Charles Villiers Stanford

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles Villiers Stanford was born in Dublin on the 30th of September 1852, into a family where music was not a hobby but a way of life. His father, John James Stanford, was a prominent Dublin lawyer who also happened to be a cellist and a noted bass singer. John Stanford had been chosen to perform the title role in Mendelssohn's Elijah at the Irish premiere in 1847. His mother, Mary, was an amateur pianist capable of performing solo concerto parts at Dublin concerts. From his earliest years, the boy was surrounded by exceptional musicianship and high ambition.

  The result was a prodigy. By the time he was eight, Stanford had written a march in D major that was performed at the Theatre Royal, Dublin. At seven, he gave a piano recital playing works by Beethoven, Handel, Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Mozart and Bach. By the time he left for Cambridge in 1870, he had already composed orchestral works, sacred music, and secular vocal pieces.

  Yet for all his early brilliance, Stanford spent much of his career in the shadow of others: first competing for primacy with Sullivan, Parry and Mackenzie, then watching a younger generation of composers surpass him, composers he had trained himself. How did a man of such talent come to be remembered more for his pupils than for his music? And what does the arc of his career reveal about the fate of ambition in music?

• 2. A Dublin Education

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  Elizabeth Meeke, Stanford's godmother and one of his earliest teachers, set a demanding standard before he turned twelve. She had studied with Ignaz Moscheles, one of the most celebrated pianists of the early nineteenth century, and she drilled the young Stanford without mercy. Stanford recalled her method: she made him play every day at the end of his lesson a Mazurka of Chopin, never letting him stop for a mistake. By the time he had worked through all fifty-two Mazurkas, he could read most music his fingers could handle with comparative ease.

  Meeke was one of three of Stanford's teachers who were former pupils of Moscheles. The others included Henrietta Flynn, whom he turned to after Meeke left Ireland, and Michael Quarry, who followed Flynn. His parents also arranged violin, piano, organ and composition lessons with a succession of teachers, treating his musical education as seriously as any academic subject.

  The cultural life of Dublin in the 1860s fed Stanford's wider musical imagination. The city received occasional visits from international stars, and the young Stanford heard performers of the calibre of Joseph Joachim and Adelina Patti. The annual visit of the Italian Opera Company from London, led by Giulia Grisi and Giovanni Matteo Mario and later Thérèse Tietjens, gave him a taste for opera that never left him. During a summer stay in London when he was ten, he met the composer Arthur Sullivan and the writer and musical administrator George Grove, both of whom would later play important parts in his career.

• 3. Cambridge and the Classicist's Conviction

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  Stanford went up to Cambridge in 1870 on an organ scholarship at Queens' College, having narrowly missed a classics scholarship at Trinity Hall. He had already tried for a different path; his father had hoped he would enter the law. The two men reached a compromise: a conventional university education first, then music studies abroad.

  At Cambridge, Stanford immediately immersed himself in the musical life of the university, often to the detriment of his Latin and Greek. He joined the Cambridge University Musical Society and became its assistant conductor. The society, founded in 1843, had declined in quality and was restricted to male singers, which limited its repertoire severely. Stanford could not persuade the members to admit women, so in February 1872 he co-founded a rival ensemble, the Amateur Vocal Guild, which performed as a mixed choir. The Musical Times called the result "a bloodless revolution." The quality gap between the two groups was plain enough that the CUMS membership voted to merge, with women admitted as associate members.

  In the summer of 1873 Stanford made his first trip to continental Europe, travelling to Bonn for the Schumann Festival. There he met Joachim again, and also met Brahms. The encounter deepened a commitment that would define his aesthetic for the rest of his life. At a moment when many music-lovers were choosing sides between classicists and the modernist camp of Liszt and Wagner, Stanford aligned himself with Schumann and Brahms. He could still admire Die Meistersinger while remaining cool toward much of Wagner's other output. This was not a fashionable position, and he knew it.

  His academic record was less distinguished. Two days after being formally appointed organist of Trinity College at a salary of £100 a year, Stanford sat his finals for his classics degree. He ranked 65th out of 66 candidates and received a third-class degree.

