All Things Music
London Spotlight #2 | C.V. Stanford
Charles Villers Stanford was born in 1852 in Dublin, Ireland and was an “Anglo-Irish” composer from the (very) late romantic period era. His parents were both talented musicians, his father playing Elijah in Mendelssohn’s Elijah (A personal favorite of mine!) in the Ireland premiere, and his mother was an amateur pianist. His parents encouraged his musical education along with classics in his day schooling in Dublin, playing works of Beethoven, Handel, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Bach, and many more. His first composition March in Db major was performed in the Theatre Royal in Dublin when Stanford was only 5, he began regularly performing recitals from this point on. At the age of ten his parents took him to London for the first time to study music and take lessons from the Royal Academy of Music and upon returning he ventured to Germany for studies at Leipzig Conservatory, one of the oldest schools of music in the world.
His father, hoping he would continue in a legal profession, accepted Charles’ decision to pursue music as a career, but stipulated that he go to a conventional university before going to musical studies abroad. He struggled to earn scholarships in classics. He was awarded an organ scholarship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge (Now Trinity College). He traveled to Cambridge in 1870 and immersed himself in the musical life of the college. Stanford, while his music is very constricted to the Romantic influences like Brahms was sometimes viewed as conservative, he was actually very liberal in his approach to the social life of university and music. He advocated for the inclusion of women in the Cambridge University Musical Society, who had refused to accept women as members. Stanford, enraged, created his own musical society with a mixed-choir, it received mass public attention as good, which resulted in the Cambridge Society changing its bylaws to accept women fully. After the organist at Trinity College became Ill, Stanford became the organist there in 1873 but Stanford, still being a student, requested negations with the College:
“Charles Villers Stanford (undergraduate of the College) be appointed organist at a salary of 100 pounds p.a. for the next two years in addition to rooms and Commons when in residence. The organist to be allowed to be aboard 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.” - Trinity College Council, 1874
It is in Germany where he met Bramns, Schumann, Joachim, and so many other huge names of music at the time. From these connections he was able to take the music he learned and worked on in Germany at Leipzig to Britain and present many “first performances” of substantial orchestral music that you and I know today as familiar. He became increasingly popular as his skill developed and quickly became known throughout Great Britain. Back at Trinity College, Stanford was raising musical standards, composing sacred works of the Mass Evening Services in Bb, C, F, and D; The Lord is my Shepherd; and Beati quorum via, (perhaps his most famous work for choir).
His music was not always well received, Charles Hubert Parry (composer of the coronation anthem “I was glad” (1953) said “Charlie’s music contains everything but sentiment. Love not at all-that I heard not a grain of…and I do not think that there might be one more tune. Melody is not a thing to be avoided, which he has.”
Some of Stanford’s pupil’s included Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Rebecca Clarke, and Arthur Bliss, some of whom have surpassed Stanford’s own fame.
Take a listen to Beati quorum via, which the parish choir will sing as the introit for Evensong at Croydon Minster in London this summer during their residency.