Scenes from The Song of Hiawatha by H. W. Longfellow.... Full Score.

London: Novello and Company. 1901. Upright folio. All three cantatas by the British composer—Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha's Departure—bound in one volume, with original publisher's boards. No PN. Each cantata separately paginated. [i] Half title, "Hiawatha's Wedding-Feast.", [i] blank, [i] general title (for the entire work), 1–127 pp.; [i] half-title, "The Death of Minnehaha.", 1–113 pp.; [i] half-title, "Hiawatha's Departure.", 1–164, 164a, 165–191, 16a pp. Page 16a, titled "appendix," includes an alternate ending for the song, "Spring had come," which opens the third cantata, for performance as a standalone piece;  page 164a is to be played if the section between rehearsal numbers 73A and 82 is omitted. Formerly at Forbes Library, Northampton, Mass.; the last borrowing date on the list pasted to the lower board is December 1, 1948. Handstamps identify the item as "withdrawn." Conductor's markup in blue and red crayon (first two cantatas only) and in lead pencil. Spine torn and partly detached; some leaves partly detached; some tears (e.g. Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, pp. 28–29); boards worn (especially the publisher's catalogue to the lower board; paper brittle; occasional tape repairs. Still a good copy overall. 

A very rare, almost unique copy. While copies of the individual cantatas—with full title pages specific to the respective cantata—exist in more sizeable numbers, neither WorldCat nor IMSLP lists a complete copy like this one. The general title and the half-titles, the latter in an interesting design reminiscent of Jugendstil, are not documented anywhere else.

Hiawatha's Wedding Feast was conceived as a standalone piece. First performed at the Royal College of Music, London, on November 11, 1898, it made the composer known overnight. Coleridge-Taylor was suggested to compose a sequel; in the end, there were two. The Death of Minnehaha was completed in 1899 and premiered at the North Staffordshire Music Festival in Hanley on October 26 that year. Hiawatha's Departure followed on March 22 1900. The whole trilogy was published as The Song of Hiawatha and had its first complete performance in 1900, at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The later parts of the overall work were not nearly as successful as Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, which continued to be regarded as a work in its own right and received many hundreds of performances all over the English-speaking world, including the U.S. (first in Brooklyn, N.Y., on March 23, 1899, by the Temple Choir of Brooklyn). This unequal status is mirrored in the present copy, where the first cantata shows more signs of use than the others and the third was probably never performed at all. Coleridge-Taylor subsequently made four conducting tours through the U.S. and was received by President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House in 1904, which was then an unusual honor for a person of color; Coleridge-Taylor's father hailed from Sierra Leone. Coleridge-Taylor's music fell out of fashion in the later twentieth century but has experienced a welcome revival in recent years. (22241)

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Printed Music

Classical Music

Culture, Ethnicity & Gender

England

$350.00

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