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Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Composer; the 'African Mahler' of late Romantic music
The son of a Sierra Leonean doctor and an English mother, he composed music that made Dvořák call him a genius — and died at thirty-seven.
The rise
Raised by his mother in Croydon after his father returned to Sierra Leone, Coleridge-Taylor entered the Royal College of Music at fifteen. His cantata trilogy The Song of Hiawatha (1898–1900) became a sensation, performed annually at the Royal Albert Hall for decades.