Idyll, Op. 44

Born in London on August 15, 1875, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was raised by his English mother after his father, a physician from Sierra Leone, West Africa, returned to his native country when his practice failed. He showed musical aptitude from his earliest years, giving his first public violin recital at eight and becoming a choirboy in Croydon. At the encouragement of his choirmaster, Coleridge-Taylor entered the Royal College of Music in 1890, where his classmates included Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Though he initially planned to study the violin, he published his first significant work—a setting of the Te Deum—the very same year, launching his career in composition. After graduating from the Royal College of Music in 1897, Coleridge-Taylor received his first commission in 1898 at the recommendation of Sir Edward Elgar, who deemed the young composer “far and away the cleverest fellow going amongst the young men.” Stanford led the first part of Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha Trilogy two months later at the Royal College of Music. For the 1901 festival, Coleridge-Taylor reworked the second movement of his 1896 Symphony in A Minor, adding parts for tuba and harp and changing details of the melody, harmony, and orchestration. While the resulting work, Idyll, did not enjoy the fame of the Hiawatha Trilogy, its reception was generally positive. As a critic in the Musical Times wrote, “Mr. S. Coleridge-Taylor’s Idyll is a very beautiful, one-themed little work, exquisitely orchestrated, perhaps monotonous in color, but with a lovely reposeful intention.”