Program Notes – Enigma Variations: Petite Suite de Concert, op. 77, January 27, 2024

NOTES ON THE PROGRAM BY JOHN P. VARINEAU

Petite Suite de Concert, op. 77
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912)
Written: 1910
Movements: Four
Style: British “Light” Classical
Duration: Sixteen minutes

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is one of those “what-if” composers. Like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert, Frederic Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, Lili Boulanger, and George Gershwin, he was a composer who displayed precocious talents at a very young age and died when he was way too young. What would his legacy have been if he had lived longer?

He was born in London to a Sierra Leonean father, Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, who studied medicine in England and a white English mother, Alice Hare Martin. The two were never married, and Daniel returned to Sierra Leone when Samuel was very young, possibly even before Daniel knew Alice was pregnant. (Daniel’s ancestors were African-American slaves who were freed by the British during the Revolutionary war, settled in Novia Scotia, and then resettled in Sierra Leone, a country formed by Britain for returning Africans after the abolition of the slave trade.) Samuel was raised by his mother and grandfather, and his mother named him after the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Samuel’s grandfather played the violin, so he gave his grandson violin lessons. Samuel’s progress soon exceeded his grandfather’s capability, and by the time he was fifteen he had enrolled in the Royal College of Music. That year he published his first composition. Several more followed during the next two years, and by 1892 he had switched his major to composition, studying under Charles Villiers Stanford. (Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams were fellow students.) He wrote numerous works while in college and after his graduation in 1897 he got his first commission. Edward Elgar was the man who recommended Samuel for the commission, and it was A. J. Jaeger (“Nimrod” in tonight’s Enigma Variations) who introduced the two composers.

Shortly after that, Samuel conducted the first performance of another work, the oratorio Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, based on the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Almost immediately, Coleridge-Taylor became something of a sensation, and the oratorio rivalled the popularity of Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah in England. His fame meant more commissions and teaching positions in various music conservatories.

At the beginning of the new century, he was invited by the Coleridge-Taylor Society (a large African-American chorus in Washington, D.C) to come to the United States. This was the first of three trips he made here, developing close ties to the leading African-American intellectuals like Paul Laurence Dunbar and W.E.B. Du Bois. And it was here that Coleridge-Taylor began to seriously investigate his own African heritage and the music of African-Americans. “What Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk music, Dvorak for the Bohemian and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for the Negro melodies,” he wrote.

It may have been the precarious financial position of a young composer or simply overwork that lead to his death, at the age of 37, from pneumonia. By that time, he had written well over 90 substantial works in numerous genres. What if he had lived longer? Or, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, “In the annals of the future his name must always stand high, but with the priceless gift of years, who can say where it might not have stood.”

Coleridge-Taylor wrote his Petite Suite de Concert on commission in about 1910. He used some material from an earlier work titled The Clown and Columbine based on a short story by Hans Christian Andersen. The Petite Suite is one of his more popular works (and not at all like the bulk of his output). It is classified as “British Light Music,” akin to the works of Leroy Anderson here in America. In the four short movements you’ll hear engaging melodies, charming rhythm, deep sentiment, and brilliant orchestration. True testament to the consummate skill of this now almost forgotten composer.

©2024 John P. Varineau