Ex. 3-16: When I am dead, my dearest

This song was first sung and published in 1904, when Coleridge-Taylor was 28. It is the second of his Six Sorrow Songs (Op. 57), all set to poems by Christina Rossetti. He dedicated the set "To my Wife," Jessie, whom he had met as a fellow student at the Royal College of Music in London. He played the piano himself at the first performance, in Croydon in May 1904, and the applause brought the singer and composer back to bow again and again.

In the poem, the speaker tells a loved one not to sing sad songs or plant roses after their death: "if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget." It is the poem by Rossetti that has been set to music most often; her brother William wrote that it had "certainly" been set more than anything else she wrote.

The title may come from W. E. B. Du Bois, the African American writer he had met in London in 1900: Du Bois's 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk ends with a chapter on the spirituals, which he called "sorrow songs," and Coleridge-Taylor called it about the finest book he had ever read by a Black author. Later that year he made his first trip to the United States, where President Theodore Roosevelt received him at the White House.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London in 1875; his father was a doctor from Sierra Leone, and his mother was English. His cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, first performed in 1898 when he was 23, made him famous in Britain and America. He died of pneumonia in 1912, at only 37, and this song was sung at his funeral in Croydon. His daughter, then nine, was dressed in white rather than black, because her father had always disliked mourning clothes, especially for children.

From the album Heart & Hereafter: Collected Songs of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor by Elizabeth Llewellyn and Simon Lepper (2021)
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