Many choirs used to (and occasionally still) sing Maunder's Olivet to Calvary (words by Shapcott Wensley – pseudonym for H S Bunce) regularly, often in alternate years with John Stainer's Crucifixion.
Maunder wrote a number of part-songs, including a piece called Thor’s War Song (from Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn), and a musical setting of the Border Ballad by Sir Walter Scott.
In his A Short History of English Church Music, Erik Routley traced John Stainer's The Crucifixion (1887) as the archetypal choral work deliberately written for amateur choirs that others imitated, and often diluted.
"Much of [Stainer's] music and the whole of [his] libretto where it is not quoting scripture, is a caricature of the sensational triviality which, no matter how great the efforts of their latter day defenders, we are bound to attribute to the Victorians.
"[5]However, in 1922, an American reviewer for The New Music Review wrote the following concerning Maunder's work: "An enthusiastic choirmaster once declared that the organists and choristers of the English-speaking world should unite to raise a monument to J. H. Maunder as a great benefactor of the human race in general and of church musicians in particular, because he combined in his voluminous writings for the church two factors which are both most highly to be commended and yet which are seldom found in the same composer, i.e., a good musical style and great technical facility.
"[6]Percy Scholes damnned him with faint praise, writing that his 'seemingly inexhaustible cantatas, Penitence, Pardon and Peace, and From Olivet to Calvary long enjoyed popularity, and still aid the devotions of undemanding congregations in less sophisticated areas.
'[7] In 1966, Basil Ramsey wrote in the Musical Times of the LP recording of Olivet to Calvary by Barry Rose and the Guildford Cathedral Choir: "Here is a perplexing problem.
[9] Phillip Tolley, in the website of British Choirs on the Net, wrote: Olivet to Calvary is a fine example of music written for the late Victorian/early Edwardian Anglican church.