Introducing Charles Villiers Stanford

Charles Villiers Stanford’s music results from a careful fusion of his Irish birth and his English formation. Coupled to this, is his musical training in Germany. Stanford’s work is characterised by a rigorous technical craftsmanship. His genius is best seen in the songs, the part songs, some smaller choral works, several of his refined and well-wrought chamber works and the orchestral rhapsodies. That said, his cycle of seven symphonies, the concertos, and certain large-scale choral pieces, once criticised as uninspiring, can be seen in recollection as full of interest and delight.

Sadly, from the beginning of the 20^th century his music entered the doldrums. Stanford never attached himself to any of the “modernist” schools such as impressionism, atonalism, or serialism. Since the 1990s, Stanford has seen a considerable revival in the recording studio, if not the concert hall. Interestingly, his liturgical settings have never absented itself from our native cathedrals and “quires and places where they sing.”

Stanford was also a notable educator as professor of music at Cambridge University, and a successful, if sometimes controversial, teacher of composition at the Royal College of Music.

Percy M. Young once wrote that Stanford is “a composer to whom one may return with cultured pleasure.” That is no mean achievement.

Brief Biography of Charles Villiers Stanford:

• Born at 2 Herbert Street, Dublin on 30 September 1852
• Studied music privately with Robert Prescott Stewart and Michael Quarry.
• Came to London in 1862 and studied with Arthur O' Leary and Ernst Pauer.
• Went up to Cambridge in 1870, with an Organ and a Classical Scholarship.
• In 1873 he transferred to Trinity College as organist.
• Studied in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke and later at Berlin under Friedrich Keil.
• Came to public attention with the incidental music for Tennyson’s Queen Mary (1876).
• Attended the First Bayreuth Festival in 1876.
• Involved with the Cambridge University Musical Club from 1871 to 1893.
• Married Jennie Wetton on 8 April 1878
• His first opera The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan was completed in 1877 and was premiered at Hanover on 6 February 1881.
• The ever-popular Service in B flat, op.10 was written during 1879.
• In 1883, he was appointed Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music, London.
• From 1885 to 1902 he was conductor of the English Bach Choir.
• In 1887, he succeeded George Alexander Macfarren as Professor of music at Cambridge.
• First performance of the Symphony No.3 (Irish) heard at St James’s Hall on 27 June 1887, under the direction of Hans Richter.
• Knighted in 1901.
• At the Royal College of Music, his pupils included Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Frank Bridge, Herbert Howells, Gustav Holst, Arthur Bliss, and Ivor Gurney.
• Charles Villiers Stanford died in 9 Lower Berkeley Street, Portman Square, London on 29 March 1924. He is buried at Westminster Abbey.

Twelve Selected Works:

Charles Villiers Stanford’s catalogue is massive. He completed nine operas, seven symphonies, thirteen concertos, six Irish Rhapsodies, more than twenty anthems and services for liturgical use, sundry secular cantatas, incidental music, eight string quartets, six duo sonatas, six organ sonatas, numerous songs, and part-songs. The twelve works, which cover most genres, given below are all available on CD/LP/Download. Several have been uploaded to YouTube.

1. Morning, Communion and Evensong Service in B flat, op.10
2. Piano Quintet in D minor, op.25
3. Symphony No.3 in F minor (Irish), op.28
4. Funeral March from the incidental music to Tennyson’s Beckett, op.48.
5. Violin Concerto in D major, op.74
6. The Fairy Lough, op.77, no.2 for voice and piano.
7. Three Rhapsodies from Dante for piano, 1. Francesca, 2. Beatrice, 3. Capaneo, op.92
8. Songs of the Sea, op.91 and Songs of the Fleet, op.117
9. Part Song: The Bluebird, op.119, no.3
10. Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor, op.126
11. Irish Rhapsody No. 4 in A Minor, op. 141, "The fisherman of Lough Neagh and what he saw."
12. Organ Sonata No.5 in A major, (Quasi una fantasia) op.159

Bibliography:

Stanford authored a book on Brahms and his Music (1912) and was joint author with Cecil Forsyth of A History of Music (1916). Of significant importance to historians are his “autobiography,” Pages from an Unwritten Diary (1914) as well as two collections of essays, Studies and Memories (1908) and Interludes, Records, and Reflections (1922).

The earliest study of the composer was John F. Porte’s Sir Charles V. Stanford published in 1921. The volume included a brief sketch of his career as well as an annotated catalogue of his music. The first formal biography was authored by his friend, the Irish baritone, Harry Plunkett Greene, and published in 1935.

The definitive biography is Jeremy Dibble’s Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician, which was published in 2002. In the same year, Paul Rodmell’s study was issued by Ashgate Press in their Music in 19th Century Britain series.

Finally, of considerable interest is Gerald Norris’s Stanford, the Cambridge Jubilee, and Tchaikovsky (1980).

If you can only hear one CD:

This must be the Lyrita recording of the Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor, op.126, coupled with the ‘Funeral March’ from Beckett, op.48, and the Irish Rhapsody in A Minor, "The fisherman of Lough Neagh and what he saw," op. 141 (SRCS102, 1985, SRCD219, 2015), Malcolm Binns gives an excellent performance of this wonderfully romantic concerto: he is accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Nicolas Braithwaite. Reviewing this recording for The Gramophone (August 1985, p.244) Michael Kennedy suggests that “This recording will encourage some brave orchestral administrators to invite the eloquent soloist, Malcolm Binns, to play the concerto in public. Several much less attractive and well-written concertos are heard which one would happily see yielding place to it.” Apart from another recording of the concerto by Margaret Fingerhut, and the Ulster Symphony Orchestra under Vernon Handley, (CHAN8736, 1989) this desideratum never happened.

Thomas Dunhill wrote about the Irish Rhapsody No.4, “If I wanted to impress a foreign unbeliever with the real beauty of British music at its best I should take him to hear a performance of the ‘Ulster’ Rhapsody, that he might have a glimpse of what the "Fisherman saw at Lough Neagh," and of what the great Irish composer was able to reflect of this vision in his music. ‘Dark and true and tender is the North’ is the quotation attached to the closing page of the score - a mere expression of an Orangeman's sympathies, probably - but the three adjectives describe the loveliness of the music itself in a way that no other words could do. It is a work of imperishable quality.”

Finally, if you can only listen to one work:

One of my Desert Island part-songs is Charles Villiers Stanford’s The Blue Bird, a setting of a text by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge. There are many recordings of this piece, including this one by the Cambridge Singers, on YouTube. The poem is taken by the composer and is turned into a glorious miniature. Few other motets have this feeling, this magic, this power to move. There is a “combination of coolness and warmth - of sunlight and cloud.” If this were the only music that we remembered Charles Villiers Stanford for, he would be well-worth recalling.