Published on 02 Feb 2012
Jonathan Butcher writes:
Up until 1900 Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (born in 1875) had had
little to do with composing for the theatre. His main body of work
was choral and orchestral and, of course, his most famous opus, and
the one that catapulted him to fame more or less overnight, was his
major oratorio, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, to words by
Longfellow, a poem that Coleridge-Taylor had long admired. Sadly,
although this was performed all over the world and for two weeks
every summer for a good many years at the Royal Albert Hall (with its
companion pieces The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha’s
Departure), he made little or no money out of the work, because
he sold it outright to Novello & Co. Ltd. – something he was to
regret bitterly.
The great and revered
actor/manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree engaged SC-T to write incidental
music for one of his productions in 1900 – Herod, a play
by Stephen Phillips. This happy association was to continue until
SC-T’s untimely death in 1912 at the age of 37. His involvement
with the theatre, with all its colourful characters, magic and
intrigue, may well have been the very spark Coleridge-Taylor needed
to spur him on to write his only full length opera, as, between 1907
and 1909, he was actively engaged in composing what we now believe he
would have called, Thelma.”
A more extended version
of this article was first published in Opera magazine, January 2012. The opera Thelma will
be performed on 9, 10 & 11 February 2012 in the Ashcroft Theatre
of Fairfield Halls, Croydon, conducted by Jonathan Butcher.
[Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor(1875-1912) is featured at AfriClassical.com. Major observances of
the Centennial of his death are underway and are the work of
organizations including the Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor Foundation, http://www.sctf.org.uk,
which has just been entrusted with an extensive Bibliography
compiled
by Prof. Dominique-René de Lerma, http://www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com and made available at the website
of the Foundation.]
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