Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha Gets First Edinburgh Performance
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- The Song of Hiawatha — Coleridge-Taylor's three-part cantata — will be performed at the Edinburgh International Festival next week, its first appearance there despite becoming a sensation in the early 20th century.
- The Royal Albert Hall staged spectacular pageants of the work from 1924 (then annually 1926–1939) with roughly 1,000 performers — 200 dancers and hundreds of Royal Choral Society singers — mostly conducted by Malcolm Sargent.
- The Hiawatha pageants featured what the source calls "exoticised and racialised caricatures" of Native Americans despite the presence of Mohawk chief Os-ke-non-ton; post-WWII performances became rare, with this century seeing barely a handful of professional stagings.
- Longfellow's 1855 poem that inspired the cantata is now widely read as a colonialist fantasy, and the source notes Coleridge-Taylor's score drew no ethnographic material from Indigenous musical cultures.
- Coleridge-Taylor, who died in 1912 at age 37, never received royalties from performances of Hiawatha — a situation the source says contributed, in part, to the creation of the Performing Rights Society.
- Coleridge-Taylor's US career took off after a 1904 visit, yielding the "24 Negro Melodies" piano collection and the Symphonic Variations on an African Air, premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1910.
Why it matters: Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha hasn't been professionally staged in large numbers since 1939 because of its colonialist staging associations; the Edinburgh premiere next week gives choral programmers their first major-festival model for reviving the work — and his neglected catalogue, including the opera Thelma.
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