Kubla Khan and the Publishing Business
How does this compare to other Coleridge-Taylor works?
COPAC lists seven holdings of Coleridge-Taylor’s orchestral march Ethiopia Saluting the Colours (1902) including versions for two players at one piano, for solo piano, and in an arrangement for the organ. Augener published a 13 page version, there is a 19 page version (which might be a different librarian including covers and other pages in the total) and the British library has 51 pages of the original manuscript. The other holders are the Royal Academy of Music and Oxford. On this basis the holdings of Kubla Khan are good considering 1905 was before the law that required publishers to deposit items in named libraries.
Take another Coleridge-Taylor piece, like Kubla Khan, for solo singer and orchestra – The Atonement. COPAC notes that the 169 page score (vocal and piano) by Novello is held in six locations including the universities of Edinburgh, Leeds and London, both the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music, and the British Library. The latter also holds Novello’s printed string parts for this piece. COPAC also reveals that the 80 page Novello publication of Coleridge-Taylor’s Meg Blane is held at the universities of St Andrews and Sheffield as well as the British Library and the Royal Academy of Music. The British Library also has Novello’s version in tonic sol-fah, and Novello’s published string parts (as does Oxford), as well as Novello’s publication of one song from Meg Blane (dated 1904).
The libraries participating in the COPAC scheme seem to have a reasonable selection of Kubla Khan. But we do not know if the string parts were ever published. As for Houghton and Company, The Times carried an advertisement on 25 January 1907 for a cantata by Tertius Noble published by Houghton. So the collapse of the initial publisher of Kubla Khan was nearly two years after its London premiere and over two years after the plates were printed. There was plenty of time for musical people to obtain copies. The lack of performances might reflect public indifference to Coleridge-Taylor’s new work. But Novello and Company took up Kubla Khan, and they were Britain’s leading publishers of music of this sort and knew the market. The theme was also taken up by Granville Bantock (1868-1946) and published by Curwen in 1912. It was sometimes a test piece for unaccompanied male voices at festivals and was arranged for brass band.
Research into Houghton and Company may reveal that Coleridge-Taylor’s Kubla Khan was seriously affected by their financial collapse.
Jeffrey Green
September 2011.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor created Kubla Khan in 1905. The poem he put to music was by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), famously written in a drug-induced daze which was broken by ‘a gentleman from Porlock’ who called at the cottage where the poet had written down fifty-five lines (and so ended the spell). The poem encouraged the 1985 song Welcome to the Pleasuredrome by the pop group Frankie Goes to Hollywood and a modern approach to the creation of the poem is in Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987). The poem is set in Mongolia in the 13th century. It has been much analysed by scholars of English Literature, and has scarcely been out of print in two centuries. It opens:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-drome decree;
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea
Coleridge-Taylor conducted the Handel Society of London when his Kubla Khan was premiered on 23 May 1906 at the Queen’s Hall in central London. The soloist was contralto Edna Thornton (born 1875 the same year as Coleridge-Taylor, she died in 1964). Miss Thornton sang at Covent Garden from 1905, and was admired by famed conductor Hans Richter who employed her talents in the 1908-1909 Ring cycle. She participated in the 1923 premiere of Gustav Holst’s The Perfect Fool – Holst had been at the Royal College of Music during Coleridge-Taylor’s later years there. The Handel Society was a good amateur group of musicians. So the premiere was well conceived.
In October 1906 the York-based Tertius Noble conducted Kubla Khan at a two day music festival in Hovingham, and in January 1907 Coleridge-Taylor conducted it in Croydon. The composer’s first biographer W. C. Berwick Sayers (Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Musician. His Life and Letters, 1915) stated Kubla Khan ‘received a satisfactory performance at the concert of the Handel Society in 1906, and another shortly afterwards at the Scarborough Festival’ (Noble’s performance at Hovingham). ‘For an interval of years, however, until 1914, the work was scarcely heard. This was mainly owing to the collapse of its publishers’ (page 183). It was then (re)published by Novello.
Given the widespread belief that Coleridge-Taylor had a disadvantaged relationship with publishers Novello and Company, that Kubla Khan was taken up by Novello seems to need a great deal of consideration. Also the failure of the initial publisher shows the music publishing business was far from safe. Thirdly the mechanics of music publishing suggest that Sayers – a librarian – misunderstood the industry.
Kubla Khan was published in London in 1905 by Houghton and Company (and by Schuberth in New York). It has fifty pages. Having set the pages in type and had them checked by the composer the publisher would print copies and bind them, and offer them to the shops. If there were doubts as to the commercial value of a new work, the music for each of the orchestra’s instruments would not be printed – those instrumental parts for violin, cello, viola, bass, brass and reeds would remain in manuscript but would available for hire. Those would be hand-written, probably by a professional copyist. Quite often the first published item would be a piano arrangement with a melodic line for vocal or violin. Exactly what did Houghton and Company offer British musicians in 1905?
The COPAC system (which lists books and printed music kept in major British libraries) indicates copies of Houghton’s 1905 edition of Kubla Khan are stored at the British Library (two copies, one ‘revised’), the universities of York and Leeds, and the Royal College of Music. There are also copies of the Novello edition, all dated on COPAC to 1905 which suggests that Novello purchased the plates from the bankrupt Houghton and Company.