The first performance of the entire work in America was given under the direction of Mr. Charles E. Knauss by the Orpheus Oratorio society in Easton, Penn., May 5, 1903. The Cecilia society of Boston, under Mr. B. J. Lang, gave the first performance of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast on March 14, 1900; of Hiawatha’s Departure on December 5, 1900; and on December 2, 1902, The Death of Minnehaha, together with Hiawatha’s Departure.

In 1902 Mr. Coleridge-Taylor was invited to conduct at the Sheffield musical festival his orchestral and choral rhapsody Meg Blane, Op. 48. The fact that this work was given on the same program with a Bach cantata, Dvorak’s Stabat Mater and Tschaikowsky’s Symphonie Pathetique indicates the high esteem in which the composer is held.

A sacred cantata of the dimensions and style of a modern oratorio. The Atonement, Op. 53, was first given at the Hereford festival, September 9, 1903, under the composer’s baton, and its success was even greater at the first London performance in the Royal Albert hall on Ash Wednesday, 1904, the composer conducting. The first performance of The Atonement in this country was by the Church Choral society under Richard Henry Warren at St. Thomas’s church, New York, February 24 and 25, 1904. Worthy of special mention are the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, Op. 6 (1897), which Joachim has given, and the Sorrow Songs, Op. 57 (1904), a setting of six of Christina Rossetti’s exquisite poems.

Beside the work already mentioned are a Nonet for Piano, Strings and Wind, Op. 3 (1894), Symphony in A minor, Op. 7 (1895), Solemn Prelude for Orchestra, Op. 40, (1899), between thirty and forty songs, various piano solos, anthems, and part songs, and part works in both large and small form for the violin with orchestra or piano.

Mr. Coleridge-Taylor has written much, has achieved much. His work, moreover, possesses not only charm and power, but distinction, the individual note. The genuineness, depth and intensity of his feeling, coupled with his mastery of technique, spontaneity, and ability to think in his own way, explain the force of the appeal his compositions make. Another element in the persuasiveness of his music lies in its naturalness, the directness of its appeal, the use of simple and expressive melodic themes, a happy freedom from the artificial. These traits, employed in the freedom of modern musical speech, coupled with emotional power and supported by ample technical resource, beget an utterance quick to evoke response.

The paternity of Mr. Coleridge-Taylor and his love for what is elemental and racial found rich expression in the choral work by which he is best known and more obviously in his African Romances, Op. 17, a set of seven songs; the African Suite for the piano, Op. 35; and Five Choral Ballads, for baritone, solo, quartet, chorus and orchestra, Op. 54, being a setting of five of Longfellow’s Poems on Slavery. The transcription of Negro melodies recently published is, however, the most complete expression of Mr. Coleridge-Taylor’s native bent and power. Using some of the native songs of Africa and the West Indies with songs that came into being in America during the slavery regime, he has, in handling these melodies, preserved their distinctive traits and individuality, at the same time giving them an art from fully imbued with their essential spirit.

It is especially gratifying that at this time, when interest in the plantation songs seems to be dying out with the generation that gave them birth, when the Negro song is in too many minds associated with “rag” music and the more reprehensible “coon” song, that the most cultivated musician of his race, a man of the highest esthetic ideals, should seek to give permanence to the folk songs of his people by giving them a new interpretation and an added dignity.

Outwitting the Devil

A STORY

BY KELT-NOR