Charles Villiers Stanford
[3] 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.
[4] 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.
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.
[8] At the age of seven, Stanford gave a piano recital for an invited audience, playing works by Beethoven, Handel, Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Mozart and Bach.
[9] 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.
[15][16][17] 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.
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).
[1] 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.
The organist to be allowed to be abroad during the two years mentioned for one term and the vacations for the purpose of studying music in Germany, the college undertaking to find a substitute in his absence.
[47] Stanford offered the work to the opera impresario Carl Rosa, who refused it and suggested that the composer should try to have it staged in Germany: "Its success will (unfortunately) have much greater chances here if accepted abroad."
[50] Stanford had made many useful contacts during his months in Germany, and his friend the conductor Ernst Frank got the piece staged at the Königliches Schauspiel in Hanover in 1881.
[56] At Cambridge Stanford continued to raise the profile of CUMS, as well as his own, by securing appearances by leading international musicians including Joachim, Hans Richter, Alfredo Piatti and Edward Dannreuther.
[60] He held the professorship for the rest of his life; among the best known of his many pupils were Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Rebecca Clarke,[61] Frank Bridge and Arthur Bliss.
Hans von Bülow conducted the German premiere of Stanford's Irish Symphony in Hamburg in January 1888, and was sufficiently impressed by the work to programme it in Berlin shortly afterwards.
"[82] In both sets of music Stanford made extensive use of leitmotifs, in the manner of Wagner; the critic of The Times noted the Wagnerian character of the prelude to Oedipus.
In July 1891, Shaw's column was full of praise for Stanford's capacity for spirited tunes, declaring that Richard D'Oyly Carte should engage him to succeed Sullivan as the composer of Savoy operas.
[86] In October of the same year, Shaw attacked Stanford's oratorio Eden, bracketing the composer with Parry and Mackenzie as a mutual admiration society,[87] purveying "sham classics": [W]ho am I that I should be believed, to the disparagement of eminent musicians?
The conductor was the young Henry Wood, who recalled in his memoirs that the producer, Sir Augustus Harris, managed to quell the dictatorial composer and prevent him from interfering with the staging.
[111] The Manchester Guardian commented, "Not even in the Falstaff of Arrigo Boito and Giuseppe Verdi have the characteristic charm, the ripe and pungent individuality of the original comedy been more sedulously preserved.
"[84] When Elgar was struggling for recognition in the 1890s, Stanford had been supportive of his younger colleague, conducting his music, putting him forward for a Cambridge doctorate, and proposing him for membership of the exclusive London club, the Athenaeum.
[115] Stanford later counter-attacked in his book A History of Music, writing of Elgar, "Cut off from his contemporaries by his religion and his want of regular academic training, he was lucky enough to enter the field and find the preliminary ploughing done.
[129] Stanford's last opera, The Travelling Companion, composed during the war, was premiered by amateur performers at the David Lewis Theatre, Liverpool in 1925 with a reduced orchestra.
In Dibble's view, the frequent charge that Stanford is "Brahms and water" was disproved once the symphonies, concertos, much of the chamber music and many of the songs became available for reappraisal when recorded for compact disc.
[140] In Stanford's church music, the critic Nicholas Temperley finds "a thoroughly satisfying artistic experience, but one that is perhaps lacking in deeply felt religious impulse.
"[144] The commentator Richard Whitehouse writes that Stanford's seven symphonies embody both the strengths and limitations of his music, displaying "a compositional rigour and expertise matched only by his older contemporary ... Parry, while seeming content to remain well within the stylistic ambit of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms."
Whitehouse comments that although Stanford's symphonic construction is conventional, "an often subtle approach to movement forms and resourceful orchestration make his symphonies worth exploring.
[145] In his study of Stanford's works, John Porte refers to it as "full of the spirit and tunes of his country ... with its contrasting expressions of jollity and sad beauty".
He rates the last of the composer's operas, The Travelling Companion, as his finest operatic achievement, though Burton credits much of its power to the brilliant story adapted by Henry Newbolt from Hans Andersen.
[164][165] His Mass in G Major received its world première recording in 2014, featuring the Choir of Exeter College Oxford and the Stapeldon Sinfonia, with Tim Muggeridge (organ) and directed by George de Voil: EMR CD021.
English mixed-voice choir the Cambridge Singers (conducted by John Rutter) released the album Stanford and Howells Remembered in 1992, including both sacred and secular works.
