British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was considered a rising star in the music world in 1900. He was a Black composer and died tragically young, never fully achieving his potential fame and recognition. We aim to honor Coleridge-Taylor by showcasing a major piece of his work, “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast” (1898-1900) in the American University Symphony Orchestra and Chorus spring concert. 

The work, one of three cantatas, sets a section of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (1807-1887) epic poem The Song of Hiawatha (1855) to text with both orchestral and choral music. Longfellow’s work presents the story of a fictionalized Ojibwe warrior, Hiawatha, through his adventures and ill-fated love for Minnehaha, a Dakota woman. The poem was immediately a success and inspired adaptations by other musical and visual artists, including Coleridge-Taylor.

In writing Hiawatha, Longfellow tried to elevate Native American culture by emphasizing the honesty, bravery, and goodness of the poem’s hero and his people. While he admiringly depicted aspects of Native culture in vivid and faithful detail, ultimately Longfellow failed in various ways to depict these cultures accurately. In describing scenes from Native American life, Longfellow relied on first-person accounts that exaggerated, exoticized, or drew upon stereotypes of Native culture. Furthermore, Hiawatha presents a trope common in depictions of Native Americans—the idea that Native American culture is doomed, a relic of the past, and inevitably making way for Euro-American expansion. Ultimately, the work can be seen as a romanticized conflation of disparate Indian tribes, their traditions, and their legends. 

Although he inadvertently misrepresented Native Americans in creating Hiawatha, Longfellow was an abolitionist and proponent of racial justice. His work increased interest in Native American culture and served as an antidote to common racist depictions from the time that cast Native Americans as violent savages. In her essay on artistic depictions of Hiawatha, art historian Cynthia D. Nickerson says that the poem is a uniquely “American epic” that raised Native American legend to the level of ancient mythology, the most illustrious source for western art history throughout history next to the Bible (Nickerson, 50).

One of the artists who famously drew from Longfellow’s work for inspiration was Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907), a sculptor, half Black and half Ojibwe, who depicted five scenes from The Song of Hiawatha. Lewis’s marble statues draw a visual parallel to the statuary of ancient Rome. Art historian Juanita Marie Holland argues that Lewis’s Hiawatha works may have been a promotional strategy to emphasize her Native American heritage over her Black heritage, and the more flattering stereotypes associated with the former—the “noble savage” ideal cultivated in no small part by Longfellow’s poem itself (Holland, 28). 

This may also explain why Coleridge-Taylor was drawn to Hiawatha as a source for his music. Coleridge-Taylor was a composer of color with an English mother and African father and descended from American enslaved people. Coleridge-Taylor would have undoubtedly experienced racism in England, especially as a composer working in a white-dominated field. While not Native American, Coleridge-Taylor may have chosen Hiawatha as a subject because it offered rare dignity to a marginalized group.

Sources:

Arbour, Robert and Christoph Irmscher, ed. Reconsidering Longfellow. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014.  

Buick, Kirsten Pai. Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 

Conn, Steven. History’s Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.  

Holland, Juanita Marie. “Mary Edmonia Lewis’s “Minnehaha”: Gender, Race, and the “Indian Maid.” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 69 no. 12 (January 1995): 26-35.  

Joy, Natalie. “The Indian’s Cause: Abolitionists and Native American Rights.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 8 no. 2 (June 2018): 215-242.  

Nickerson, Cynthia D. “Artistic Interpretations of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha,” 1855-1900.” American Art Journal 16 no. 3 (July 1984): 49-77. 

Thompson, Stith. “The Indian Legend of Hiawatha.” PMLA 37 no. 1 (March 1922): 128-140.