The Song of Hiawatha (full name: Scenes from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), Op. 30, is a trilogy of cantatas written by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor between 1898 and 1900. The first part, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, was particularly famous for many years and made the composer's name known throughout the world.
Hiawatha's Wedding Feast consists of nine sections: eight for chorus and orchestra, and one, "Onaway! Awake, beloved!", for solo tenor and orchestra.
Background
In 1898, Coleridge-Taylor was fresh from his success with his orchestral Ballade in A minor, which was performed at the Three Choirs Festival of 1898 after Edward Elgar had recommended him as "far and away the cleverest fellow going amongst the younger men". Having been greatly inspired by his reading of Longfellow's epic 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha (even later naming his own son Hiawatha), he decided to set the words to music in a choral work called Hiawatha's Wedding Feast.
The score was completed in May 1898[1] and was published by Novello before the first performance was given.[2] Interest in Hiawatha's Wedding Feast was so great from sales of the music that, even before a single note of the work had been heard in public, Coleridge-Taylor was commissioned to write a sequel, The Death of Minnehaha.[1]
The premiere of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast took place on 11 November 1898 at the Royal College of Music[3] under the baton of his teacher, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.[4][5] (Some sources say the composer conducted the work himself; however, others make it clear that he was so shy that Stanford had to leave the stage to seek him out in order to coax him up to the stage to receive the audience's applause.)[3] Great publicity preceded the premiere and many people were refused admission, but one person who was accommodated was Sir Arthur Sullivan, who said (according to Coleridge-Taylor's daughter Avril): "I'm always an ill man now, my boy, but I'm coming to hear your music tonight even if I have to be carried."[2][4] Sullivan's high opinion of the cantata is privately confirmed by the entry he made in his diary later that night, one of the very few in which he referred at all to a contemporary composer: "Dined at home and went to Roy. Coll. Music Concert to hear Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha. Much impressed by the lad's genius. He is a composer, not a music-maker. The music is fresh and original - he has melody and harmony in abundance, and his scoring is brilliant and full of colour - at times luscious, rich and sensual. The work was very well done."[6] Sir Hubert Parry described the event as "one of the most remarkable events in modern English musical history".[3][7] The success of the work was immediate and international.
The sequels
The Death of Minnehaha was completed in 1899 and premiered at the North Staffordshire Music Festival in Hanley[4] on 26 October that year.[8] A third part, Hiawatha's Departure, premiered on 22March 1900.[8] The whole trilogy was published as The Song of Hiawatha and had its first complete performance in 1900, at the Royal Albert Hall.[1]
The later parts of the overall work were not nearly as successful as the first part, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which continued to be regarded as a work in its own right and received many hundreds of performances in the UK and overseas countries such as the US, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. It became so famous in Britain that for many years it rivalled Handel's Messiah and Mendelssohn's Elijah in the public's affections.[4][9] Nothing else he ever wrote equalled the fame of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast.[2] The tenor aria, "Onaway! Awake, beloved!", was part of most tenors' repertoires for the next 50 years.[5] The relative lack of success of the latter two parts was partially due to the criticisms of them by Edward Elgar and August Jaeger.[10]
Coleridge-Taylor also wrote an overture, sometimes performed separately, which quotes the spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen". In 1901, the trilogy, complete with the new overture, was presented at Birmingham, where it outshone Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius.[4] By 1904, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast had received 200 performances in England alone.[4]
The first performance of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast in the United States was in Brooklyn, New York, on 23 March 1899,[11] by the Temple Choir of Brooklyn.[11] On the strength of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, Coleridge-Taylor made three tours of the United States, and at one stage seriously considered moving there. In 1904, he met President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, a very unusual honour in those days for a man of African descent and appearance (his father was a native of Sierra Leone). On his 1906 tour, he conducted his works in Toronto, St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Boston, Washington and Chicago. His final tour was in 1910.[12] His last composition, written in 1912, the year of his death, was the Hiawatha Ballet Music, Op. 82, based on The Song of Hiawatha.
Hiawatha's Wedding Feast sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Coleridge-Taylor had no conception of how successful it would become, as he had sold it outright for the sum of 15guineas.[4][3][13] After his death in 1912, the fact that he and his family received no royalties from what was one of the most successful and popular works written in the previous 50 years, led in part to the formation of the Performing Right Society.[10]
Annual stagings at the Royal Albert Hall
Starting in 1924, the trilogy, along with the Hiawatha Ballet Music, was presented in the Royal Albert Hall with scenery, costumes and dancing. The first such staging was conducted on 19 May 1924 by the composer's son Hiawatha Coleridge-Taylor[5] (who was born in 1900, at the height of the composer's fame).[8] These stagings, often conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent, were presented for two weeks annually until the Second World War[4] and were attended by many thousands of people, including the Royal Family. Sargent became so associated with these "Hiawatha" performances that one chapter of one of his biographies is called "The Wigwam Years".[14] Singers who appeared in these performances included Miriam Licette, Lilian Stiles-Allen, Elsie Suddaby, Harold Williams, Parry Jones, Frank Titterton,[15]Tessie Mobley,[16] William Boland, and Chief Os-Ke-Non-Ton of the Mohawk tribe.[17]
Sargent recorded Hiawatha's Wedding Feast twice: in 1929, with tenor soloist Walter Glynne, an unnamed orchestra and the Royal Choral Society; and again in 1961, also with the Royal Choral Society, the Philharmonia Orchestra and tenor soloist Richard Lewis. Also in 1929–30, Sargent recorded The Death of Minnehaha with the same choral and orchestral forces as for the 1929 Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, with Elsie Suddaby, George Baker and Howard Fry. The work has declined in popularity of recent years, but is still sometimes revived, such as a centenary performance in Boston in October 1998.[9]
Related Research Articles
Sir Granville Ransome Bantock was a British composer of classical music.
