Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha

Abstract Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha trilogy was one of the most popular and widely performed pieces of music in the opening decade of the twentieth century. Its composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912), was a young English composer of mixed race (African-British) background, who, as a result of this composition, became celebrated over the United Kingdom and North America in his short lifetime. Based on Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, these three cantatas (Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast; The Death of Minnehaha; Hiawatha’s Departure, 1898–1900) formed a central part of the early twentieth-century choral repertory. Hiawatha affords present-day audiences the chance to explore the music of one of the most important composers of colour in the Western art music tradition, while the work and its reception forms a prism with which to analyse questions of canonicity, marginalization, race, and identity from the composer’s own day down to the present.