Requiem: "Hiawatha" in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

The grand red-brick Royal College of Music on Prince Consort Road London faces the Royal Albert Hall, a large concert hall that witnessed dozens of performances of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Song of Hiawatha the 1920s and 1930s. The hall had and still has fierce critics-The design is wrong for anything except gladiatorial combat was an early comment The Engineer (Clark 1958, 41). It could hold eight thousand spectators, but it was situated a residential area, immediately south of Hyde Park, far from other theaters and halls (42, 61). From the moment it opened 1871, the management struggled to fill its seats. The combination of Coleridge-Taylor's The Song of Hiawatha and the showmanship of Thomas Fairbair solved that problem the interwar years. Fairbair was a pageant master who mounted Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana and scenes from Gounod's Faust at the hall 1922, combining singers costume with projection slides. In 1924, responding to a charity's request, he considered presenting a dramatized version of either Mendelssohn's Elijah or Coleridge-Taylor's Song of Hiawatha. He had discussed the general concept with Coleridge-Taylor many years before (180). Both works had been presented previously at the hall standard choral style, so Fairbair visited the Royal Choral Society to see which one had been financially more successful. The Song of Hiawatha had brought more people. On that existing success, Fairbaim set to work. The Royal Albert Hall has a central arena, not a stage, and Fairbaim's backcloth was ten thousand square feet. The members of the chorus had to sing without scores, for they were to be a Native American costume and always public view. When first discussing this with the Royal Choral Society, Fairbair was told that the members could probably sing the Hiawatha choruses in their sleep already (Reid 1968, 158). A waterfall-with real water draining into a natural stream beneath the building-was part of the colorful set. 'Hiawatha' was a success from the