Sir Harold Malcolm Watts Sargent was an English conductor, organist and composer widely regarded as Britain's leading conductor of choral works. The musical ensembles with which he was associated included the Ballets Russes, the Huddersfield Choral Society, the Royal Choral Society, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the London Philharmonic, Hallé, Liverpool Philharmonic, BBC Symphony and Royal Philharmonic orchestras. Sargent was held in high esteem by choirs and instrumental soloists, but because of his high standards and a statement that he made in a 1936 interview disputing musicians' rights to tenure, his relationship with orchestral players was often uneasy. Despite this, he was co-founder of the London Philharmonic, was the first conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic as a full-time ensemble, and played an important part in saving the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from disbandment in the 1960s.
The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow which features Native American characters. The epic relates the fictional adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha and the tragedy of his love for Minnehaha, a Dakota woman. Events in the story are set in the Pictured Rocks area of Michigan on the south shore of Lake Superior. Longfellow's poem is based on oral traditions surrounding the figure of Manabozho, but it also contains his own innovations.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a British composer and conductor.
Hiawatha (Haiëñ'wa'tha) is a Native American semi-historical figure who was the co-founder of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Minnehaha is a Native American woman documented in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. She is the lover of the titular protagonist Hiawatha and comes to a tragic end. The name, often said to mean "laughing water", literally translates to "waterfall" or "rapid water" in Dakota.
Richard Lewis CBE was an English tenor of Welsh parentage.
Astra Desmond was a British contralto of the early and middle twentieth century.
August Johannes Jaeger was an Anglo-German music publisher, who developed a close friendship with the English composer Edward Elgar. He offered advice and help to Elgar and is immortalised in the Enigma Variations.
Frederic William Austin was an English baritone singer, a musical teacher and composer in the period 1905–30. He is best remembered for his restoration and production of The Beggar's Opera by John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch, its sequel, Polly, in 1920–23, and for his popularization of the melody of the carol The Twelve Days of Christmas. Austin was the older brother of the composer Ernest Austin (1874–1947).
Percy Eastman Fletcher was a British composer of classical music best known today for his brass and military band music. He also worked as a highly successful musical director at London theatres.
Gwendolen Avril Coleridge-Taylor was an English pianist, conductor, and composer. She was the daughter of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his wife Jessie.
"The Death of Minnehaha" was a part of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha.
Webster Booth was an English tenor, best remembered as the duettist partner of Anne Ziegler. He was also one of the finest tenors of his generation and was a distinguished oratorio soloist.
The conductor Malcolm Sargent's career as a recording artist began in the days of acoustic recording, shortly before the introduction of the microphone and electrical recording, and continued into the stereo LP era. He recorded prolifically from 1924 until 1967, the year of his death.
Miriam Licette was an English operatic soprano whose career spanned 35 years, from the mid-1910s to after World War II. She was also a singing teacher, and created the Miriam Licette Scholarship.
Kenneth Alwyn was a British conductor, composer, and writer. Described by BBC Radio 3 as "one of the great British musical directors", Alwyn was known for his many recordings, including with the London Symphony Orchestra on Decca's first stereophonic recording of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. He was also known for his long association with BBC Radio 2's orchestral live music programme Friday Night is Music Night, appearing for thirty years as a conductor and presenter, and for his contribution to British musical theatre as a prolific musical director in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and married the actress Mary Law in 1960. His website and the first volume of his memoirs A Baton in the Ballet and Other Places were both published in 2015. The second volume Is Anyone Watching? was published in 2017. A Book of Remembrance was opened on his website in December 2020.
Thomas C. Fairbairn was a theatre impresario, particularly known for his productions of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha.
The British Symphony Orchestra is the name of a number of symphony orchestras, active in both concert halls and recording studios, which have existed at various times in Britain since c1905 until the present day.
Mamie Hilyer was an African American pianist and promoter of classical music, who founded the Treble Clef Club (1897) and the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society (1901) in Washington D.C., playing a significant role in nurturing the district's musical culture.
1 2 McGinty, Doris Evans (2001). "'That You Came so Far to See Us': Coleridge-Taylor in America". Black Music Research Journal. 21 (2): 197–234. doi:10.2307/3181603. JSTOR3181603.
↑ Green, Jeffrey (September 22, 2001). "Requiem: Hiawatha in the 1920s and 1930s". Black Music Research Journal. 21 (2): 283–288. doi:10.2307/3181606. JSTOR3181606.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
