Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s three-part choral work The Song of Hiawatha will receive its first performance at the Edinburgh International Festival, despite having made the composer internationally famous more than a century ago. The article argues that its revival matters because the work was once a major popular success and helped establish Coleridge-Taylor as the best-known Black classical composer of the Edwardian era, but has since largely vanished from professional concert programmes.

Based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, the cantata attracted hundreds of performances in Britain and the US in the early 20th century, before becoming the basis for enormous Royal Albert Hall stagings involving about 1,000 performers between 1926 and 1939. Those productions relied on racialised and exoticised portrayals of Indigenous people, reflecting the colonial assumptions embedded in Longfellow’s source material; after the second world war, performances became rare. Its original appeal lay in memorable melodies, direct choral writing and music accessible enough for amateur choirs while still rewarding to perform.