In 1906, composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor saw the world premiere of a composition he wrote inspired by his namesake, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, at the Queen’s Hall in London. Coleridge-Taylor’s “Kubla Khan,” based on Taylor Coleridge’s poem of the same name, evokes a dream world loosely inspired by the poet’s fantasy version of what China might be like. It’s an opium-laced vision of castles, sacred rivers, maidens and beautiful music.
It’s ripe imagery for Coleridge-Taylor’s luscious musical adaptation. Last weekend, the University of Minnesota School of Music and the Oratorio Society presented a concert of the work, along with two other pieces by the composer, in “The Artistry of Genius: The music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.” In 1906, the young Black British composer was something of a rising star.
He’d written the tremendously popular “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast,” based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” at the turn of the century, and made three tours to the United States between 1904 and 1910, even meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt. And yet, like much of Coleridge-Taylor’s compositions, “Kubla Khan” all but vanished in the years after the composer’s early death in 1912 at the age of 37. In recent years, orchestras, music publishers and institutions have worked to correct the mistake.
Here in Minnesota, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and other local groups have put Coleridge-Ta.