Short answers, pulled from the story.
Charles Villiers Stanford entered a Dublin household on the 30th of September 1852. His father John James Stanford was a prominent lawyer and cellist who had sung the title role in Mendelssohn's Elijah at its Irish premiere in 1847.
The young Charles Villiers Stanford received instruction from three former pupils of Ignaz Moscheles including his godmother Elizabeth Meeke. She taught him to read music before he turned twelve years old by making him play Chopin Mazurkas daily without stopping for mistakes.
Charles Villiers Stanford co-founded a mixed choir called the Amateur Vocal Guild in February 1872 which led to a merger where women gained associate membership. He also took over conducting duties when Trinity College organist John Larkin Hopkins fell ill in 1873 and presented Britain's first performance of Brahms Requiem in 1876.
Charles Villiers Stanford studied composition with Carl Reinecke in Leipzig but found piano lessons from Robert Papperitz more helpful. He later declared Friedrich Kiel a master who taught him more in three months than others had in years while visiting Berlin.
Shamus O'Brien ran eighty-two consecutive performances proving successful comic opera with stage-Irish vocabulary later deemed old-fashioned. The Veiled Prophet premiered in Hanover 1881 but waited until 1893 for English debut at Covent Garden while Savonarola received critical savaging when staged at Covent Garden July 1884.