The Wedding Feast

Coleridge-Taylor’s Four Characteristic Waltzes were advertised in September’s Musical Times in versions for solo piano, for violin and piano, string parts (small and large orchestra), for wind (both sizes of orchestra) and for military band. This with Coleridge-Taylor’s festival success confirmed that he was a composer to be watched. Some London critics knew the opinions of Jaeger, Parry, Sullivan and Stanford on this quiet dark-skinned young man. And there were reviews such as that in the Musical Times back in June 1898:

It is very rare to find such marked individuality in conception and treatment in so young a composer, and pianists and violinists in search of fresh and original music may be warmly recommended these waltzes. They were originally designed for orchestra, but they are very effective as pianoforte pieces, and still more so when the assistance of a violin is secured.

The review ended: ‘the parlour pathos of the conventional waltz is consumed by a virile spirit that converts its usual monotonous beat into heart-throbs’. ¹ Organist Frederick Edwards who edited the Musical Times had old-fashioned views hence Jaeger’s comment to Thompson in 1901 that it was ‘funny’ that Edwards ruled ‘over the destinies of musical young England’. ² ‘One of Mr. Taylor’s latest works’, noted September’s Musical Times, ‘is a setting of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha’s Wedding-Feast” for tenor solo, chorus, and orchestra, a fine specimen of his characteristic freshness which distinctly merits the attention of choral societies’. Novello had ‘just published’ the cantata. ³ Coleridge-Taylor’s new work despite Jaeger’s enthusiasm was rushed into print not on the back of his Gloucester triumph but owing to Walford Davies’s mislaid copy. Novello had not scheduled it for 1898. ⁴ Alfred Littleton of Novello is supposed to have told Coleridge-Taylor that they did not expect to sell a single copy. He was very wrong: his firm’s purchase of the work was a terrific commercial success. Novello paid fifteen guineas (£15.75) which was two months’ income for a skilled artisan or little more than a term’s fees at the Royal College. The cantata was to be a mighty seller. Why did the composer sell Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast outright?