Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (30 September 1852 – 29 March 1924) was an Anglo-Irish composer, music teacher, and conductor of the late Romantic era. Born to a well-off and highly musical family in Dublin, Stanford was educated at the University of Cambridge before studying music in Leipzig and Berlin. He was instrumental in raising the status of the Cambridge University Musical Society, attracting international stars to perform with it.
While still an undergraduate, Stanford was appointed organist of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1882, aged 29, he was one of the founding professors of the Royal College of Music, where he taught composition for the rest of his life. From 1887 he was also Professor of Music at Cambridge. As a teacher, Stanford was sceptical about modernism, and based his instruction chiefly on classical principles as exemplified in the music of Brahms. Among his pupils were rising composers whose fame went on to surpass his own, such as Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. As a conductor, Stanford held posts with the Bach Choir and the Leeds Triennial Music Festival.
Stanford composed a substantial number of concert works, including seven symphonies, but his best-remembered pieces are his choral works for church performance, chiefly composed in the Anglican tradition. He was a dedicated composer of opera, but none of his nine completed operas has endured in the general repertory. Some critics regarded Stanford, together with Hubert Parry and Alexander Mackenzie, as responsible for a renaissance in music from the British Isles. However, despite his conspicuous success as a composer in the last two decades of the 19th century, his music was eclipsed in the 20th century by that of Edward Elgar as well as former pupils.
Life
Early years
Stanford was born in Dublin, the only son of John James Stanford and his second wife Mary, née Henn.Dibble, Jeremy. "Stanford, Sir Charles Villiers", Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, accessed 11 December 2011 John Stanford was a prominent Dublin lawyer, Examiner to the Court of Chancery in Ireland and Clerk of the Crown for County Meath."Stanford, Sir Charles Villiers", Who Was Who, A & C Black, 1920–2008; online edition, Oxford University Press, December 2007, accessed 11 December 2011 His wife was the third daughter of William Henn, Master of the Court of Chancery in Ireland and his wife Susanna Lovett of Liscombe House, Buckinghamshire, and granddaughter of the judge William Henn.Rodmell, p. 9 Both parents were accomplished amateur musicians; John Stanford was a cellist and a noted bass singer who was chosen to perform the title role in Mendelssohn's Elijah at the Irish premiere in 1847."Charles Villiers Stanford", The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, vol. 39, no. 670 (December 1898), pp. 785–793 Mary Stanford, "a lady of great charm", was an amateur pianist, capable of playing the solo parts in concertos at Dublin concerts.
The young Stanford was given a conventional education at a private day school in Dublin run by Henry Tilney Bassett, who concentrated on the classics to the exclusion of other subjects.Willeby, p. 264 Stanford's parents encouraged the boy's precocious musical talent, employing a succession of teachers in violin, piano, organ and composition. Three of his teachers were former pupils of Ignaz Moscheles, including his godmother Elizabeth Meeke, of whom Stanford recalled, "She taught me, before I was twelve years old, to read at sight. ... She made me play every day at the end of my lesson a Mazurka of Chopin: never letting me stop for a mistake. ... By the time I had played through the whole fifty-two Mazurkas, I could read most music of the calibre my fingers could tackle with comparative ease."Stanford (1914), p. 58 One of the young Stanford's earliest compositions, a march in D major, written when he was eight years old, was performed in the pantomime at the Theatre Royal, Dublin three years later.Rodmell, p. 28 At the age of seven, Stanford gave a piano recital for an invited audience, playing works by Beethoven, Handel, Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Mozart and Bach. One of his songs was taken up by the University of Dublin Choral Society and was well received."University of Dublin Choral Society", Freeman's Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 16 February 1867, p. 3
In the 1860s Dublin received occasional visits from international stars, and Stanford was able to hear famous performers such as Joseph Joachim, Henri Vieuxtemps and Adelina Patti.Stanford (1914), pp. 61–62 The annual visit of the Italian Opera Company from London, led by Giulia Grisi, Giovanni Matteo Mario and later Thérèse Tietjens, gave Stanford a taste for opera that remained with him all his life. When he was ten, his parents took him to London for the summer, where he stayed with his mother's uncle in Mayfair.Stanford (1914), p. 70 While there he took composition lessons from the composer and teacher Arthur O'Leary,Firman, Rosemary. "Stanford, Sir Charles Villiers (1852–1924)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 11 December 2011 and piano lessons from Ernst Pauer, professor of piano at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM). On his return to Dublin, his godmother having left Ireland, he took lessons from Henrietta Flynn, another former Leipzig Conservatory pupil of Moscheles,Dibble, p. 25 and later from Robert Stewart, organist of St Patrick's Cathedral, as well as from a third Moscheles pupil, Michael Quarry.Stanford (1914), p. 75 During his second spell in London two years later, he met the composer Arthur Sullivan and the musical administrator and writer George Grove, who later played important parts in his career.