• 4. Leipzig and the Useless Pedant

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  On the recommendation of Sir William Sterndale Bennett, now director of the Royal Academy of Music, Stanford travelled to Leipzig in the summer of 1874 for lessons with Carl Reinecke, professor of composition and piano at the Leipzig Conservatory. The composer Thomas Dunhill later noted that 1874 represented "the tail-end of the Leipzig ascendancy, when the great traditions of Mendelssohn had already begun to fade." Stanford arrived hoping to encounter something better than he could find at home. What he found was worse.

  Reinecke, Stanford said, was "the most desiccated" of all the dry musicians he had ever known. He had no good word for any contemporary composer. He loathed Wagner, sneered at Brahms, and had no enthusiasm of any sort. Stanford's biographer Paul Rodmell offers an unexpected defence of this experience: Reinecke's ultra-conservatism may have been unexpectedly valuable, as it may have encouraged Stanford to kick against the traces. A more inspiring teacher might have produced a more docile student.

  Relief came when Joachim recommended Stanford study in Berlin with Friedrich Kiel. The contrast was immediate. Stanford said he learned more from Kiel in three months than from all the others in three years. Piano lessons in Leipzig with Robert Papperitz, organist of the Nikolaikirche, also provided a more helpful counterpoint to Reinecke's sterile instruction.

  While in Leipzig, Stanford attempted a setting of part one of Longfellow's poem The Golden Legend. He intended to set the entire poem but abandoned the project, defeated by Longfellow's "numerous but unconnected characters." He later excluded this work, along with most of his compositions from these years, when assigning opus numbers. The earliest pieces in his official catalogue date from 1875.

• 5. Building the British Musical World

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  Stanford returned to Cambridge in the intervals of his German study and found the musical society in good shape under his deputy, Eaton Faning. In 1876 the society gave one of the first performances in Britain of the Brahms Requiem. The following year CUMS presented the first British performance of Brahms's First Symphony. Both were deliberate acts of advocacy for the music Stanford believed in.

  At the same time he was drawing major figures to Cambridge: Joachim, Hans Richter, Alfredo Piatti and Edward Dannreuther all appeared with the society. Stanford commissioned incidental music from Hubert Parry and helped Parry gain wider recognition at a time when the two men were still on easy terms. He also composed church music that his biographer Jeremy Dibble calls "highly distinctive," including a Service in B in 1879, the anthem "The Lord is my shepherd" in 1886, and three Latin motets including Beati quorum via in 1888.

  In 1882, aged twenty-nine, Stanford was one of the founding professors of the Royal College of Music, appointed professor of composition and conductor of the college orchestra alongside the violinist Henry Holmes. He had accepted the post partly out of concern for the state of British orchestral training, which he had measured directly against the German standards he admired. George Grove, the founding director of the college, shared this diagnosis, and Stanford was one of his two principal allies in building the institution.

  Five years later, in 1887, Stanford was appointed professor of music at Cambridge, succeeding Sir George Macfarren, who died in October of that year. He held both professorships simultaneously, and after six years of effort he persuaded Cambridge to require three years of study at the university before a candidate could sit the bachelor of music examinations, ending the earlier practice of awarding degrees to candidates who had never been undergraduates there.

• 6. The Opera That Would Not Die

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  Stanford completed nine operas across his career, none of which entered the standard repertory. The fact that he kept trying, decade after decade, after reviews ranging from mixed to savage, is one of the more revealing things about him.

  His first opera, The Veiled Prophet, completed around 1880, was based on a poem by Thomas Moore. Stanford offered it to the impresario Carl Rosa, who declined and suggested he try Germany first, noting that success abroad would give the work better prospects at home. Rosa also pointed, bluntly, to the enormous popularity of Gilbert and Sullivan: "If the work was of the Pinafore style it would be quite another matter." Stanford's friend the conductor Ernst Frank got the opera staged at the Königliches Schauspiel in Hanover in 1881. The premiere attracted mixed reviews and the English premiere had to wait until 1893.

  The opera Savonarola, written with the author Gilbert à Beckett, had its premiere in Hamburg in April 1884 to a reasonable reception. At Covent Garden three months later it was received with ferocity. A reviewer in The Theatre wrote that the libretto was dull, stilted and dramatically weak, then added that even so the music was worse: Savonarola had convinced him that opera was "quite out of Stanford's line and that the sooner he abandons the stage for the cathedral, the better for his musical reputation." Parry privately agreed the work was badly constructed.

