Short answers, pulled from the story.
Charles Villiers Stanford was an Anglo-Irish composer, conductor and teacher born in Dublin on the 30th of September 1852 and died on the 29th of March 1924. He was a founding professor of the Royal College of Music in 1882 and Professor of Music at Cambridge from 1887. Among his most celebrated pupils were Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Stanford composed approximately 200 works, including seven symphonies, nine operas, eleven concertos, about forty choral works, twenty-eight chamber works, around sixty partsongs, roughly 200 art songs and around 300 folksongs arranged for the concert hall. His church music, including the Services in A, F and C and the Stabat Mater, has proved the most enduring part of his output.
Stanford's pupils at the Royal College of Music included Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, John Ireland, Rebecca Clarke, Frank Bridge and Arthur Bliss. Stanford himself rated the pianist and composer William Hurlstone as his most talented student.
Stanford's ashes are buried in the north choir aisle of Westminster Abbey, near the graves of Henry Purcell, John Blow and William Sterndale Bennett. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on the 2nd of April 1924 and interred in the Abbey the following day.
Critics from Bernard Shaw onward argued that Stanford's music lacks passion, with Shaw distinguishing between the spirited "Stanford the Celt" and the emotionally restrained "Stanford the Professor." His reputation was further eclipsed in the early twentieth century by Edward Elgar, and by the renown of his own pupils Holst and Vaughan Williams, whose works entered the standard repertory while Stanford's did not.
The Charles Villiers Stanford Society was founded in 2007 by a group of music enthusiasts and academics including Stanford biographer Jeremy Dibble. It was formed to promote research into Stanford's works and life and to support performances and recordings of lesser-known compositions, including a world premiere recording of his last opera, The Travelling Companion.