Editor's note: This story was submitted by Charles Kaufmann, artistic director of the Longfellow Chorus. "Maine Stage" for Wednesday, Aug. 13, features excerpts from the chorus' performance of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's "The Song of Hiawatha."
I founded The Longfellow Chorus in 2007 as a Longfellow 200th birthday event, and our first concert was scheduled to correspond with Longfellow's birthday, February 27. The idea was to perform a few Victorian vocal works that used Longfellow's poetry as texts. I wasn't sure at that time whether I'd be able to find enough music to fill one program. As it turned out, there are hundreds of pieces of music from the 19th century and 20th centuries based on Longfellow's poetry and prose, and some of these are lengthy cantatas by major composers -- Franz Liszt, Arthur Sullivan and Edward Elgar -- which have fallen into neglect and are rarely performed today.
Of special interest to me was a cantata setting of Hiawatha by the Afro-English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912). I had never heard of Coleridge-Taylor in spite of my conservatory training, and found this to be true of all of my otherwise well-informed musical colleagues. In 2010 I took a first stab at performing a portion of Hiawatha, The Death of Minnehaha. The centennial of Coleridge-Taylor's all-too-early death arrived on September 1, 2012, and this gave me the incentive to dedicate our entire 2013 festival to a complete performance of Coleridge-Taylor's four-part Scenes from The Song of Hiawatha, something that I believe had not been done in the US in modern times.
This generated some excitement among a group of Coleridge-Taylor enthusiasts in Coleridge-Taylor's hometown of Croydon, a suburb of London. The most prominent of these was Jonathan Butcher, Artistic Director of Surrey Opera, who was planning his own Coleridge-Taylor centennial events. Jonathan helped me locate a number of unpublished Coleridge-Taylor works at Royal College of Music, and I included these on the program.
For our 2013 festival, I had hoped to screen a documentary about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; however, none existed that I knew of. So I somewhat naively decided to make my own. I knew that Coleridge-Taylor had been to the US several times. In 1904, an African-American choral society named in his honor and associated with the Metropolitan AME Church of Washington, DC -- the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society -- invited him to conduct their performance of Hiawatha. In 1910 and 1912, the Norfolk Music Festival of Norfolk, CT, (now associated with Yale University) commissioned several works and again brought Coleridge-Taylor here to conduct.
I contacted the Metropolitan AME Church in Washington to see if they would be interested helping me film a recreation of the 1904 concert of the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society in their church. I also contacted the Norfolk Festival and asked if I could bring my orchestra to film a recreation of the premiere of Coleridge-Taylor's Violin Concerto in G on the centennial of the first performance in Norfolk, June 4, 2012. As luck would have it, Dr. Lester Green, the very talented minister of music at Metropolitan AME agreed to collaborate, and the Norfolk Festival literally opened its doors to us.
The result was a two-hour documentary, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and His Music in America in America, 1900–1912, which premiered in Nickelodeon Cinema One in Portland during the March 2013 Longfellow Choral Festival.
Tonight on Maine Stage, you will hear a portion of our weekend-long 2013 Longfellow/Coleridge-Taylor Festival. It was a very special event. Dr. Green of Metropolitan AME in Washington brought to Portland nearly two-dozen exceptional singers from the DC area. Other singers and musicians in the orchestra came not only from Maine, but from Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Rochester, NY. Our soloists, Tai Murray, violin, Angela Brown, soprano, Rodrick Dixon, tenor, and Robert Honeysucker are among the finest African-American classical artists in the country.
I wanted to try to reproduce the dance element of Hiawatha associated with the yearly performances conducted by Malcolm Sargent in Royal Albert Hall in London between the world wars. As a result, Darrell Moultrie, a choreographer in New York, brought to us five dancers under his direction.
For our 2013 Longfellow Festival in honor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, we had assembled 100 performers into probably the most diverse classical music ensemble in Maine's history, and this is what you will hear tonight at 8:00.