John Stanford hoped that his son would follow him into the legal profession but accepted his decision to pursue music as a career.Stanford (1914), p. 103 However, he stipulated that Stanford should have a conventional university education before going on to musical studies abroad. Stanford tried unsuccessfully for a classics scholarship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge,Stanford (1914), p. 105 but gained an organ scholarship, and later a classics scholarship, at Queens' College. By the time he went up to Cambridge in 1870, he had written a substantial number of compositions, including vocal music, both sacred and secular, and orchestral works (a rondo for cello and orchestra and a concert overture).
Cambridge Stanford immersed himself in the musical life of the university to the detriment of his Latin and Greek studies. He composed religious and secular vocal works, a piano concerto, and incidental music for Longfellow's play A Spanish Student. In November 1870 he appeared as piano soloist with the Cambridge University Musical Society (CUMS), and quickly became its assistant conductor and a committee member.Porte, p. 9 The society had declined in excellence since its foundation in 1843.Dibble, p. 48 Its choir consisted solely of men and boys; the lack of women singers severely limited the works that the society could present. Stanford was unable to persuade the members to admit women, and so he staged what The Musical Times called "a bloodless revolution". In February 1872 he co-founded a mixed choir, the Amateur Vocal Guild, whose performances immediately put those of the CUMS singers in the shade.Dibble, pp. 48–49 The members of CUMS rapidly changed their minds, and agreed to a merger of the two choirs, with women given associate membership of the society.Stanford (1914), p. 115
The conductor of the combined choir was John Larkin Hopkins, who was also organist of Trinity College. He became ill and handed over the conductorship to Stanford in 1873.Rodmell, p. 37 Stanford was also appointed Hopkins's deputy organist at Trinity, and moved from Queens' to Trinity in April 1873.Rodmell, p. 38 In the summer of that year Stanford made his first trip to continental Europe. He went to Bonn for the Schumann Festival held there, where he met Joachim and Brahms.Dibble, p. 51 His growing love of the music of Schumann and Brahms marked him as a classicist at a time when many music-lovers were divided into the classical or the modernist camps, the latter represented by the music of Liszt and Wagner. Stanford was not constrained by the fashion for belonging to one camp or the other; he immensely admired Die Meistersinger though he was unenthusiastic about some of Wagner's other works.Rodmell, p. 49 After leaving Bonn he returned home by way of Switzerland and then Paris, where he saw Meyerbeer's Le prophète.
Hopkins's illness proved fatal, and after his death the Trinity authorities invited Stanford to take over as organist of the college. He accepted with the proviso that he was to be released each year for a spell of musical study in Germany. The fellows of the college resolved on 21 February 1874:
Two days after his appointment, Stanford took the final examinations for his classics degree. He ranked 65th of 66, and was awarded a third-class degree.Rodmell, p. 39
Leipzig
On the recommendation of Sir William Sterndale Bennett, former professor of music at Cambridge and now director of the Royal Academy of Music, Stanford went to Leipzig in the summer of 1874 for lessons with Carl Reinecke, professor of composition and piano at the Leipzig Conservatory.Dibble, p. 38 The composer Thomas Dunhill commented that by 1874 it was "the tail-end of the Leipzig ascendancy, when the great traditions of Mendelssohn had already begun to fade."Dunhill, Thomas. "Charles Villiers Stanford – Some Aspects of His Work and Influence", Proceedings of the Musical Association, 53rd session. (1926–1927), pp. 41–65 Nevertheless, Stanford did not seriously consider studying anywhere else. Neither Dublin nor London offered any comparable musical training; the most prestigious British music school, the Royal Academy of Music (RAM), was at that time hidebound and reactionary. He was dismayed to find in Leipzig that Bennett had recommended him to a German pedant no more progressive than the teachers at the RAM.Rodmell, p. 44 Stanford said of Reinecke, "Of all the dry musicians I have ever known he was the most desiccated. He had not a good word for any contemporary composer... He loathed Wagner ... sneered at Brahms and had no enthusiasm of any sort."Stanford (1914), p. 157 Stanford's biographer Paul Rodmell suggests that Reinecke's ultra-conservatism may have been unexpectedly good for his pupil "as it may have encouraged Stanford to kick against the traces."Rodmell, p. 45 During his time in Leipzig Stanford took piano lessons from Robert Papperitz (1826–1903), organist of the city's Nikolaikirche, whom he found more helpful.
Among Stanford's compositions in 1874 was a setting of part one of Longfellow's poem The Golden Legend. He intended to set the entire poem, but gave up, defeated by Longfellow's "numerous but unconnected characters."Dibble, p. 66 Stanford ignored this and other early works when assigning opus numbers in his mature years. The earliest compositions in his official list of works are a four-movement Suite for piano and a Toccata for piano, which both date from 1875.Porte, pp. 15–16
After a second spell in Leipzig with Reinecke in 1875, which was no more productive than the first, Stanford was recommended by Joachim to study in Berlin the following year with Friedrich Kiel, whom Stanford found "a master at once sympathetic and able ... I learnt more from him in three months, than from all the others in three years."Stanford (1914), pp. 164 and 172
Rising composer