In 1898, Coleridge-Taylor was fresh from his success with his orchestral Ballade in A minor, which was performed at the Three Choirs Festival of 1898 after Edward Elgar had recommended him as "far and away the cleverest fellow going amongst the younger men".

[2] Interest in Hiawatha's Wedding Feast was so great from sales of the music that, even before a single note of the work had been heard in public, Coleridge-Taylor was commissioned to write a sequel, The Death of Minnehaha.

[1] The premiere of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast took place on 11 November 1898 at the Royal College of Music[3] under the baton of his teacher, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.

)[3] Great publicity preceded the premiere and many people were refused admission, but one person who was accommodated was Sir Arthur Sullivan, who said (according to Coleridge-Taylor's daughter Avril): "I'm always an ill man now, my boy, but I'm coming to hear your music tonight even if I have to be carried.

"[2][4] Sullivan's high opinion of the cantata is privately confirmed by the entry he made in his diary later that night, one of the very few in which he referred at all to a contemporary composer: "Dined at home and went to Roy.

The music is fresh and original - he has melody and harmony in abundance, and his scoring is brilliant and full of colour - at times luscious, rich and sensual.

In 1904, he met President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, a very unusual honour in those days for a man of African descent and appearance (his father was a native of Sierra Leone).

[4][3][13] After his death in 1912, the fact that he and his family received no royalties from what was one of the most successful and popular works written in the previous 50 years, led in part to the formation of the Performing Right Society.

[8] These stagings, often conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent, were presented for two weeks annually until the Second World War[4] and were attended by many thousands of people, including the Royal Family.

Also in 1929–30, Sargent recorded The Death of Minnehaha with the same choral and orchestral forces as for the 1929 Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, with Elsie Suddaby, George Baker and Howard Fry.