  A comic opera, Shamus O'Brien, premiered in 1896 with the young Henry Wood conducting. It ran for eighty-two consecutive performances. Thomas Beecham thought it "a colourful, racy work" and revived it in 1910. Yet it eventually came to seem old-fashioned. His last opera, The Travelling Companion, composed during the First World War, was premiered by amateur performers at the David Lewis Theatre, Liverpool, in 1925, a year after Stanford's death. Critics who have revisited it more recently, including Christopher Webber, argue that it has "timeless qualities" that could yet restore his reputation as an opera composer. A new production of The Critic, staged at the Wexford Opera Festival in 2024 to mark the centenary of his death, received critical acclaim.

• 7. The Teacher Who Made Rebels

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  Herbert Howells, one of Stanford's pupils at the Royal College of Music, described what it was like to be found out in a fault: Stanford's great hatreds were slovenliness and vulgarity, and when those qualities walked into the teacher's room, they came out badly damaged. Another pupil, Edgar Bainton, remembered a teaching method that seemed to have no method at all. Stanford's criticism consisted mostly of "I like it, my boy" or "It's damned ugly, my boy," with the latter the more frequent verdict. Bainton concluded that in this apparent chaos lay the value of the experience: Stanford's comprehensive knowledge of musical literature from all nations and ages gave even his most irritating opinions a weight that could not be dismissed.

  Stanford's most celebrated pupils included Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Rebecca Clarke, Frank Bridge and Arthur Bliss. He rated the English pianist and composer William Hurlstone as his most talented student. What most of these figures shared was a trajectory away from the Brahmsian principles Stanford had instilled in them, toward idioms that Stanford himself viewed with suspicion or open hostility.

  The composer George Dyson reflected on this paradox: the very rebellion Stanford fought against was the most obvious fruit of his methods. Driving students toward various forms of revolution may, Dyson speculated, be one of the best things a teacher can do. The works of Holst and Vaughan Williams entered the general repertory in Britain and beyond in a way that Stanford's never did. On the day Stanford died, Holst said to Howells, "The one man who could get any one of us out of a technical mess is now gone from us."

• 8. Eclipsed and Enduring

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  Edward Elgar was, in the 1890s, a composer struggling for recognition. Stanford supported him during those years: conducting his music, proposing him for a Cambridge doctorate, putting him forward for membership of the Athenaeum. The music scholar Robert Anderson later characterised the reversal that followed in terms of cricket: Stanford "had his innings with continental reputation in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, but then Elgar bowled him out."

  Stanford did not accept this quietly. When Richard Strauss praised Elgar as the first progressive English composer, Stanford, who detested Strauss, found the judgment particularly galling. When Elgar was appointed professor of music at Birmingham University in 1904, Stanford wrote him a letter Elgar found "odious." Elgar's inaugural lecture contained remarks about composers of rhapsodies that were widely read as a counter-attack on Stanford. Stanford returned fire in his book A History of Music, writing that Elgar, "cut off from his contemporaries by his religion and his want of regular academic training, was lucky enough to enter the field and find the preliminary ploughing done."

  The criticism most consistently levelled at Stanford by his contemporaries and later writers was that his music lacked passion. Bernard Shaw, writing as a music critic, praised what he called "Stanford the Celt" and attacked "Stanford the Professor," who reined in the Celt's emotions. George Grove, one of Stanford's earliest supporters, wrote to Parry that Stanford's music contained "everything but sentiment. Love not at all."

  After Stanford died on the 29th of March 1924, his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey on the 3rd of April, near the graves of Henry Purcell, John Blow and William Sterndale Bennett. The Royal College of Music orchestra, conducted by Adrian Boult, ended the service with a funeral march Stanford had written for Tennyson's Becket in 1893. The Times observed that the conjunction of his music with that of those great predecessors showed how thoroughly, as a composer, he belonged to their line. His church music has proved his most durable legacy; Vaughan Williams ranked the Stabat Mater among Stanford's works of "imperishable beauty," and the Services in A, F and C remain in the cathedral repertory today.