Edinburgh Festival to Premiere Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s *The Song of Hiawatha*

The Edinburgh International Festival will present the three-part cantata *The Song of Hiawatha* next week, marking the work’s first performance at the festival and its first staged presentation in the United Kingdom in many decades. The piece, composed by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) as a setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 poem, was a major factor in establishing the composer as the most widely known Black classical composer of the Edwardian era.

The Guardian

When the cantata premiered in the early 20th century, it quickly became a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic, with hundreds of performances. From 1926 through 1939 the Royal Albert Hall mounted annual productions that filled the arena floor and involved roughly 1,000 participants—including about 200 dancers and a large chorus from the Royal Choral Society. A Mohawk chief was invited to appear in these shows, a detail that was later described as lending a veneer of authenticity to the exoticised and racialised pageantry. After World War II, such large-scale stagings fell out of favour, and professional productions of the work have been scarce in the 21st century.

The Guardian

Coleridge-Taylor’s score is noted for its melodic openness, frequent use of wide intervals, fifths and octaves, and occasional modal inflections. While the music fits comfortably within the Victorian-Edwardian choral tradition, it does not draw on Indigenous musical material. The cantata’s immediate appeal lay in its clear melodic ideas and emotionally direct choral writing, making it accessible to amateur choirs while still offering enough challenge for seasoned singers. The success of the first part, *Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast*, helped launch the composer’s international career, leading to later works such as the “24 Negro Melodies,” the African-inspired *Symphonic Variations on an African Air*, and the *Bamboula* premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1910.

The Guardian

The upcoming staging offers an opportunity to reassess a work that intertwines artistic achievement with a complex cultural legacy. While the original productions have been criticised for presenting a colonialist caricature of Indigenous life, the new performance may introduce contemporary audiences to the cantata’s musical strengths without the outdated visual tropes. Moreover, the event highlights the historical inequity that left Coleridge-Taylor without royalties from his most popular piece—a circumstance that contributed to the formation of the Performing Rights Society. Organisers hope the festival will spark renewed interest in the composer’s broader catalogue, which has remained under-performed since the post-war era.

The Guardian