1852–1924 · Ireland, United Kingdom · 20th century
Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) was an Irish composer, conductor and music teacher, one of the figures behind the "musical renaissance" in Britain. He taught composition at the Royal College of Music for many years and was professor of music at Cambridge; his pupils included Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The site holds his songs for voice and piano at upper intermediate and advanced level.
Stanford was born in Dublin into a well-off lawyer's family: his father sang bass and played the cello, and his mother, remembered as a charming woman, played the piano, including solo concerto parts at Dublin concerts. The boy's talent was noticed early, and he was taught piano and organ by Dublin teachers considered among the best in the city.
Stanford was sent to a private day school in Dublin that focused on the classics. At the same time his parents engaged separate teachers for violin, piano, organ and composition — three of whom had studied with the pianist Ignaz Moscheles.
From 1862 Stanford studied composition in London with Arthur O'Leary and piano with Ernst Pauer. He failed to win a classics scholarship at Trinity Hall, but in 1870 he entered Queens' College, Cambridge — first on an organ scholarship, and later gaining a classics scholarship there too.
As a student Stanford was active in the university's musical life: he appeared as a pianist with the Cambridge University Musical Society (CUMS), became its assistant conductor and joined its committee. In April 1873 he became deputy organist of Trinity College and moved there from Queens', and in 1874, after the previous organist's death, he took over the post in full.
In 1874-1876 Stanford continued his musical studies in Germany. In Berlin his teacher was Friedrich Kiel, whose lessons he found far more rewarding than his earlier ones: by his own account, he learned more from Kiel in three months than from his previous teachers in three years.
Stanford began his teaching career at the Royal College of Music in 1883, teaching composition to students including Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams and John Ireland. He held the post of professor of music at Cambridge from 1887 until his death in 1924.
The Royal College of Music opened in 1883 to replace the unsuccessful National Training School for Music; Stanford became one of its founding professors, alongside the violinist Henry Holmes, under its director George Grove.
Stanford, along with Hubert Parry and Edward Elgar, was seen as one of those who renewed British music in the late 19th century. As a teacher he was demanding and hot-tempered: he insisted that students strictly follow the rules of composition, which led to conflicts with both the university authorities and some students. Stanford regarded William Hurlstone as the most talented of his pupils.
Stanford left seven operas and as many symphonies, six Irish Rhapsodies for orchestra, and a set of concertos — three for piano, two for violin, and one each for cello and clarinet. He also wrote chamber music and works for violin, piano and organ — among them Six Irish Fantasies for violin and piano and Irish Dances for piano — as well as an oratorio, a mass and other sacred music. He wrote numerous songs too, and worked on publishing collections of Irish folk music. His music is close in sound to Brahms and Bruckner, and many of his works carry the motifs of Irish folk song.
During his student years and afterwards Stanford composed prolifically: in 1875 his First Symphony won second prize in a competition for British composers at the Alexandra Palace, and in 1876 his incidental music for Tennyson's play Queen Mary, written at the author's request, was performed at the Lyceum Theatre, London.
He also wrote incidental music for the Theatre Royal in Cambridge, including scores for stage productions of two classical tragedies: Aeschylus's The Eumenides, given in 1885, and Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, given in 1887. From 1885 Stanford also conducted the Bach Choir in London, remaining in charge until 1902.
When Sullivan gave up conducting the Leeds triennial music festival in 1898, Stanford took over the role and kept it until 1910; among the pieces he wrote for the festival were Songs of the Sea, a Stabat Mater setting and Songs of the Fleet.
Back in the 1890s, before Edward Elgar had earned wide recognition, Stanford backed him in several ways: he conducted Elgar's works, helped bring him a Cambridge doctorate, and put his name forward to join the Athenaeum, an exclusive London club. That goodwill cooled once Elgar's fame, spreading abroad as well as at home, outgrew Stanford's own — a shift that stung him.
When Elgar took up a professorship of music at Birmingham University in 1904, Stanford sent him a letter that Elgar took as insulting; in his own inaugural lecture there, Elgar then made a remark about rhapsody composers that many read as a jab at Stanford. Writing later in his book A History of Music, Stanford suggested that Elgar's lack of formal academic training and his religion had set him apart from his contemporaries, yet had also left the ground already prepared by the time Elgar arrived on the scene.
The war hit Stanford hard: air raids frightened him enough that he left London for Windsor. Several of his former students were swept into the fighting: it wounded Arthur Bliss, gassed Ivor Gurney, and cost George Butterworth his life. The yearly opera production at the Royal College of Music, which Stanford had run every year from 1885, had to be dropped as well.
A stroke felled Stanford on 17 March 1924, and he died at his London home on 29 March. After cremation, his ashes went into Westminster Abbey, close to where William Sterndale Bennett, John Blow and Henry Purcell are buried.
Stanford wrote in a wide range of genres, from operas and symphonies to chamber and sacred music, and among them are numerous songs for voice and piano. Among his instrumental works are Six Irish Fantasies for violin and piano and Irish Dances for piano. As a teacher he based his own style on the music of Brahms and was sceptical of modernism. He was himself an organist, too, and wrote a fair amount of music for the instrument. As organist of Trinity College he also wrote church music — for example a Service in B flat (1879) and the anthem "The Lord is my shepherd" (1886).
He pursued opera with particular dedication: his first, The Veiled Prophet, was written in 1878-1879 on a poem by Thomas Moore. The impresario Carl Rosa turned the work down and suggested offering it in Germany instead, and it was staged there in 1881, in Hanover. Despite this dedication to the genre, none of his operas has held a place in the theatrical repertory, and his choral works for the Anglican church are performed more widely.
The dana-piano.kz site holds seven editions of his songs for voice and piano, all written for this pairing of singer and pianist. Four of them are rated upper intermediate — "As thro' the land", "Sweet and low", "O swallow, swallow" and "Our enemies have fall'n". Three more are rated advanced — "The splendour falls", "Ask me no more" and "Thy voice is heard". This pairing calls for a singer and a pianist to work together, and the spread of levels, from upper intermediate to advanced, allows moving from one edition to the next step by step.
A good place to start with Stanford's songs is the upper intermediate editions "As thro' the land", "Sweet and low", "O swallow, swallow" and "Our enemies have fall'n", moving on to the advanced "The splendour falls".