grandfather in Croydon, within feet of a railway
line, downwind of a slaughterhouse. His features proclaimed his
African father’s legacy, but Dr Daniel Taylor had returned to
Sierra Leone before his birth, and had died in the colonial backwater
of the Gambia in 1904, having never seen his composer son.
Coleridge-Taylor’s world was quite different to that of typical
Handel Society members. He told his first biographer that many of the
members spent their holidays in the south of France and his were
taken at Westcliff-on-Sea (Southend). He mentioned that once and
thereafter ‘I always avoided mention of my holidays’.
Such
social distinctions, so powerful in Edwardian England, were cast
aside when Coleridge-Taylor rehearsed and conducted the society.
The
February 1911 concert at the Queen’s Hall included the conductor’s
Bon-Bon
Suite
and
Handel’s Spring
and
Summer.
Fourteen months later the society’s ‘reputation for independence
of choice’ was noted by the Musical
Times
when reviewing the May 1912 Queen’s Hall concert. Works by
Beethoven, Bizet, and Schumann were included. The audience ‘as is
usual at these concerts, was very numerous’. The singers showed
‘the benefits of their training at the hands of Mr.
Coleridge-Taylor’. His hard work and professional skills were
deeply respected.
Philip
Webb, when he heard that Coleridge-Taylor had died (aged
thirty-seven) in September 1912, wrote to his widow
I
cannot tell you how much grieved I am at this sad and unexpected
news, and how deeply I sympathise with you in your irreparable loss.
It is a great loss to our Society, for your husband was an almost
ideal Conductor for us, containing as he did with his great musical
talent so much personal sympathy and tact. His simple and [2 words
illegible] sweet disposition made him a delightful colleague to work
with. I have already received several letters from members of the
Society, expressing their great sorrow, and I know that relations
between him and the Society generally were of a quite unusual
cordiality, and that one and all will be mourning for his loss. I am
sending a wreath on behalf of the Society. Believe me, yours
sincerely, Philip Webb
The
Handel Society continued. Its April 1913 concert had Handel’s Ode
on St. Cecilia’s Day,
Coleridge-Taylor’s Solemn
Prelude,
and the new conductor Georg (sic) Henschel’s
Requiem:
the choice reflecting the impact of Coleridge-Taylor’s death.
Vaughan
Williams conducted from 1919 to 1921, then Eugene Goossens until
1925. Venues included the Royal College of Music, and in 1928 the
London Palladium where Douglas Hopkins conducted Hercules
in aid of the National Sunday League. In June 1931 the society gave a
concert at University College when the Musical
Times
noted it existed to maintain ‘the healthy practice of performing
music by amateurs’ and praised its choice of non-familiar works.
Its last conductor was Reginald Goodall, whose biographer John Lucas
noted disliked Handel’s music: but it paid well. One of the members
remarked ‘We are gentry, not working class. It is a choir for our
friends and relations’. Lucas added – ‘A large number of them
lived in Eaton Square’[Belgravia].
The
wealthy, high-born Britons who played and sung in the Handel Society,
from those initial rehearsals at Balfour’s London home in 1882 to
performances under Goodall – in Handel’s Semele
in December 1938, the Chandos
Te Deum
and Beethoven’s seventh symphony in March 1939, and finally the May
1939 performance of Handel’s Joshua
– were all having fun. They gave pleasure to London audiences.
Their largesse was appreciated by Goodall and other conductors; their
willingness to perform from a wide range of concert music, and to
revive rare Handel, was all very praiseworthy.
Consider
the changes in British society since this era: when a cabinet
minister could slip out of parliament to go to a concert of Handel’s
music – and a black man could direct the sons and daughters of high
society in music-making of a high order.
This
article is based on materials gathered for a talk, presented to the
London Handel Society, St. George’s church, Hanover Square, London,
on 6 May 2003. Philip Webb’s letter is in the archives of the Royal
College of Music. My thanks to Oliver Davies.
[Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) is profiled at AfriClassical.com,
which features a comprehensive Works List and a Bibliography by Prof.
Dominique-René de Lerma, www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com.
We
are collaborating with the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation of the
U.K., www.SCTF.org.uk]
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